UnHerd

Adelaide festival cancellation exposes progressive hypocrisy

Adelaide Writers’ Week has been cancelled following the withdrawal of more than 180 authors, with the director and almost the entire board resign...

But as progressives rediscover free speech, it should be noted that Abdel-Fattah is herself no free speech warrior, and has been active in trying to get other writers removed from multiple festivals. In 2024, she and nine others signed a letter advocating for the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman to be removed from the line-up of the very same Adelaide Writers’ Week. Friedman did not appear, but reportedly withdrew for other reasons. Additionally, Abdel-Fattah was among 500 progressives who backed a campaign to have pro-Israel singer Deborah Conway removed from the Perth Festival’s 2024 Literature and Ideas programme. Having been invited, Abdel-Fattah should not have been disinvited; instead, she should have been asked to explain her views. Yet cancellation has made her a martyr, one now likely to help her sell many more books and be invited to many more events. In that sense, it is hopefully a great victory against cancel culture and a mirror to hold up to progressives next time they target others. Panicked board members, politicians and lobby groups, desperate to be seen to be doing something about antisemitism, have taken action which has backfired. The cheering on of festival director Louise Adler’s resignation letter was a masterpiece in progressive hypocrisy. In it, she stated that the arts have become “unsafe” and that artists are now viewed as a “danger to the community’s psycho-social wellbeing”. But let’s be clear: the routine invocation of “safety” is code for “I don’t want to hear your opinion.” Appeals to “psycho-social wellbeing” involve exactly the language progressives have used for the last decade to justify deplatforming speakers with whom they disagree. Indeed, the letter Abdel-Fattah signed against Deborah Conway stated that the festival shouldn’t “platform beliefs that harm the community” and that doing so “risks the safety of the Festival”.

UnHerd

Outsourcing Maccabi decision to AI shames West Midlands Police

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood this afternoon stated that she no longer has confidence in the head of West Midlands Police, after it was revealed t...

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood this afternoon stated that she no longer has confidence in the head of West Midlands Police, after it was revealed that the force used AI in compiling its risk assessment for its handling of a football match between Aston Villa and Maccabi Tel Aviv in November. Chief Constable Craig Guildford admitted earlier today that AI invented a fictitious game between the Israeli club and West Ham. This hardly helped his case that the decision to ban Maccabi fans in Birmingham was a foregone conclusion in the face of resistance from Muslim lobby groups. It does, however, strengthen allegations that police fabricated their intelligence case. Another question springs to mind, too: why did Britain’s third-largest police force rely on AI in such a contentious piece of decision-making? As an acolyte of the College of Policing, Guildford would be familiar with the acronym THOR — or Threat, Harm, Opportunity and Risk — which is part of policing’s ponderous “Accredited Professional Practice” for risk management. Clearly, he failed to apply this principle to his force’s reliance on artificial intelligence. The incident highlights several issues, not least the use of AI-based technologies in law enforcement and the degrading of police intelligence units. Then there’s the biggest issue of all: the poor quality of British policing’s senior leaders. Guildford cut an unimpressive figure at the Home Affairs Select Committee today, his explanations for his force’s actions failing to convince the assembled MPs.

UnHerd

The white women turning to ‘Dark Woke’

Or there’s the TikTok video circulating on X, in which a blue-eyed, salt-and-pepper-haired woman who describes herself as a 42-year-old single mother and “relationship anarchist” slips sexily into her Carhartt overalls while spelling out a “dating-profile request” for a man whom she can “call, right now, and say, ‘Hey, get in the passenger seat and let’s go fuck some shit up.’” These street soldiers aren’t the antifa types torching cars or the rioters looting stores. They are, like Good, Millennial moms in the Midwest. They’re people from normal quarters of American life who are spending time during the workday putting their bodies and vehicles on the line to protect illegal migrants, some with serious criminal records, from deportation. And they see ICE as a neo-Gestapo that calls for more than rhetorical condemnation. Feelings of misery and powerlessness, especially acute on the young female Left, will ensure Dark Woke lingers, and reemerges as opportunities for catharsis present themselves. These opportunities will be especially compelling when they offer a perceived sense of community, or of self-sacrifice for the common good. Satisfaction, though, will prove illusory, because the source of the young women’s pain is not really injustice, except in the sense that a grave injustice has been committed against happiness in the destruction of our communities, social bonds, and overall humanity. https://archive.ph/ihklR

MSN

Lawrence of Arabia’s portraits have been given trigger warnings for the cultural appropriation of Arab clothing. The National Portrait Gallery has flagged as “sensitive” artworks depicting the First World War hero in tribal dress. Portraits of TE Lawrence in his thobe and keffiyeh now come with a warning stating that the images may clash with “today’s attitudes”. The caution was put in place despite the fact that Lawrence, who fought alongside the Arabs against the Ottoman Empire, was presented with the robes as a gift by the Arab ruler Emir Faisal. Paintings depicting Lord Byron and other Europeans in the traditional dress of predominantly Muslim cultures have also been marked as sensitive.

The Critic Magazine

A Muslim state loses faith in British education | James Price | The Critic Magazine

In the latest sign that diversity is our greatest strength, the United Arab Emirates has cut off funding for its students to study in the United Ki...

We shouldn’t be surprised by this. Universities are, of course, rife with impressionable fools who have been primed to think that the West is bad and that anti-colonialism is a cool trend, on par with a broccoli-like haircut for Gen Z males. Amongst these useful idiots, dangerous ideologues are waiting to pounce. I shan’t forget Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the so-called “Underpants Bomber”, a Nigerian student at University College London who attempted to detonate explosives hidden in his pants on a flight to Detroit on Christmas Day 2009. He had been President of UCL’s Islamic Society, and hosted numerous controversial speakers as he was slowly radicalised until he moved to Yemen. He is memorable to me because his device only succeeded in blowing up the part of himself he would have most appreciated having, were he to get his hands on the seventy-two virgins he believed were coming his way. We already have numbers from MI5 that there are well over 40,000 Jihadists on their watchlist in Britain. Imagine Aston Villa’s stadium, Villa Park (Capacity 42,000) with every seat occupied by someone plotting to commit atrocities. Actually, recent revelations about plots to formed armed Muslim militias to attack Maccabi Tel Aviv fans in a game against Villa recently mean you don’t need to pretend. Add to that the Iranian IRGC agents, al Qaeda nutters and ISIS operatives and other nutters coming over totally unchecked on small boats and housed in residential streets of Britain. It should be a relief, then, that Nigel Farage has pledged to ban the Muslim Brotherhood in Britain. The devil may quite literally lie in the detail here, but it is a welcome start. At least one Westminster think tank is opening up a new centre dedicated to the thorny task of how the state would actually tackle this, a decade on from David Cameron’s refusal to do so.