Mick Hartley

Theroux and the West Bank settlers

I watched the full Louis Theroux documentary on the settler movement.

I wanted to point out at least one historical inaccuracy that I spotted when he speaks about Hebron.

He states: “In 1968, the year after it was occupied by Israel, a community of Jewish settlers moved in… pic.twitter.com/oDAoJ64D3s

— Drew Pavlou 🇦🇺🇺🇦🇹🇼 (@DrewPavlou) April 29, 2025

Full text:

He states: “In 1968, the year after it was occupied by Israel, a community of Jewish settlers moved in illegally. They now number some 700.”

In 1895 the Jewish population of Hebron was 1,429. So there were more Jews in Hebron some 130 years ago than there are Jews in Hebron today. Why does Louis neglect to mention this?

He interviews a Palestinian human rights activist named Issa. This man states: “This is my land. The settlers chose to come here. And if it’s not safe for them, why continue to build more settlements in my own city?”

But let’s step back for a second. Why is it that the Jewish population of Hebron is smaller today than it was 130 years ago?

Jews have lived in Hebron since antiquity. Biblical tradition holds that Abraham settled in Hebron and purchased the Cave of the Patriarchs as a burial place for his wife Sarah.

Modern Jewish history in Hebron dates back to at least the 15th century. A visiting rabbi found at least 20 Jewish families living in Hebron in 1521.

This small Jewish community grew over the years despite facing brutal discrimination and recurring pogroms. They were banned from praying at the Cave of the Patriarchs - one of the holiest sites in Judaism - until the beginning of the 20th century.

The Jewish community of Hebron was only effectively finally destroyed in 1929 as a result of the Hebron Massacre.

Dozens of Jews - including non-Zionist Jews who had lived in Hebron for generations - were systematically murdered by Arab nationalists. The British then ordered the remaining Jews to leave the city. Jewish properties and homes were looted. The Hadassah building became an Arab girls' school, the Abraham Avinu synagogue was destroyed and used as a goat pen, and the Jewish cemetery was vandalized and desecrated.

When Jordan occupied Hebron from 1948 to 1967, they razed the last remaining Jewish synagogues and strictly prohibited Jewish access to the city. The Tomb of the Patriarchs was once again off limits to the Jews.

Following Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six Day War, Jews were finally able to reenter the city and visit the Tomb of the Patriarchs. Louis Theroux only picks up the story here, when settlers “illegally” moved in.

I want to clarify that I oppose extremist settlers in the West Bank. But if the Jews are to live anywhere in the West Bank, surely there can be a community in Hebron? I mean, how is it fair that a 500 year old Jewish community gets massacred and expelled and their homes looted and when they move back in 30 years later it’s “illegal.”

No doubt the settler movement is peopled by some unpleasant people with racist views. However the prospect of Theroux - or anyone at the BBC - doing an equivalent hit piece on Hamas, with its proud boast that it aims to kill all the Jews in the name of Islam, is of course somewhere round zero - though Hamas is a far more significant force, and represents Arab Palestinian opinion, I would guess, to a much greater extent than the settlers represent Israeli opinion. The Beeb, meanwhile, continues to report all Hamas stories, and all Hamas statistics, as fact - to be prominently displayed as main news. So finding some nasty Jews to interview, as representative of Israel, fits the BBC agenda very nicely.

Jake Wallis Simons at the JC - To demonstrate ‘impartiality’, the BBC shows the worst Jews they can find.

Overall, it was impossible to form a proper opinion on the people we met due to the baked-in bias. Here was the world according to the BBC, in which Theroux’s every encounter happened to support the conclusions with which he had left Heathrow.

Right at the end, he dispenses with his trademark light touch and treats us to a bit of raw dogma. “The settler dream shows no sign of abating, along with the dislocation, devastation and death that follows inevitably in its train,” he says. So here is the takeaway: the Jews are to blame for the bloodshed, not the Arabs, who tried to murder them from the start. Which is what we were supposed to think all along.

