Mick Hartley

Nuclear threats

Chilling stuff from Russian political scientist Sergey Mikheev:

 

Sergey Mikheev: "We need to convey a simple message to Europe: You will receive a nuclear strike in European territory if you form some sort of a NATO peacekeeping contingent, if you decide to deploy this contingent somewhere and so forth... This would mean nuclear war. Yes! Nuclear war."

Vladimir Solviev: "This exact message was conveyed to French journalists..."

Mikheev: [Europe] must understand this. [I say] to the brave Poles: In half a second, there will be nothing left of your Warsaw. And the brave Germans, brave Estonians, brave people of the Balts... By the way, speaking about the Balts, as far as I know, there are big problems at the border in Kaliningrad. Maybe the question of a corridor to Kaliningrad becomes relevant?

"A corridor, a land corridor to Kaliningrad. Why not?"

Solviev: "If this was the case with Transnistria, then also in [Kaliningrad]..."

Mikheev: "It seems to me that the states called Lithuania and Poland are behaving too brazenly. Too brazenly! And they also don't understand that they can actually be dealt with faster than Ukraine. Because the issue of the corridor is a local military operation, it's much easier than everything we are doing in Ukraine."

The reference to Kaliningrad is interesting, as an indication of what these Greater Russia Putin loyalists are thinking. I haven't seen it mentioned before in the context of the invasion of Ukraine, but of course it makes absolute sense. A strange left-over from WW2, Kaliningrad Oblast is a Russian territory isolated from Russia itself, stuck between Poland and Lithuania. If you look on the map, there are two of the Baltic countries, Latvia and Lithuania, between Russia and Kaliningrad. And the port of Kaliningrad itself is ice-free all year round: it would be a major coup for Russia to drive through Latvia and Lithuania - or indeed obliterate them - and link the port directly to Mother Russia.

To complain that "Lithuania and Poland are behaving too brazenly" takes the breath away, as Russian forces set about the destruction of Ukraine. They really think they have a right to control all neighbouring countries. 

This clip is from "An Evening with Vladimir Solviev". A previous MEMRI clip had Vladimir chatting with Putin's guru Alexander Dugin.

'Relax, it’s only dark humour'

We heard yesterday about the new NUS president and her history of antisemitism. According to Jake Wallis Simons it's not just a problem in universities: it's there in schools too:

My children have never felt the need to hide their Jewishness. That’s the heart of it, I suppose. A few months ago, a boy picked up his books and declared, 'I’m not sitting next to the Jewish girl', before moving to another seat.

When she told me about it, my daughter, who is 14, said the kid had just been seeking attention. It was a one-off, she said. She didn’t want me to contact the school. So I decided to let it go; the lesson for her, perhaps, was that this stuff happens in life.

Thinking about it, it had happened once before, a few years ago. It was Chanukah, and my son had decided to wear his kippah to school. He was only seven or eight at the time. In the playground, a kid had said: 'You’re a Jew. I hate Jews.'

It was alarming at the time. But I had thought that they were isolated incidents. My kids brushed them off. Last night, however, in a conversation with my son, I was shocked to discover that they were only the tip of the iceberg.

These days, apparently, a favourite school trick is to ask my 12-year-old son if he’s 'a Jew'. When he nods, the kids reply, 'heil Hitler'. It happens about three times a week, my son told me. Sometimes they simply ask, 'is your sister a Jew?' and laugh. Or they hoot, 'Jew, Jew, Jew,' when they see my kids in the corridor.

The school has a problem with swastikas. People think it’s funny to scratch them into tables and walls, and the teachers don’t do anything about it. There was a craze recently to draw a swastika on your hand in chalk and slap somebody on the back, so the imprint is left on their blazer.

Now, this isn’t an inner city comprehensive. It’s a state school in Hampshire that is consistently praised by Ofsted and gets good results. The behaviour is generally good, and the children are largely middle-class. These days, you couldn’t hope for a better education without paying for it.

Which is partly why it came as such a surprise. My children seem to think it’s more about idiocy than malice. When my son objects to the taunts, the other kids respond, 'relax, it’s only dark humour'. They just think it’s all a bit of a laugh. Maybe they needed an assembly, I said. Some education. Maybe a visit from a Holocaust survivor. My son smiled ruefully and shook his head....

