Mick Hartley

Stemming the tide of venom north of the border

A new dystopian vision comes to Scotland next week with the introduction of the extraordinary hate crime law. If you haven't been following the debate, Kathleen Stock at UnHerd is probably as good a place to start as any.

If the Scottish establishment is to be believed, ordinary Scots are positively frothing with hatred at the moment. Already Police Scotland record “non-crime hate incidents”, based solely on an onlooker’s perception of hatred, as a matter of course. But this hasn’t been enough to stem the tide of venom north of the border. So on Monday, the Hate Crime and Public Order Act will come into force, intended among other things to criminalise the “stirring up” of hatred towards several protected characteristics, including race, age, disability, religion, and transgender identity.

And there’s more. Ostensibly introduced for those victims of hate crimes too intimidated to speak to the police directly, there will now be designated “third-party reporting centres” for accusations of hateful crime, including one in a Glasgow sex shop. Snitch on someone you dislike and pick up a dildo at the same time — isn’t modern life wonderful? ...

Many commentators are concerned that the whole Act will chill legitimate free speech, either via actual criminal sanctions or via misinterpretations of the law by police and others; and there are particular worries about speech that is critical of religion, either of the traditional or transactivist kinds. But the smooth-tongued rainbow mandarins paid to dictate equality policy to a mostly vacant-eyed political class have told everyone to take a deep breath and relax. As the chief executive of Equality Network in Scotland Rebecca Crowther soothingly told Sky News: “This legislation is not going to catch people online saying things that I might disagree with, that you might disagree with, things that might upset me, things that might upset others in the community… What it does legislate against is when that freedom of speech strays into something that is abusive, that could cause fear and alarm, and that also incites hatred or incites people to act on that hatred.” Meanwhile Yousaf himself has said that he has “full confidence” that the police will look beyond “vexatious” complaints.

But what this trite sort of response obviously ignores is that, as social norms change, it is increasingly difficult for people to distinguish between that which is merely disagreeable and upsetting, and that which is genuinely hateful and abusive. It is an irony of the present situation that so many seem to think that biology is socially constructed but that the meaning of hatred is natural and fixed. In fact, what counts as an adequate expression of a particular emotion is at least partly culturally determined, and these days the category of hatred seems to be a lot more expansive than it used to be. Previously, its presence was indicated by otherwise random-looking outbursts of violence towards outgroups, and the use of aggressive slurs. In present day Scotland, however, it seems detectable from saying things like “choosing to identify as ‘non-binary’ is as valid as choosing to identify as a cat” — a recent statement by the Conservative MSP Murdo Fraser, subsequently recorded by police as a non-crime hate incident, a verdict he now intends to contest in court....

A reasonable person wouldn’t have gone along with any of this, and yet in Scotland crazily myopic and illiberal measures continue to be waved through, with stunning condescension on the part of their smug originators. In other words, there’s no use appealing to what some hypothetical reasonable person would think, when there appear to be no such people in the vicinity. They’ve probably all gone down the sex shop to report J.K. Rowling for saying homosexuality is a thing. It’s almost as if these people hate us.

It's going to be interesting, to say the least, to see how this astonishingly bad piece of legislation will work out, but given Police Scotland's training on gender-critical activists called Jo, who think trans people should be sent to the gas chambers, I think we can get a fairly good idea. If nothing else, it's a trans activists' charter for silencing their critics.

Update: Taggart's on the case.

'Thur's been a misgenderin.' pic.twitter.com/67R29Aipf2

— Ian Acheson 🇬🇧🇮🇪 (@NotThatBigIan) March 29, 2024

The breast-feeding grandad

From the Mail:

A trans woman has been helped to breastfeed her grandchild, in what is thought to be a world first.

And, let's hope, a world last.

The unidentified 50-year-old was helped to express up to 30ml of milk at a time, after a four week course of hormone treatment.

Researchers from Duke University reported the woman ‘lactated for a total of two weeks’ and was able to feed the four-month-old baby.

