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The post There was nothing racist about the media scrutiny of Jason Arday appeared first on spiked.
I was a career policeman. My lived experience (for what it’s worth) was that, generally speaking, serious sex offenders don’t change. Hey, I’m not a criminologist or psychologist, but I spent my working life around criminals of virtually every persuasion. Sex offenders are a special breed. Even “decent honest criminals” tended to agree.
On the other hand, I’ve met ex-offenders (who were, but are no longer, criminals) who’ve changed. I’m mates with a few. I have no problem with people who’ve made mistakes in their lives: we all have feet of clay and there for the grace of God go I (etc). I reckon I’d have made a half-decent Christian.
But the Simon Levy types? No. Fucking. Way. If you get convicted for predatory rape you should have a target on your back ad infinitum. Is my view too extreme? I don’t care, to be perfectly honest. I’m simply as passionate about victims as the criminal justice elites are about “oppressed and marginalized” offenders. I believe the rights of women and girls trump those who’ve demonstrated bad faith and a propensity to offend.
That’s the starting point. Fairness builds from there. Anything else is perverse. A system which invites, almost by default, sexual re-offending. Which is the system we have now.
If you’re interested in all things Plod related, I strongly recommend following Dominic Adler
On jargon:
These [socialist] writers were obviously counting on the proverbial humility of a certain section of our people, who believe that a person who is incomprehensible must be profoundly wise.
On new Prime Ministers:
The Press succeeded in the magical art of producing names from nowhere within the course of a few weeks. They made it appear that the great hopes of the masses were bound up with those names. And so they made those names more popular than any man of real ability could ever hope to be in a long lifetime. All this was done, despite the fact that such names were utterly unknown and indeed had never been heard of even up to a month before the Press publicly emblazoned them. At the same time old and tried figures in the political and other spheres of life quickly faded from the public memory and were forgotten as if they were dead, though still healthy and in the enjoyment of their full viguour. Or sometimes such men were so vilely abused that it looked as if their names would soon stand as permanent symbols of the worst kind of baseness.
On art:
The more vile and miserable are the men and products of an epoch, the more they will hate and denigrate the ideal achievements of former generations.
On cancel culture:
The tactics of Social Democracy consisted in opening, at a given signal, a veritable drum−fire of lies and calumnies against the man whom they believed to be the most redoubtable of their adversaries, until the nerves of the latter gave way and they sacrificed the man who was attacked, simply in the hope of being allowed to live in peace. But the hope proved always to be a foolish one, for they were never left in peace.
On the middle class:
Those among whom I passed my young days belonged to the small bourgeois class. Therefore it was a world that had very little contact with the world of genuine manual labourers. For, though at first this may appear astonishing, the ditch which separates that class, which is by no means economically well−off; from the manual labouring class is often deeper than people think. The reason for this division, which we may almost call enmity, lies in the fear that dominates a social group which has only just risen above the level of the manual labourer – a fear lest it may fall back into its old condition or at least be classed with the labourers. Moreover, there is something repulsive in remembering the cultural indigence of that lower class and their rough manners with one another; so that people who are only on the first rung of the social ladder find it unbearable to be forced to have any contact with the cultural level and standard of living out of which they have passed.
On education:
There is no reason why millions of people should learn two or three languages during the school years, when only a very small fraction will have the opportunity to use these languages in later life and when most of them will therefore forget those languages completely.
Have you got it yet? I bet you have. The language used and the way I’ve framed the question suggests a well-known historical figure and someone we’re not supposed to agree with.
But it’s interesting, isn’t it? Whatever he was, he was not a numpty. Well… he was a numpty. But he was clearly capable of recognising patterns and coming up with theories to explain them. Some of which were correct.
Which makes me wonder. Getting hold of a copy of Mein Kampf is not the easiest thing in the world to do. For instance, there were no second-hand copies on eBay last time I looked. I can’t imagine they are that scarce. So I assume eBay and others have been leant on by the authorities.
So, what are they so worried about? We are told that Hitler was a raving loony. That is the narrative. But it is not true. Read Mein Kampf for more than a few minutes and you realise that there’s more to the guy. But the government can’t stand that idea. Apparently. It fears the idea that rather than being a raving loony, Hitler was a raving loony with an ability to reason. Crazy not stupid, so to speak. But why would that idea so threatening to the government?
P.S. I’ve just read the Jewish stuff. Oh Boy.
P.P.S FWIW, I am reading the Murphy translation. I understand there are quite a few translations out there. Or were.
The Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution has been the basis of numerous Supreme Court decisions, yet there is a compelling case for its never having been legally ratified. In this week’s Friday Philosophy, Dr. David Gordon examines those claims.