Resisting patriarchal oppression

I'm sorry, didn't you just intervene in a Supreme Court case for the purpose of asserting men's interests over women's?

I think I'll get my advice on resisting patriarchal oppression elsewhere thanks. https://t.co/ESuojEC5F8

— Dr. Jane Clare Jones (@janeclarejones) April 30, 2025

The voice of the revolution

And there we have it. Today's hard left is unchanged from Militant in 1980s Liverpool with Derek Hatton, delighting in the ruin of the working class, embracing every misogynist trope. https://t.co/EcgLJEnHe5

— Polly Clark (@MsPollyClark) April 30, 2025

Added:

I'm with the Tankies rather than the Trots on this. pic.twitter.com/hnlX8x7tkY

— Darren Johnson (@DarrenJohnson66) April 30, 2025

Whether women are human or a porn stereotype

Victoria Smith sees the opposition to the Supreme Court ruling as yet another demonstration of how trans activism is the progressive man's politically acceptable way to hate women:

Trans activism has radicalised the kind of man who would not be seen dead looking up “standard” manosphere influencers yet is drawn to their ideas. He may already have a dehumanised image of women from the porn he watches, but knows that he is “meant” to see women as fully-fledged humans all the same. For years he might have kept his misogyny in check, then along came the trans woman, magic emissary from Planet Gender, to reassure him that no, all the worst things he secretly thinks about women, those frivolous, masochistic whores? They’re true and it’s great! In fact, it’s bigotry to think otherwise! Yes, old-style women — “those dinosaurs”, as Ricky Gervais so accurately put it — might object, but the new-style women, “good as gold”, have arrived to set them straight. 

And these new style women are, of course, trans women. Men. Men who now define what a women is for the benefit of progressive men. And it turns out to be just what these progressive men - well, enough of them - always really thought women were. Sluts.

The hardest thing about being a woman, says Caitlin Jenner, is “figuring out what to wear”, while Grace Lavery fantasises over being “fetishised […] as a slutty girl is”. Andrea Long Chu sniggers that Gigi Gorgeous, a trans influencer, “is a TERF’s worst nightmare: a shameless cosmetic miracle, assembled by a team of plastic surgeons, endocrinologists, agents, and marketers — a walking, talking advertisement”:

Gorgeous has sanded her personality down to the bare essentials. She laughs at what is funny, she cries at what is sad, and she is miraculously free of serious opinions. She has become, in the most technical sense of this phrase, a dumb blonde.

Note that this is not “a feminist’s worst nightmare”, but “a TERF’s”. Trans activism has relegated actual feminism, with its claim that women are full human beings, to the status of TERFdom while claiming the word ‘feminism’ for itself. By doing so, it has told every embittered, basement-dwelling leftist misogynist that his belief that women are not fully human is entirely justified. That if women didn’t secretly enjoy their abject status, they’d cut off their breasts and identify out of it. This is radicalisation. It has made monsters of those who might otherwise have merely been casual sexists.

It is in this context that we should see the current backlash against the supreme court definition of “woman” — not just in practical terms (who uses which toilet?), but ideological ones (are women people at all?). Trans activism’s MRA army have been particularly incensed at the prospect of defining women in relation to their biology, and have sought to claim that this is biological essentialism. Of course, their rage is not at the thought of female humans — who will exist, no matter what you call us — being reduced to walking wombs (after all, they’re quite happy to call us “uterus havers” or “gestators”). Their rage is at the word “woman” being associated with non-pornified, ageing, flesh-and-blood female bodies — bodies with hair, wrinkles and odours, bodies housing diverse, creative, non-bimbo brains — rather than with plastic-breasted, wide-eyed fantasies. It is not for nothing that “protect the dolls” has become the go-to slogan for “supporting trans women”. Protect the fantasy of dehumanised womanhood from the threat of those saggy-breasted boner-killers, the adult human females!