The motivation for inducing lactation was to create a ‘bond from breastfeeding that she had not been able to experience with her own five children’.

The motivation certainly wasn't the health of the baby - god knows what repulsive chemical stew the poor child was ingesting. That comes way down the list of priorities, though: most important was for the man to get his little thrill.

And what was the mother thinking??

‘The patient tearfully reported this was a significant and emotional experience for her that felt very different from formula feeding her other children.

‘She states she has a special bond with this baby for which she is grateful.

‘She regrets that she had not known about the possibility sooner and wished that other transgender women could know that breastfeeding a baby can be a reality.

‘She reported unforeseen benefits, including female gender affirmation and full breast maturation.

‘The patient did not experience any side effects from her treatment regimen.’

Isn't that nice? Not a word about the baby, of course - merely a prop in this grotesque exercise in "gender-affirmation".

Maya Forstater, executive director of campaign group Sex Matter, said: ‘Babies cannot consent to being participants in a study which sets aside biological reality to define treatment protocols relating to so-called “gender medicine”.

‘Men should not be permitted, still less supported, to get between babies and their mothers, or to use babies as props to validate their beliefs that they are women.’

The Flying Bats

Meanwhile, in Sydney:

A women’s football competition has been branded “misogynist” after it was won by a team featuring five transgender players amid accusations one had broken an opponents’ leg in two places.

Flying Bats FC won every match they played during the four-week Beryl Ackroyd Cup, including a 10-0 victory in which one of their trans players scored a double hat-trick.

Since winning Sunday’s final in Sydney, Australia, 4-0, it has emerged organisers had earlier held a crisis meeting, during which rival teams were warned forfeiting games against the Bats would result in disciplinary action and could even be viewed as “an act of discrimination”.

The same meeting included accusations a 6ft 2in, 14st Bats player had once broken the leg of 5ft 6in, nine-and-a-half stone opponent in two places and claims 24 of the injured player’s team-mates had quit because they did not want to face the LGBTQ+ side.

Flying Bats went on to win the $1,000 (£514) first prize on Sunday.

One senior club official was quoted by Australia’s Daily Telegraph newspaper saying: “Our girls are here to play for fun and expect to play in the female competition. They did not sign up for a mixed competition.

“Some of the parents were so concerned they would not let their daughters play.

“It was so disheartening for them to see the huge ­difference in ability – they’re killing it.”

Behold the level of obfuscatory jargon from the club, to avoid acknowledging what's blindingly obvious to anyone with eyes to see:

The president of the Flying Bats, which boasts of being “the biggest LGBTQIA+ women’s and non-binary football club in the world”, told Daily Mail Australia trans women had been playing for them for at least two decades.

Jennifer Peden said: “As a club, the Flying Bats FC stand strongly for inclusion, and pride ourselves on safe, respectful and fair play, the promotion of a supportive community for LGBTQIA+ players, officials and supporters, and the significant physical, social and mental health benefits that participation in sport brings, especially to marginalised members of the LGBTQIA+ community. We are a club that values our cisgender and transgender players equally.

“We strongly support the Australian Human Rights Commission’s guidelines for the inclusion of transgender and gender diverse people in sport.

“These guidelines, along with the Sex Discrimination Act, inform the gender inclusion policies of Football Australia, Football NSW, and the North West Sydney Football Association at the community, grassroots level at which we play.

“Trans women belong in the women’s competition because that is the gender with which they identify. Trans women have played with the club for at least 20 years, at levels ranging from beginner to skilled, just like our cis women players.

“Our players are graded on ability and placed in the team that is most appropriate for their skill and experience level.”

A Football NSW spokesperson said the organisation took “pride in being at the forefront of developing inclusive policies for the sport in Australia and operates within the existing legal framework, including anti-discrimination legislation.