On 31 July, Amnesty International publicly apologised for publishing an “anti-rights” briefing at the heart of a weeks-long public clash with author J.K. Rowling. The document, “A Growing Threat: The Anti-Rights Movement in the UK,” purported to map a nationwide “anti-rights ecosystem” that included Beira’s Place, the Edinburgh sexual-violence support service established by Rowling in 2022. Transgender-rights activists have long criticised the charity for excluding transgender women from its services.
Rowling was having none of it, and she launched a scathing public attack on an NGO that she said has “become a tyrant that persecutes those who don’t espouse what it decrees acceptable beliefs.” She invited any of the groups named on what she called Amnesty’s “blacklist” to apply to the J.K. Rowling Women’s Fund for legal support. Amnesty quickly realised that it had picked the wrong fight. Its earlier, carefully calibrated expression of “regret” collapsed into a full mea culpa; it withdrew the briefing. The document had been uploaded by mistake, the organisation said, bypassing its established and normally rigorous internal-review processes. An internal investigation was announced, to be followed by an independent external review.
Should any of the women's organisations targeted by @AmnestyUK's recent 'anti-rights' blacklist wish to take legal action, applications can be made to the JK Rowling Women's Fund. https://t.co/iyohnrgVZN https://t.co/D28OInpM5g
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) July 13, 2026
At a glance, Amnesty’s climbdown seems to close a brief but turbulent chapter in the history of one of the world's most influential human-rights organisations. But if it hopes that its procedural explanation will satisfy critics and end scrutiny of its operations, it is mistaken; it only raises more questions. How, for instance, does a document of this significance—which named more than a hundred British organisations and might have seriously damaged their reputations and funding—reach publication without passing through the oversight that Amnesty claims it applies to all its work? And if that process failed here, why should anyone assume that it has not failed elsewhere?
As senior editor at Human Rights Watch (HRW), I saw the machinery behind major human-rights publications up close. It beggars belief that a complex document like this one about a highly sensitive issue simply slipped out of the door unnoticed. A less fantastical explanation is that it was not a rogue briefing, but the most legally exposed expression of a settled institutional view. In May, Amnesty published a related report titled “Like a Snowball: The Growth and Impact of the Gender-Critical Movement in the UK,” which included comparable characterisations of many of the same organisations and was finally withdrawn on 31 July. Also withdrawn was a parliamentary briefing produced for Pride Month this year that likewise described 51 gender-critical organisations as “anti-trans.”
Amnesty’s approach in the Rowling affair followed the familiar NGO playbook that has allowed human-rights organisations to survive crises for decades to preserve their moral authority and avoid meaningful accountability. First, downplay the incident by framing it as a regrettable breakdown in an otherwise scrupulous system; second, promise an investigation; third, wait for the news cycle to move on. But maybe that won’t work this time. Is it too much to hope that Rowling’s stand-off with Amnesty will finally produce a reckoning for an increasingly unaccountable sector?
A realist might well conclude that there is almost no chance of that. Organisations like Amnesty International—which command budgets that run into hundreds of millions, and even billions, of US dollars—have spent decades surviving controversies and evading scrutiny, even though they exert enormous political and cultural influence. An optimist, on the other hand, might point out that history has a habit of stripping moral halos from individuals and institutions (like the Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts of America) that were once thought beyond reproach. The wheels of accountability may turn slowly, but turn they do.
Last month, the UK Charity Commission opened a compliance case into Amnesty’s handling of the “anti-rights” affair, saying it was “engaging with the charity’s trustees to gather more information.” Public figures have also begun to challenge what they see as the organisation’s ideological direction. “As a former major fund-raiser for Amnesty—I produced the first five “Secret Policeman’s Balls”—I renounce the mob who have taken over Amnesty,” wrote comedian John Cleese on X. “Amnesty used to be about trying to do something about TORTURE.” Iseult White, the granddaughter of Amnesty co-founder Seán MacBride, told the Times that she “would not donate a single penny to Amnesty.” And now, some of those who have spent their working lives in the human-rights sector are also speaking out about the betrayal of foundational principles they witnessed during their careers.
I am one of those people. Shortly after 7 October 2023, I left HRW and co-founded EiGHT, a Swiss-based nonprofit established and staffed by former and current professionals from major global-rights and humanitarian groups. Our mission is to press for greater accountability and external oversight of organisations like Amnesty International, Greenpeace, HRW, and Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières, MSF) which have been allowed to wander unchecked through the legal system, the media, academia, and the halls of power.
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