Mick Hartley

In the gender-fluid navy

It's getting increasingly difficult to keep track of all the institutions that've been Stonewalled into gender absurdity. The Royal Navy? Have they featured yet? Yes, a quick search reveals that the Times had a piece back in May on efforts to increase acceptance of "gender fluidity" in the service and be good little Stonewall devotees:

The navy’s submission for last year’s Stonewall 100 scheme, obtained by The Times, shows how extensive diversity and inclusion training is ingrained into the service. It placed joint 71st in the group’s top 100 employers list for last year.

Recruits are rigorously prepared to fight discrimination. They receive a diversity and inclusion package and a “classroom instructor-facilitated lesson” in the first week of a ten-week induction, the Stonewall application shows.

This contains information about “sexual orientation and gender identity and discusses each in detail, referring to bisexuality and trans and non-binary genders”.

In addition, all navy personnel complete a mandatory package every other year called Be The Change, which is taught by a qualified diversity adviser.

Sections include teaching how “unconscious biases shape the way that they impact on others”.

Navy career advisers also receive training on gender identity and unconscious bias by the navy’s diversity inclusion team.

This includes a presentation using a “genderbread sailor” to give the career advisers a greater knowledge of “gender identity, transgender issues and sexual orientation in today’s society”....

Now, the latest Senior Service gender news from the Telegraph:

Royal Navy personnel are told to introduce themselves with their pronouns before meetings, in official guidance seen by the Telegraph.

A guide for Royal Navy personnel on “Trans and Non-Binary Awareness” tells staff: “Introducing yourself with your pronouns at the start of meetings and interactions is a good way to be inclusive.”

The guide, which is available on the Royal Navy intranet, states: “Some people do not associate with gender binary and may use different pronouns like they/them hers or neo-pronouns like ze/hir/hirs. You should use the pronoun that a person shares with you.”

Navy staff are urged to “avoid micro-aggressions like backhanded compliments and unhelpful tips” and to “keep constantly educating and researching about trans matters”.

The Royal Navy advertised Ministry of Defence diversity events for staff to attend on its intranet page for “National Inclusion Week”, which took place from Monday to Friday this week.

The MoD intranet encouraged staff “to actively participate in as many events as possible”.

Of the online events offered, which varied in length from 45 minutes to an hour, included talks entitled “Take Action, Make Impact”, “Race and the Race Action Plan”, “Transgender and Non-Binary”, “Neurodiversity”, and “Diversity and Inclusive Language”.

The Navy trans guide also displays a “trans umbrella” that features different gender identities, including “gender neutral”; “two spirit”, which often refers to a gender expression some north American indigenous communities proport; and “pangender”, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “a gender identity [that] encompasses multiple genders, which may be experienced simultaneously or in a fluid, fluctuating manner”.

The guide boasts of the Royal Navy being a “Stonewall top 100 employer” last year.

Fabulous.

I wondered last time, tongue-in-cheek, if perhap Stonewall might be part of a Russian-inspired plot to destroy this country's institutions from within...

Wheeler Dam

Arthur Rothstein, 1942:

"Wheeler Dam, Alabama (Tennessee Valley Authority). Substation."

"Wheeler Dam, Alabama (Tennessee Valley Authority). Gantry crane."
[Photo: Shorpy/Arthur Rothstein for the U.S. Foreign Information Service]

Late September sun

 At Walthamstow Wetlands and the Lea this morning:

 

At The Palestine Writers Literature Festival

And not just in France....

American universities are very careful nowadays about not causing offence. Trigger warnings abound. Race can only be discussed within the parameters of Critical Race Theory.

There is one exception to all this, of course: you can say what you like about Jews. 

Dominic Green at the JC:

The Palestine Writers Literature Festival, hosted by the University of Pennsylvania on September 22 to 24, was light on both literature and actual Palestinians, but heavy on anti-Israel propaganda and nut-jobs. What, as the Russian revolutionaries used to say, is to be done?