“Football NSW continues to align with Football Australia’s adoption of the Australian Human Rights Commission’s Guidelines for the inclusion of transgender and gender diverse people in sport, under which, community players are permitted to participate in football on the basis of the gender with which they identify.”

It's broken, folks. It's cult-speak. It's laughable. Though I doubt the girl who had her leg broken found it very funny.

Ghost town

From French photographer Thibaut Derien's project J’habite une ville fantôm - "I live in a ghost town": photos of old abandoned shops and cafes in small towns across France - relics of a disappearing world.

Derien, who is also a musician, has traveled all over France, visiting countless small towns and villages along the way. He often avoids major highways, preferring country roads and local streets where development is slower. “I continue this series because I’m still touched each time I discover an old shop,” he tells Colossal, “always standing despite abandonment as a resistance to the modern world. I always think about people who spent their life behind those walls.”

A closed shop represents more than simply a bygone era or an empty facade for the artist, who is interested in capturing the individuality of each location in light of the homogeneity of today’s commercial developments. Derien looks closer: “First, it’s just a facade; you can think it’s sad, but if you look a little bit more you see old paintings, old mosaics, some ‘know-how’… Many commercial centers—all the same—have replaced the small shops, each one different.”

[All images © Thibaut Derien]

Team Picture Story of the Year

A photo of a truck with the half-naked body of Israeli Shani Louk, abducted and killed by Hamas, features in the “Team Picture Story of the Year”:

Poyipics is the oldest photojournalism competition in the world.  Their Pictures of the Year International award began as a photographic contest in 1944 by Cliff Edom at the Missouri School of Journalism in Columbia, Missouri.

This year Poyipics awarded the winner to The Associated Press in the category “Team Picture Story of the Year” for their article “War between Israel and Hamas” in which they do not even mention the name of Shani Louk, nor even not that she was raped and massacred by Hamas terrorists in front of a delirious crowd.

From the Jerusalem Post:

A freelance photojournalist, Ali Mahmud, contributed to the Associated Press (AP) winning first place for the Team Picture Story of the Year last week for taking a photo of Shani Louk's half-naked corpse as Hamas terrorists were driving it away on October 7, alluding to the photographer's knowledge of the attack beforehand.

According to the Pictures of the Year program's website, the category "recognizes the collaborative effort of a photography staff covering a single topic or news story. It is a narrative picture story that consists of images taken as part of a team effort to cover a single issue or news story."

Other photos, mostly attributed to other photographers on behalf of the Associated Press, were snapped of destroyed or damaged buildings in Gaza, injured or dead Palestinians, Israelis mourning at funerals or fleeing from rocket attacks. However, many of these photos allude to photographer's previous knowledge and possible involvement of the massive attack launched on Israeli soil - in order to get the "shot of a lifetime."

The program posted news about the AP's victory, alongside Mahmoud's photo of Louk on Instagram, where they came under immense criticism from users. Louk's name is not mentioned anywhere in the program's Instagram post.

"There is a dead body of a partially unclothed human being, a young woman who was brutally murdered and probably raped. This cannot be real. Please remove this photo," one user wrote, while another said "She has a name. Shani Louk. Her family specifically requested that we remember her laughing and living. Take this down and show some respect. If you want to post our Shani, find a photo she consented to."

Mahmud, who took the photo of Louk, had his name mentioned in an earlier report when parents of Louk and other Nova massacre victims sued AP and Reuters last month for their employment of photojournalists who accompanied the terrorists on their pogrom and contended that AP ignored close connections the photographers had to terrorist organizations, to which they said: "we have not seen any evidence – including in the lawsuit – that the freelance journalists who contributed to our coverage did."

Awards for photos of people celebrating murdered Jews. These are dark times.

Update:

This is how Shani Louk's family asked for her to be remembered. Smiling and alive.