"Protect the dolls". T-shirts as worn by all the right people, from Tilda Swinton to Pedro Pascal to Connor Ives (who? - ed). Says it all. "Dolls". 

The supreme court judgement was not about whether women are biologically female or a joyous, inclusive mix of identities. At its most basic level, it was about whether women are human or a porn stereotype. Humanity won. A significant number of men are so angry about this they’re threatening to rape and kill us.  

This is what radicalisation looks like and women are not safe. We are condemned by incels and trans activists alike for existing as humans rather than objects, and politicians, in thrall to fictional rather than actual extremism, still say nothing. The longer they do so, the more things will escalate (as Jeni Harvey has written, this is “the most dangerous time”).

The pandering has to stop. It really is time for the world to wake up.

Revealing their own ignorance

At least some doctors are speaking out about that ridiculous BMA vote on the Supreme Court ruling:

The British Medical Association has been accused of “destroying trust in medicine” and perpetuating “medical misogyny” after its members condemned the Supreme Court’s ruling on sex....

Dr Louise Irvine, co-chair of the Clinical Advisory Network on Sex and Gender, said: “­It is really worrying for female patients to think that doctors are seriously arguing that sex is not a clear-cut category in healthcare. Doctors have to recognise sex in order to be able to practise medicine properly and safely.

“As a doctor, you need to know sex for accurate diagnoses. Sex matters for NHS service provision and single-sex wards. It is misogynistic to negate or ignore women’s rights. Medical misogyny is a huge problem. The profession has a long, long history of misogyny. Now the BMA is making out that sex is a nebulous concept and category. If doctors don’t understand sex then I don’t think they should be doctors.”

Biology in Medicine, a group of doctors who campaign for patients to be treated according to their sex, said: “Activists are destroying trust and integrity in our profession. The denial of the biological reality of sex by the BMA is the culmination of a few activists infiltrating key BMA committees and forums.”...

Irvine urged other clinicians to “reassure patients that motion does not represent the views of the majority of doctors”.

She added: “The BMA say the Supreme Court ruling is scientifically illiterate, but they are the ones being scientifically illiterate because their motion implies that sex is not binary. That is unscientific: sex is binary. There are only two sexes; there is no third sex. They are revealing their own ignorance.”

And...a Times poll:

Lush trans propaganda

The shamelessness of trans activists never ceases to amaze. From the Times:

The retailer Lush Cosmetics put an information leaflet that made unfounded claims of a global conspiracy against transgender people in the party bags of seven and eight-year-old children.

Young girls attending a birthday event at one of the chain’s outlets, where they made bath bombs and soaps, were handed the 24-page booklet alongside products when they left.

The document claims on its opening page that trans people have been targeted by a “calculated media assault” designed to “distract from global crises”. It explains that the media is trying to “shift attention from those nicely off, while the rest of us struggle”.

It also claims that the media is “encouraging violence” against trans people and that many lives had been devastated by a “tidal wave of hate”.

The document, which was written by the charity TransActual and produced by Lush “in solidarity and allyship with trans people”, goes on to explain some of the terms that trans people use to identify themselves.

It says: “Some may consider themselves trans. Others do not. People may also identify as gender-queer (GQ), gender-fluid, agender, nongender, third gender, bi-gender, trans man, trans woman, and neutrois.” The leaflet also explains “intersectionality”, stating that while it “sounds complicated”, it is “actually, very simple”.

“It just means that we are all subject to multiple forms of inequality or disadvantage (or privilege and advantage).”

Um...no. But really - intersectionality for seven-year-olds?

The document compares modern America with Nazi Germany. It says: “In the 1930s, the Nazis destroyed the world’s first gender clinic. They burned its books, and sent trans people to concentration camps. Much learning was lost.

“There are echoes of that in the USA today, as trans individuals see their passports confiscated, birth certificates torn up, history erased, healthcare banned and legal protections removed.”