Wearisome as it may be, we should note the scheduled lead speakers at this event. Roger Waters, who claims he was disinvited but participated on Zoom, is prone to musings on the “Zionist cabal” and floating giant inflatable pigs bearing the Star of David over the crowds at his stadium gigs.

Marc Lamont Hill is a Farrakhan fan and Al Jazeera presenter who was fired from CNN for calling for Israel’s destruction (“Free Palestine, from the river to the sea”). He plays to smaller crowds these days. No wonder he calls all mainstream media “Zionist outlets”.

There were some actual Palestinians there. The Australian writer Randa Abdel-Fattah calls Israel a “demonic, sick project” and says she “can’t wait for the day we will commemorate its end”. Susan Abulhawa, the organiser of this lovely event, thinks “Zionists are to Palestinians as Nazis are to Jews”.

If American support for Israel is values-based, then this shower don’t represent a serious challenge to public opinion. They do, however, have the sympathy of the liberal professoriat: faculty from four departments, none of them sciences and all of them in the humanities, sponsored the conference.

The students of these top-flight universities get to swim in what Joe Biden calls “the river of power” that runs from the Ivy League to Washington DC. So there are grounds for concern if the future leaders of America are drip-fed lies about the Jews and Israel. But again, what should be done? ...

The American campus is a paradise of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, which is why everyone is scared to say what they think. There are more trigger warnings on campus than in The High Chaparral’s Christmas special, yet incitement against Jews, and not always under the guise of “anti-Zionism”, is now constant....

Anti-Israel activism is deeply entrenched on campus. The law moves slowly. Jewish Americans, and especially their communal leadership, must acknowledge the emerging reality. The way things are going, Israelis will be more accepted in Riyadh than on the elite campuses of Europe and North America.

Antisemitism “widespread” in French universities

Very depressing:

Nine out of ten Jewish students say they have suffered antisemitism at French universities or elite colleges, according to a new survey.

The discrimination was usually in the form of insults or jokes but sometimes included physical assault.

Some 77 per cent of Jewish students and 28 per cent of students from all backgrounds think antisemitism is “widespread” in universities, according to the study published in Le Parisien newspaper yesterday.

The poll by the French Institute of Public Opinion, carried out for the country’s Union of Jewish Students, showed that 7 per cent of Jewish students had been assaulted in antisemitic attacks. A former student at the prestigious Institute of Political Studies told Le Parisien that fellow students had repeatedly harassed him and chanted Nazi slogans. “One said he wished my grandparents had died in the camps,” he said.

He said he got into a fight with a student who spat in his face and told him he disliked Jews. At a social event where guests had their hands marked with a cross to show they had paid, a swastika was drawn on his hand.

The institute is one France’s grandes écoles, the elite colleges whose graduates generally secure influential posts in business, government, the civil service or the media.

“We used to think education was a protection against antisemitism, but not any more,” Yonathan Arfi, the president of the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions, told The Times. “At universities today, there’s antisemitic and anti-Israel rhetoric from the far left, and the far right is also present. This creates a hostile environment for Jewish students.”

The difference now is that antisemitism is more from the left than - as used to be the case - from the right.

Some Jewish students have reported hostility from Muslims angry over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but most say that is not the main problem.

“Hostility towards Jews doesn’t come from any one community or especially from Muslims,” said Philippe Schmidt of the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism. “Far-left propaganda is a bigger issue,” he said.

No anthropology debate

That cancellation of a paper about sex by the American Anthropology Association because of  "harm to members of the Trans and LGBQTI community"...well, they've come up with a longer excuse - No Place For Transphobia in Anthropology: Session pulled from Annual Meeting program.

In keeping with the current spirit of advance warnings, I should say that this piece may cause offence to those rational individuals who possess some degree of intelligence and understanding of science. It is, in short, one of the most astoundingly stupid and dishonest documents it will have been your misfortune to read. 

But at least it's short.

The AAA and CASCA boards reached a decision to remove the session “Let’s Talk about Sex Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology” from the AAA/CASCA 2023 conference program. This decision was based on extensive consultation and was reached in the spirit of respect for our values, in order to ensure the safety and dignity of all of our members, as well as the scientific integrity of the program.