The biggest photojournalism competition in the world decided to trample on the family's wishes in favor of giving a photo of Shani's mutilated body a prestigious award. She wasn't even named in… pic.twitter.com/y4L4R35bdA

— Hen Mazzig (@HenMazzig) March 28, 2024

The Tajik connection

More on the Moscow terrorist attack - realistic this time - from Kyle Orton at UnHerd:

Much of the media coverage has so far focused on Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP), an Afghanistan-based IS contingent that was likely involved in the atrocity. But this should not be misunderstood as a separate entity: IS’s “provinces”, such as ISKP, all take their cue from the “centre” in Iraq and Syria.

Nato’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 left Western intelligence constrained in assessing the ISKP threat, but the evidence that IS had turned back to “external” operations, with ISKP a key part of this, stacked up over the last year. A series of ISKP plots were disrupted in Kazakhstan, India, and Europe — including what would have been devastating attacks over Christmas and New Year in Austria and Germany. “Successful” IS attacks hit France and Belgium in October, and then Iran and Turkey in January.

The four visibly-beaten men brought into court in Russia this week as perpetrators were all Tajiks. While information from the Russian judiciary must be handled carefully, most ISKP operatives in the aforementioned cases were Tajiks — a perhaps unsurprising revelation given that IS has been targeting Tajikistan for recruitment.

Tajikistan’s well-established Islamist scene, so close to ISKP’s Afghan base, is an easy recruitment pool and many Tajik jihadists in the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, disillusioned since the 2021 takeover, have been drawn to IS’s “purer” Islam, unconstrained by national boundaries and alliances with “infidel” states such as Russia. Russian-speaking Tajiks with passports were always going to raise fewer red flags, plus the large Tajik migrant labour population in Russia meant that terrorists could blend in easily....

Questions remain over the Russian state’s behaviour before and during the massacre. Despite the US warning Russia publicly on 7 March of “imminent plans to target large gatherings in Moscow, to include concerts”, Vladimir Putin dismissed these “provocative statements” on 19 March as attempts to “intimidate and destabilise our society”.

Whatever the needs of propaganda, Russia’s security forces could have adhered to these warnings privately, but seemingly did not: it took an hour-and-a-half to react during the concert hall attack — when it took the FSB minutes to arrest mourners laying flowers for murdered dissident Alexei Navalny last month — and security forces then retreated for some time rather than entering the building.

The Kremlin’s attempt to link Ukraine, as predictable as it was absurd, has heightened the sense that Moscow is hiding something. It may simply be incompetence, often a better explanation than conspiracy. While it is true that Putin came to power on the back of the 1999 apartment bombings in Moscow, it may be a stretch to say he was behind this attack. Nevertheless, if the Kremlin now finds few believe it was not responsible for the slaughter of innocent Russians, in some way at least, it has nobody to blame but itself.

Hamish De Bretton-Gordon in the Telegraph does offer the suggestion that "ISIS acted alone, but were permitted to carry out the attack by the Russian intelligence services as part of a ‘false flag’ operation to boost support for its clampdowns and the war in Ukraine". But he admits that, although such brutal cynicism is entirely possible from Russia, in the end this is unlikely: "History tends to favour cock-up over conspiracy, and we know the FSB can be as staggeringly incompetent as any sweeping bureaucracy, especially one predicated on fear".

Obama and the Moscow ISIS attack

It's worth remembering quite how poisonous George Galloway really is. The newly elected MP for Rochdale campaigned on a Gaza Free Palestine ticket, cynically appealing to Rochdale's disaffected Muslim voters - and no doubt to a few hard leftists as well. His party, the Workers Party of Britain, is not only aggressively anti-Israel; it's also strongly pro-Putin. The origins of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, they say "are in fact to be found in the aggressive designs of imperialism stretching back many years". You get the picture. 