Latest figures reveal that anti-Semitism is soaring in Britain. February’s Community Security Trust (CST) report shows that anti-Jewish hate crime hit an all-time high last year. The total level of incidents rose by 34 per cent to 2,255, the highest ever recorded. Jew-hate incidents were reported to every single police force bar one.

The problem is particularly bad in education. Perhaps it is the dominance of 'woke' ideology, which seems to carry a dim view of Jews. Latest statistics from the CST disclose that anti-Semitism on campus rose by 59 per cent last year, reaching record levels....

When speaking to my son, I asked him if the kids behaved this way towards other minorities at school. Black children, for example. His eyes widened. 'Of course not,' he said, a note of irony in his voice. 'That would be racist.'

Yep. Jews don't count.

The first transgender MP

We see how it works.

Tory MP Jamie Wallis was in deep trouble: 

When Jamie Wallis narrowly won his seat as MP for Bridgend during the Conservative landslide in December 2019, he became the first Tory to hold the South Wales constituency since 1983.

His political honeymoon was short-lived, however, and within weeks reports emerged that he was behind a network of companies that his local council, Bridgend, said had been subject to hundreds of trading standards complaints. The council said the companies had been the subject of 20 enforcement visits.

One of his companies, a claims management firm, was prevented from representing customers at employment tribunals following a Ministry of Justice investigation.

Wallis told BuzzFeed News in 2020 that he disputed the figures about enforcement visits and that his former company was taking legal action against the council. The council told The Times that it had received no communication about “potential legal action” since August 2020.

There were also calls by Labour MPs for him to be thrown out of the Conservative Party after it was alleged that a website run by one of his companies promoted a “sugar daddy” service offering struggling students and single parents financial relationships with wealthy “sponsors”.

The site was listed as one of four “recommended resources” on Clean-Break.co.uk, a trading title of Wallis’s company Quickie Divorce. He quit as a director of Quickie Divorce seven days after he was elected as an MP and denied any link to the sugar daddy site.

On top of that there were some sordid sexual goings-on. He was the victim of an attempted blackmail by a former sex partner who had incriminating photos. Then he was supposedly raped by a man he'd hooked up with. And then he fled the scene after his car crashed into a telegraph pole and cut off the internet to a whole village - later claiming he was too scared to hang around and was suffering from PTSD.

Not looking good.

Then, in one bound he was free! He came out as transgender. What a hero! How brave!

Wallis rapidly received public support from fellow MPs. Tom Tugendhat, the Conservative chairman of the foreign affairs select committee, said: “This is a very brave statement.” Andrew Bowie, a Conservative MP, said: “Incredibly brave of you to post this mate. Proud of you. All power to you”.

Nadhim Zahawi, the education secretary, retweeted Wallis’s statement. Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, said: “Sending you love and solidarity from the other side of the Commons. This is hugely courageous of you to share.”

All the way to the top:

Both Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the leader of the opposition Sir Keir Starmer acknowledged Mr Wallis' statement in the Commons.

With Mr Wallis looking on from the backbenches, Mr Johnson said: "the House stands with you and will give you the support you need to live freely as yourself"....

Tory party chairman Oliver Dowden said: "Proud of my colleague Jamie Wallis.

"As a Conservative family we stand together, and we will support you.

"I hope that your brave statement will help others."

Mike Freer, the Minister for Equalities, acknowledged the "enormously personal" statement in the Commons."I hope I speak for the whole house in sending our support, it is so important that people are free and safe to be themselves whoever they are and whoever they love", he said.

Labour MP Wes Streeting said: "Sending you love and solidarity from the other side of the Commons. This is hugely courageous of you to share."

Plaid Cymru Commons leader Liz Saville Roberts said: "This is an extraordinarily brave message to send out, Jamie. Whatever our politics, public life is unremitting and often merciless. Great respect for your personal courage."

Former MP and chancellor George Osborne said "we comment on the things that have got worse in politics, but many things have got better", tweeting that "if a Tory MP had said this when I was first elected 20 years ago they would have been hounded not applauded and supported".

The LGBTQ+ charity Stonewall said it was sending "solidarity" and "love" to Mr Wallis, calling his decision to come out "brave".

Mind you, he's not actually going to change anything: He'll still look the same and keep the same pronouns. He's just, you know, transgender. And therefore a hero.