This is historical (and current) nonsense - and utterly vile. It's always trans as the most persecuted group ever in the history of the world. Not even the Holocaust is spared from trans appropriation. [And if you're looking for Mengele heirs, it's not the side they think.]

Lush has printed 20,000 of the leaflets and distributed them to its 101 stores across the UK. Alongside the leaflet, it sells a “Liberation” bath bomb in the colour of the trans flag, for which 75 per cent of proceeds going to TransActual and My Genderation, another campaign group....

Fiona McAnena, of the charity Sex Matters, described the leaflet as “shocking propaganda” and a “shameful new low”.

She said: “The fact that Lush is presenting the story of a suicide to seven-year-old girls and telling them that puberty blockers have ‘no major side-effects’ is, frankly, a serious safeguarding matter. Parents need to know what they are exposing their children to if they let them attend events at Lush.

“The evidence runs completely counter to the alarmist and desperate claims of trans activists.”

Accommodating the fragile minority

Helen Joyce at The Critic on the Sussex University fine of £585,000 by the Office for Students, for failing to uphold freedom of speech and academic freedom in the case of Kathleen Stock. It's an important first step in the battle for free speech in universities, and, perhaps, the end of student infantilisation.

University senior managers now aim to convert their institutions into “safe spaces”, rather than bracing environments where even difficult ideas can be discussed fearlessly.

When I was preparing to speak at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge in 2022, LGBT student reps claimed allowing the event to go ahead was “potentially putting transgender students in harms’ way”. Rather than reminding them that Cambridge isn’t a creche and they aren’t toddlers, the college master agreed that my presence would interfere with making Caius an “inclusive, diverse and welcoming home”.

Those trying to drive Stock out of Sussex were mostly students, and senior management should have treated their protests as a teachable moment. Instead, the response tacitly framed totalitarian slogans and emotional incontinence as on a par with serious academic endeavour.

The pandering and promises of emotional safety are in part an adaptation to undergraduates whose childhood was spent in a school system that encouraged them to obsess about their special identities and to think of themselves as mentally and emotionally fragile.

More than half of university and college students in the UK now claim to suffer from a mental health issue, often something nebulous such as ADHD, OCD, autism spectrum disorder, anxiety or depression. A quarter say they have been formally diagnosed. A fifth are registered with their institution as disabled — twice the share a decade ago.

Such registration generally unlocks an “individual support plan” that grants accommodations such as extra time in exams, extended coursework deadlines and exemptions from presenting their work to their peers or being called on in class. But once more than a handful of students have been given them, it’s impractical not to grant them to everyone.

How to remember which students cannot be called on? Why set essays when a quarter of the class must be given extra time? And how can the university manage closed-book exams if more than a handful of candidates are entitled to extra time or separate rooms with fewer distractions? Accommodating this fragile minority ends up denying all students the chance to learn from coping with everyday minor challenges and increases fragility in everyone.

And now graduates are turning up in workplaces lacking resilience and expecting their colleagues to be riveted by their special identities. To humour them, employers sponsor “affinity groups” for people with minority sexualities, gender identities and ethnicities and for mental health conditions snazzily relabelled as neurodiversity.

In recent years they have scattered the calendar with quasi-religious observances such as Trans Day of Remembrance, International Asexuality Day and LGBT History month. They take knees, display the Progress Pride flag and denounce Trump.

Thankfully, a backlash is building....

I hope she's right.

Hampstead colour

Azaleas at Kenwood this morning:

Important tools for personal empowerment and self-esteem

It's a dynamic cultural and economic powerhouse, right next to the most benighted and repressed nation in the world: of course the South Korean influence will get to the North one way or another. TV and films are banned, with the threat of years in a labour camp, or even execution. Now it's....cosmetics:

North Korean women are now sacrificing basic necessities to acquire South Korean cosmetics, once accessible only to the wealthy elite....