The first ethical principle in AAA’s Principles of Professional Responsibility is to “Do no harm.” The session was rejected because it relied on assumptions that run contrary to the settled science in our discipline, framed in ways that do harm to vulnerable members of our community. It commits one of the cardinal sins of scholarship—it assumes the truth of the proposition that it sets out to prove, namely, that sex and gender are simplistically binary, and that this is a fact with meaningful implications for the discipline.

But it is a fact with meaningful implications for the discipline, and indeed with meaningful implications for all biological sciences. And note, as always, the conflation of sex and gender.

Such efforts contradict scientific evidence, including the wealth of anthropological scholarship on gender and sex. Forensic anthropologists talk about using bones for “sex estimation,” not “sex identification,” a process that is probabilistic rather than clearly determinative, and that is easily influenced by cognitive bias on the part of the researcher. Around the world and throughout human history, there have always been people whose gender roles do not align neatly with their reproductive anatomy. There is no single biological standard by which all humans can be reliably sorted into a binary male/female sex classification. On the contrary, anthropologists and others have long shown sex and gender to be historically and geographically contextual, deeply entangled, and dynamically mutable categories.
The function of the “gender critical” scholarship advocated in this session, like the function of the “race science” of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is to advance a “scientific” reason to question the humanity of already marginalized groups of people, in this case, those who exist outside a strict and narrow sex / gender binary.

Transgender and gender diverse identities have long existed, and we are committed to upholding the value and dignity of transgender people. We believe that a more just future is possible—one where gender diversity is welcomed and supported rather than marginalized and policed.

That's it. That's ideology strangling science. That's the sound of anthropology disappearing as a serious academic discipline, and re-emerging as an enforced set of dogmas in line with party thinking.

No debate.

The demonisation of the state of Israel

Tanya Gold in the Spectator reviews Jake Wallis Simons' new book Israelopobia:

The book’s most interesting passages are on the Russian roots of anti-Zionism – a strategy to undermine America – and on the Nazism of Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. He was on the Nazi payroll, took 900 marks a month and considered Arab and German goals to be ‘completely overlapping’ in ‘this struggle against world Jewry’. He was promised that once the British were out of Palestine, Adolf Eichmann would extend the Final Solution there, which I suppose is a kind of colonialism. When Hitler fell, al-Husseini said the Arabs ‘would continue fighting until the Zionists were annihilated and the whole of Palestine became a purely Arab state’.

Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, was another fanatical admirer of Hitler, and Hitlerism flourished onwards to the Hamas Charter of 1988, which quotes The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and could have been written by Julius Streicher if they hadn’t hanged him at Nuremberg. 

Wallis Simons writes of 1947:

Behind closed doors, Abdullah I, Emir of Jordan, the Egyptian prime minister Ismail Sidky, the Iraqi prime minister Muzahim al-Pachachi, and even Abd al-Rahman Azzam, the secretary-general of the Arab League, expressed concerns about rejecting the UN plan.

But, he adds, the spirit of pan-Arab nationalism persuaded them to take the Palestinian cause as a totem. And here we are: the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas’s PhD thesis claims Zionists collaborated with Nazis, and in 2016 Imad Homato, a Palestinian professor, said: ‘If a fish in the sea fights with another fish, I am sure the Jews are behind it.’...

That same pan-Arab nationalism, as I noted the other day, somehow doesn't extend to the Palestinians and their descendants, still defined as refugees and still unable to assimilate into the Arab states that surround tiny Israel.

At heart, this is not a book about the Middle East. It is one about Europe’s inability to process the Shoah. Howard Jacobson, who is also quoted (‘And to those who will not weep, who would rather march, protest and boycott, I say: You are among those who wanted to see the dream blighted in the first place’), believes that demonisation of Israel is essential because it offers retrospective absolution for the Shoah, and that this is an unconscious and necessary process. Some things are not easily digested, though that brings little comfort to anyone.