[It's an old Family Guy joke]

No to Emily Bridges

Good news on the cycling front:

A late intervention from cycling’s global governing body has prevented Emily Bridges, a transgender cyclist, from competing in the female category of the National Omnium Championships on Saturday.

Bridges, 21, who began taking hormone therapy last year, had satisfied British Cycling’s requirements for transgender athletes by lowering her testosterone levels below 5 nanomoles per litre for 12 consecutive months, and had been due to compete against women for the first time in the Derby velodrome this weekend, against a field including Laura Kenny, the five-times Olympic champion.

But UCI rules give them six weeks to convene an expert panel after receiving the final blood test and, as UCI ranking points are available at the event in Derby, Bridges was disappointed to hear that she will have to await the outcome of the UCI’s deliberations before she can compete in the female category....

The strength of the reaction against the inclusion of a transgender athlete in cycling — Bridges won the men’s points race in the British Universities’ Championships last month — and criticism of British Cycling’s transgender policy, along with significant disquiet among riders due to race against Bridges, has prompted the governing body to call for a coalition of interested parties to “find a better answer” on the subject of transgender athletes.

Finding a better answer shouldn't be that difficult: no men competing in women's sports, whether transitioned or not transitioned. It's that simple. But no doubt this is just another piece of prevarication in the face of overwhelming opposition. "More research is needed..."

Lower East Side 1959

November 4, 1959. "People and cars, Essex Street and Henry Street, Lower East Side, New York City." Marion Trikosko for the U.S. News & World Report assignment "Puerto Rican Story N.Y.C."

[Photo: Shorpy/USN&WR Collection, Library of Congress]

On campus

No surprise here. From the JC:

The newly elected President of the National Union of Students has sung the praises of a Jew-hating cleric and raised money for a Muslim advocacy group widely accused of having sympathised with terrorists. 

Shaima Dallali has also labelled a cleric critical of Hamas a “dirty Zionist” and posted a video of anti-Israel protesters calling for an intifada.

The Union of Jewish Students has called for an urgent meeting with Ms Dallali while Labour Against Antisemitism warned that “anti-Jewish racism in the NUS is spiralling out of control”, adding that public funding should be cut unless there was profound change.  

She will take over from outgoing president Larissa Kennedy, who is herself facing calls to quit her two year term early over her suggestion Jewish students could segregate themselves to avoid watching anti-Zionist performer Lowkey at an NUS concert. 

Ms Dallali was elected by NUS delegates on Monday despite the revelation last week that she tweeted in 2012: “Khaybar Khaybar O Jews … Muhammed’s army will return #Gaza”, in a reference to a massacre of Jews in the year 628CE.

  She offered an unreserved apology for the 2012 post, which she said was an “unacceptable” reference made as a teenager. 

However, since then Ms Dallali has continued to post incendiary messages.  

In April, 2020, Ms Dallali wrote that for Ramadan she was raising money for Cage, a Muslim advocacy group which drew outrage in 2015 when its research director hailed notorious Isis terrorist Jihadi John as a “beautiful young man” who was “extremely kind and gentle”. Last year, the Commission for Countering Extremism last year urged the government to crack down on Cage.

On its website, Cage denies accusations that it is an apologist for terrorists, saying its goal is to “simply ensure that the pursuit of justice is carried out fairly.”

On Twitter Ms Dallali has called Jordanian preacher Dr Waseem Yousef a “dirty Zionist” after he wrote that Hamas was launching rockets from between residents’ homes and was making “a graveyard” for children in Gaza. 

And in a 2018 article she sung the praises of Muslim Brotherhood cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi - who was expelled from Britain, the US, France and Germany – calling him  the “moral compass for the Muslim community at large”. In a sermon on January 9, 2009, Qaradawi lashed out at Jews, including calling on God to "kill them, down to the very last one."

Between 2018 and 2019, Ms Dallali was a project manager for pro-Palestinian advocacy group Europal.   

In 2017, Europal was reported to be organising a trip to the Commons for preacher Sheikh Ekrima Sabri, who dismissed the Holocaust as a “fairytale exploited by Israel to capture international solidarity”. 

Meanwhile the UCU - the trade union for university academics - is right behind the trans activists.

My former trade union @UCU has a motion at congress proposing to "congratulate Sussex UCU for their solidarity with student protests against "gender critical" views". https://t.co/pNa3MKWHmS pic.twitter.com/PwDA8F83Ds

— Kathleen Stock (@Docstockk) March 30, 2022

Happy days on campus!