Now here's Steerpike in the Spectator on the latest poison from Galloway, happily being echoed in official Russian circles:

Step forward George Galloway, the newly-elected MP for Rochdale, who is quoted approvingly at length in Russkaya Gazeta today, giving an ‘expert opinion.’ The quotes appear to be a distilled version of comments which Galloway made on his YouTube channel on Sunday. He suggested to viewers that President Obama could be involved in the Moscow terrorist attack and that the West is ‘lying’ about its involvement. Galloway said:

When the US and the UK and others swiftly tried to re-assure me that it was only ISIS that carried out this mass-murder in Moscow, I knew automatically that they were lying. And now I am working back and here’s what I’m finding. I’m finding, first of all, that no-one, no-one, has explained the unannounced visit of President Barack Obama to meet British political and security officials in 10 Downing Street three days before this terrorist crime was carried out. Working further back, I discover that Victoria Nuland, that harbinger of death, that angel of death, who, if she comes anywhere near you, be sure a civil war is coming in your country. I saw her with my own eyes promise the Russians some nasty surprises in the next few weeks and months. I’m working further back and I discover that the White House spokesman John Kirby announced that American citizens had been warned to stay away from crowded places, including shopping malls and theatres, in the great city of Moscow, the greatest city in Europe, the capital of the largest country on the earth. And I was never that great at mathematics. But I know that one and one makes two. I know that one and two makes three. I know that one and three makes four. And so I have four pieces of evidence in my mind that leads me to believe that the United States, that the Nato allies, and their proxy servant, the state of Ukraine, the remaining state of Ukraine were in fact responsible for this mass murder.

There are no depths to which the man won't sink to get his voice heard.

Pittsburgh Coal

John Collier, November 1942. "Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (vicinity). Champion No. 1 coal cleaning plant of Pittsburgh Coal Company."

[Photo: Shorpy/John Collier, Office of War Information]

Promoting gender equality

The United Nations does it again:

Saudi Arabia has been chosen as the chair of the UN commission that is supposed to promote gender equality and empower women around the world, after an unopposed bid for leadership condemned by human rights groups because of the kingdom’s “abysmal” record on women’s rights.

The Saudi ambassador to the UN, Abdulaziz Alwasil, was elected as chair of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), by “acclamation” on Wednesday, as there were no rival candidates and no dissent at the CSW’s annual meeting in New York.

Alwasil was endorsed by the group of Asia-Pacific states on the commission. When the outgoing chair, the Filipino envoy to the UN, Antonio Manuel Lagdameo, asked the 45 members if they had any objections there was silence in the chamber.

“I hear no objection. It is so decided,” Lagdameo said.

Now if it'd been Israel...

"Statistically impossible" casualty figures

A few weeks back I featured a Tablet article from Abraham Wyner, a professor of statistics and data science, arguing that the Gaza Ministry of Health was faking the casualty figures. Now here's an article in Fathom from Tom Simpson, Lewi Stone, and Gregory Rose - Statistically Impossible: A Critical Analysis of Hamas’s Women and Children Casualty Figures. This despite the figures being regularly cited by media world-wide - including of course the BBC:

The Gazan Ministry of Health (MoH) has repeatedly claimed that 70 per cent of Gazan deaths are women and children. We first found the claim in the MoH’s 11 December 2023 report. In 2024, the MoH has repeated this claim in all seven of its reports that we have been able to obtain so far this year (see Figure 2). The 70 per cent figure has also been widely cited in the media, with a recent BBC factcheck even using it to criticise IDF statistics on eliminated Hamas combatants. But how trustworthy is the 70 per cent statistic? It should be kept in mind that the Gazan MoH operates under the auspices of the Hamas government, giving it a vested interest in delegitimising Israel and demonising the IDF.

It turns out this ‘70 per cent’ figure is contradicted by the statistics that the MoH itself provides in its own reports. It is a disinformation tool founded on statistical manipulation rather than realities on the ground. The BBC ‘factcheckers’ and other western media could easily have determined this for themselves, using publicly available information....

But it didn't suit the anti-Israel narrative.

The chief Hamas strategy is to see more dead Palestinians. As I've said before, it's a strange war where the "attackers" do their best to minimise civilian casualties, while the "defenders" want to see as many dead as possible.