Pronoun soup

VERY disturbing BBC #NolanLive Exclusive:

Northern Ireland PRE & PRIMARY school kids can have their preferred “pronouns” recorded on school system WITHOUT parents knowledge!

Pronouns include:
🤡 “Zie”
🤡 “Sie”
🤡 “Ey”
🤡 “Ve”
🤡 “Tey”

Get alphabet soup groups OUT of education! pic.twitter.com/mftzbyahvN

— John James (@JohnJamesNI) September 27, 2023

Waters "behaves like an antisemite"

The latest on Pink Floyd's deeply unpleasant Roger Waters:

The acclaimed producer of Pink Floyd’s album The Wall today said the band’s co-founder Roger Waters behaves like an antisemite.

Bob Ezrin, 74, who is Jewish, disclosed that he once heard Waters compose a ditty describing the group’s agent as a “f***ing Jew”.

A new documentary, The Dark Side of Roger Waters, exposes his insensitive behaviour towards Jewish people.

A saxophonist who played for Waters recalled the star angrily rejecting a dish served to him in a restaurant as “Jew food”.

As David Gilmour's wife Polly Samson tweeted back in February, "Sadly @rogerwaters you are antisemitic to your rotten core. Also a Putin apologist and a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching,misogynistic, sick-with-envy, megalomaniac. Enough of your nonsense."

Update: and here it is (thanks Graham in the comments):

The Andinia Plan

An interesting article in the Jewish Chronicle:

A UK-based TV channel for British muslims has been fined £40,000 after airing an "antisemitic" documentary that claimed Israel was trying to take over part of Argentina and Chile.

In February 2021, the Islam Channel broadcast an hour-long film titled The Andinia Plan, which alleged there are plans to create a new Jewish state in Patagonia - a sparsely populated region at the bottom of South America.

The conspiracy theory first appeared in a magazine published by a group of Argentinian neo-Nazis led by the sons of Holocaust architect Adolf Eichman.

Sparked by a suggestion by political activist Theodore Herzl that a future Jewish state could lie in Argentina, it typically involves the belief that there is an international plot to promote Jewish migration to the country, take control of its economy, and eventually seize its land.

While seemingly absurd, the theory has affected Jews who travel to and live in the region.

In 2012, after an Israeli tourist was questioned by Chilean authorities after a forest fire began in an environmental reserve, antisemitic comments were posted online referencing the Andenia Plan.

Writing on X/Twitter, one Chilean congressman questioned whether the man in question was really on holiday, suggesting that he had been sent by the Israeli government after "killing Palestinian children".

The Islam Channel's documentary featured claims that "an old proposal from the end of the 19th century could be resurfacing in order to change the political map of South America."

The narrator later added: "According to scholars on the subject, there are indications that might signal that the proposal may be re-emerging with force in a modern-day plan that allegedly could seek to create a new Jewish state in Patagonia in the not too distant future."

Eugenio Tuma Sedan, described in a caption as Senator of the Republic of Chile, further claimed: “There are allegations regarding the aspirations of the Zionists, that not only did they wish to occupy Palestinian territories, but they also wanted a back-up option in the south of Chile and the south of Argentina."

The broadcasting regulator Ofcom has now ruled the documentary programme amounted to hate speech against Jewish people.

The irony is that South America - southern South America - has historically been welcoming not to Jews, but on the contrary to antisemites. The reference to Adolf Eichmann reminds us of the Nazis who fled there after the Second World War.

There's also the sorry tale of Nueva Germania, the colony founded in Paraguay by Elisabeth Nietzsche, sister of philosopher Friedrich, and her husband Bernhard Förster in the 1870s. They were aiming to create a Jew-free Aryan paradise, but it didn't work out - "Any notion of an Aryan utopia was extinguished as soon as they set foot on land. The hot, humid climate, malaria, parasites, and snakes wreaked havoc among these urban families laden with young children." Elizabeth Nietzche returned to Germany after Forster's suicide, where she spent her energies in later years arguing that her brother's work was a precursor to Nazism. Her funeral in 1935 was attended by Hitler.