Where does Darwinism come from?

We're used to hearing this kind of conspiratorial antisemitic nonsense from Islamic preachers and the like, thanks to MEMRI. But in America??

Fox Nation presenter Lara Logan suggested that Charles Darwin was paid by the Jewish Rothschild family to invent the theory of evolution during an episode of the right-wing podcast And We Know on Monday.

"Does anyone know who employed Darwin? Where does Darwinism come from?" Logan asked. "Look it up. The Rothschilds."

"I'm just saying Darwin was hired by someone to come up with a theory based on evidence," she added before saying that evolution is a chicken or egg debate and cannot be answered scientifically.

The Rothschilds were a prominent wealthy Jewish family who gained their wealth in the late 18th century. Due to its great wealth, the family has featured heavily in antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jews taking over the world based partly on stereotypes of Jews' relationship with money.

This is not the first time Logan has engaged in antisemitic conspiracy theories and comments. In November, she compared Dr. Anthony Fauci to the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele who conducted horrific experiments on Jews in the concentration camps during a segment on Fox News....

Aside from antisemitism, Logan has also been spreading Russian propaganda since it invaded Ukraine, blaming the invasion on Ukraine and claiming that Russian President Vladimir Putin is the "man standing between us and the New World Order."

She does have that look in her eyes...

[Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images/JTA]

Abandoned Italian churches

As captured by photographer Roman Robroek:

Whether cloaked in thick moss and debris or almost entirely preserved, the abandoned churches photographed by Roman Robroek document the effects of a changing landscape. At least 1,000 of the religious spaces are left unoccupied in both small towns and cities throughout Italy and stand in varying degrees of disrepair. In visiting approximately 100 chapels for his series CHIESA, Robroek witnessed how the once-sacred structures have been left behind. “If a church, once the most important haven in the community, can become a pile of ruins, what does that say about what we hold certain today?” he asks in an essay.

[All images © Roman Robroek]

More trans cycling

From the Times:

British Cycling has been accused by former Olympic competitors of discriminating against females with their policy for transgender athletes.

Emily Bridges, 21, who began hormone therapy last year, is due to compete against Laura Kenny, the five-times Olympic champion, in the National Omnium Championships in Derby on Saturday, having reduced her testosterone levels to the five nanomoles per litre required by British Cycling’s policy.

But critics such as Mara Yamauchi, the former marathon runner, and Sharron Davies, the former Olympic swimmer, feel that testosterone levels are only one of the advantages conferred during male puberty and that other factors will make the inclusion of transgender women in female sport unfair.

“The Sports Council Equality Group (SCEG) made very clear that inclusion of [trans women] in the women’s category and fairness for females cannot be balanced and that national governing bodies have a choice,” Yamauchi said yesterday. “British Cycling has chosen male inclusion instead of fairness for females. It’s an either/or — people need to understand that it was a choice and British Cycling has made that choice. That’s got to be discrimination against females. It’s not an exaggeration to say that this is about the very existence of women’s sport.”

In September, the SCEG issued guidance for community sport that “testosterone suppression is unlikely to guarantee fairness between transgender women and natal females in gender-affected sports” and there are “retained differences in strength, stamina and physique between the average woman compared with the average transgender woman or non-binary person registered male at birth”.

There are also concerns that female athletes are fearful of speaking out against the inclusion of transgender women because of the potential backlash from activists. “Many people who speak out in defence of women’s sport face abuse and death threats. I’ve had this myself,” Yamauchi said. “Fear of that abuse has led to a lot of self-silencing. I know this because I’m in touch with a lot of female athletes. I really feel for the female cyclists this weekend. The fear of being branded a transphobe or bigot, and of the loss of sponsorship or income — these are very real concerns. A lot of athletes can’t risk that and it’s much easier to stay quiet.”

Indeed. But then we get some expert analysis from one Joanna Harper - "a researcher at Loughborough University, studying the effects of gender transition on performance of athletes" - to muddy the waters: 

We can have meaningful competition in sports between right and left-handers, and left-handers even have advantages in some. The broader question is whether we can have meaningful competition between trans women and other women. We will know more when we see more high-level athletes like Emily Bridges and Lia Thomas, but we don’t yet know for certain.