Among middle-aged North Korean women with stable finances, owning South Korean cosmetics has become both an aspirational goal and a status symbol. Despite their high cost—a basic skin and lotion set sells for 70,000-100,000 North Korean won (equivalent to 10 kilograms of rice)—women are willingly reducing household expenses to afford these products.

The cultural shift is notable. Previously, women feared displaying South Korean cosmetics due to potential government crackdowns. Now, proud owners place their dressing tables in private rooms where they can discreetly showcase their prized possessions to trusted friends.

“Women are cutting back on essentials like firewood and food to save for these products,” the source explained. “There’s a new conversation about self-care, where women who previously focused solely on family needs now express desires to care for themselves.”

While wealthy North Koreans have always used South Korean cosmetics, their use has expanded to women with modest but stable incomes. The luxury brand Sulwhasoo has become particularly coveted, with ownership of at least one product becoming “a standard for living as a proper woman.”

This trend suggests South Korean cosmetics have transcended their role as wealth indicators to become important tools for personal empowerment and self-esteem among North Korean women.

It used to be the South Korean Choco Pies that the North Koreans loved. Given out to workers at the long-defunct Kaesong industrial complex, and later sent over in balloons, they were much preferred to the cheap and nasty North Korean versions - to the extent that the alarmed Pyongyang authorities claimed the pies were contaminated and must at all costs be avoided. I imagine we'll soon be hearing propaganda about the contamination of these South Korean cosmetics, threatening the purity of North Korean women. It's always about contamination of the North Korean people/system by nasty foreign influences.

Just laughing at these women

🚨A male swimmer dominated the women's 45-49 category at the U.S. Masters Swimming National Championship last week, taking first place in multiple events.

Hugo "Ana" Caldas holds several women's titles and swimming records.https://t.co/5l99fCMBvD

— REDUXX (@ReduxxMag) April 28, 2025

Article here:

The U.S. Masters Swimming Spring National Championship took place in San Antonio, Texas, from Thursday to Sunday. Competing in the women’s 45-49 age category for 02 Performance Aquatics was Ana Caldas, formerly known as Hugo.

Caldas entered five individual events during the meet: the 50 and 100 yard breaststroke, the 50 and 100 yard freestyle, and the 100 yard individual medley. Caldas came first in every event he entered, beating out his female competitors by three seconds in the 100 yard freestyle and four seconds in the 50 and 100 yard breaststroke races.

A spokeswoman for the Independent Council on Women’s Sports (ICONS) told Reduxx that Caldas’ latter gains were “absolutely insane” for short sprint races. “He’s just laughing at these women,” she added.

It's quite the success story:

Since returning to swimming in 2021, Caldas has broken a World Aquatics record in the mixed relay, setting a new record at the South American championships in October last year. In March of last year, he won a women’s world title in the Masters 45–49 100m freestyle at the World Aquatics Masters World Championships in Doha, Qatar, despite World Aquatics’ 2023 policy barring male participation in women’s elite competition unless male puberty was suppressed before the age of twelve.

Out of all his lifetime achievements, Caldas has broken seven different individual US Masters records and six relay records, of which he still holds one and two respectively. He holds 37 state records in Arizona and North Carolina, and taken 22 national championship titles, with 15 of those being in individual events.

In Crossfit competitions, which he competed in from 2012 to 2021, Caldas was ranked as the number one woman in his age category in his home country of Portugal from 2018 until his retirement from the sport. He has ranked highly in a number of competitions, including taking women’s prize money and first place in Croatia, Argentina and Cyprus from 2014 to 2016. This is all despite the fact that Crossfit did not allow trans-identified men to officially compete in the sport until 2019. Although the sport has recently undone this policy, there is no screening required.

During the global COVID-19 lockdowns, Caldas became the 2021 world champion in the open category of the indoor rowing world championships, and still currently co-holds the world record in the women’s 500 meter category.

What a guy. Just shows how determination and hard work can make you a winner - plus a total lack of moral scruples, a contempt for women, and a complacent and useless sporting infrastructure.