Yes we do. Absolutely we know for certain. And it's surely relevant - though the Times doesn't bother to tell us - that Harper is in fact a trans woman, with a clear agenda to push for trans inclusion in women's sport.

Elsewhere Times sports writer Owen Slot wrings his hands at the awful dilemma:

This, sadly, is one of the modern-day challenges for sport for which there is no absolute solution. If you believe in fair competition, there is no correct answer for all. Adjustments, such as testosterone suppression, can be made, but nothing can properly eradicate the natural advantages of male DNA.

Therefore, either Bridges is made ineligible for competition — which penalises transgender athletes — or Bridges remains eligible and the women against whom she competes are penalised. Until science can completely remove the genetic male advantages, then it has to be one or the other.

Oh dear, oh dear. Penalising transgender athletes seems to be the worst thing one can possibly do: much worse than ruining women's sport. But what's being penalised is the inclusion of male athletes in women's competition, not transgender athletes per se. No one is suggesting they can't still compete in men's competitions. But - alas - they then wouldn't win any medals, never mind the "validation" of their chosen gender. They could do the sport - cycling, swimming - on their own, outside the world of competitive sport. Or they could organise their own trans sports. It's really not one of the world's great problems.

If men choose to transition, one of the consequences should be, quite clearly, that they can't then compete in women's sport. Either that, or women's sport is ruined. It's not really a difficult choice.

CIA failures

Edward Luttwak at UnHerd bemoans the incompetence of the CIA, as shown in the Afghanistan withdrawal, and now in Ukraine:

{F]or the United States, the greatest lesson of immediate importance is that its foreign and defence policies are drastically degraded by the lack of basic intelligence about foreign countries — not because the CIA fails to steal their war plans, but because it cannot acquire elementary situational awareness. This is an inevitable consequence of a cultural collapse: in the old days, a CIA officer appointed to serve in a foreign country whose language he did not know would apply himself furiously to learn as much of it as possible. But now, very few CIA officers speak any foreign language. Their superiors do not demand that they learn them, and they themselves are too busy chatting with each other to talk with the locals — other than with English-speaking local counterparts who mostly tell them what they want to hear.

This is why Biden paid a high political price for the effortless Taliban conquest of Afghanistan and the rapid fall of Kabul: the CIA told the White House that the Afghan army would hold out on its own for much more than a decent interval, for years perhaps, and said nothing at all to suggest that it might crumble without a fight. Not knowing Tajik, Uzbek, or any Pathan dialect, the CIA officers who uselessly served in Kabul from their offices did not overhear the jokes on the street about the Afghan army, or hilarious accounts of how incompetent fools could become instant officers by paying a modest bribe.

Because American generals, including media-star David Petraeus, flatly refused to call upon the regiments of Pathans, Tadjiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras who might fight out of ethnic solidarity, instead creating a mythical national “Afghan” army, the result was a fraud from day one. When the time came, they did not fight or even flee: they handed over their US-supplied weapons to the Taliban.

In Kyiv, exactly the same thing happened, but in reverse. Just as in Kabul, we had CIA officers with no situational awareness. They did not listen, or understand, or even speak Ukrainian — they proclaimed it unnecessary “because everyone speaks Russian”, before sheepishly admitting that they themselves did not. Hence the CIA told the White House that Zelenskyy would flee, that the government would dissolve, that the Ukrainian army would not fight, and that the Russians would control Kyiv in 24 hours.

Since the White House still gave credence to the CIA in spite of its long history of incompetence, it ordered the urgent, even panicked evacuation of the US diplomatic mission to Lviv. Had they had any idea at all, they might have noticed that the Russians proposed to invade Europe’s largest country with very few troops — 150,000 compared to the 800,000 sent into far smaller Czechoslovakia in 1968 — and told the White House that with a bit of help the Ukrainians would contain the invasion.

But the CIA is highly professional in its press relations, and sure enough the New York Times promptly published an article that featured “former intelligence officers” highlighting the impossibility of ascertaining “fighting spirit”. It was as neat an illustration as any of why Kabul fell, and why Kyiv could too. Unless the US remedies its CIA problem by emptying out and fumigating the place, before restaffing it with people who care enough about the world to learn its languages, the US will continue to fly blind — and crash into the next Ukraine.

And the gaffe-prone Biden is not helping anyone.