Julia Hartley-Brewer Gets Shirty About Possibility Britain Introduced Homophobia to Islam

Julia Hartley-Brewer, you may recall, is a presenter with the extremely right-wing news channel (allegedly) GB News. They posted a video earlier today of her getting stroppy about a book published by a Muslim academic arguing that there was no homophobia in Islam until they encountered the British. She states at the start of this video that it looks like an April Fool’s joke, but isn’t. This was the point where I stopped watching the video, because – and I may be prejudiced here – I think the academic is correct and Brewer wrong.

The Quran does indeed condemn homosexuality. In it, the Hebrew patriarch Lot appears as the prophet Lut, sent by Allah to preach against the sin and lead humans back to the proper worship of Allah. But the laws against homosexuality had become a dead letter in Egypt by the 12th century. In some parts of the Dar al-Islam, like Afghanistan and Pakistan, affairs between men were perfectly acceptable and even celebrated in song. T.E. Lawrence talks approvingly of homosexuality among Arab youths in his writings. And there is the Arab proverb that allegedly runs ‘Girls are for childbearing, boys are for pleasure’. I’ve also seen arguments that it was also common at the schools training the Ottoman Empire’s janissary troops. In literature, one 9th century Arab poet was gay, and his verses celebrated gay love. Despite this, his literary skill is so admired that today Arab poets imitate him in addressing the object of love with masculine pronouns, even when they are obviously female. Having said that, I think that outside the murderous persecution of the Islamists many Muslims have much the same disapproving attitudes as found in many westerners. Years ago Radio 4 did a programme about contemporary Iran during which the Beeb’s correspondent went to a footie match. This had men letting off horns, just like elsewhere around the world. And at one point the ref was treated to comments about his sexuality by the crowd.

I think it’s quite plausible that homosexuality may have been generally accepted by parts of Muslim society, and that the intense hatred of it may have been a result of contact with Britain and the west. I also wonder if the current Islamist persecution of gays may also be a reaction to the more permissive morality of the west that has arisen since the 1960s, a vicious attempt to show that Islam is more moral and pure about its enforcement of traditional sexual norms.

Brewer is someone who puts a lot of store in her supposed status as a responsible journalist. In an interview with Andrew Gold on his Heretics podcast she got stroppy about Katie Hopkins. Hopkins, she said, was racist and just someone from a reality TV show, The Apprentice. Unlike herself, who was a proper journalist who read the papers before going on air. Well, she was. She was a columnist for the Times before editing the Express, neither of which I would say were reliable in their content.

In actual fact, there isn’t much to choose between them. They’re both daughters of privilege, who would like to scale back the welfare state and, in my view, privatise the health service. Hopkins may well be racist, but I also wouldn’t like to say that Brewer wasn’t. On the other hand, Hopkins seems to have the better manner with the public. She seems genuinely appreciative and supportive of the people turning up to her ‘Live, Laugh, Love’ shows around the country. Hartley-Brewer, on the other hand, comes across as very much a Public School head girl and the official voice of the very right-wing establishment telling the nation what they should believe from behind her desk.

As with Our Favourite Internet Non-Historian, much of what Hartley-Brewer says should be taken with a generous helping of salt and checked before given credence. Traditional attitudes towards homosexuality are discussed in a number of mainstream books on Islam and religion generally, and so are accessible to anyone wishing to know about them. And there are specialist books like A Gay History of the World that would definitely cover the subject.

In the meantime, however, we can all have a chortle at the spectacle of Hartley-Brewer huffing and puffing about something she knows zilch about and is dead wrong. There hasn’t been much that’s funny in the news, so you’ve got to get your laughs where you find them.

Open Britain on Trump’s Appointment of Musk and Others Transforming America into an Oligarchy

‘Dear David,

As I watch Donald Trump lay out his cabinet picks from across the pond, one simple question comes to mind that I’m sure I’ll continue asking over the next four gruelling years: Who the f*** voted for Elon Musk? It was bad enough when he was just embarrassing himself with cringe-inducing star-jumps on Trump’s stage, or boosting his own trashy AI-generated memes on “X” (Speaking of which, Open Britain is now on Bluesky – give us a follow!).

But now, Elon Musk will help head up the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) along with former Republican Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. The irony of the “efficiency” department having two co-leaders is not lost on any of us. Technically, it’s not an actual department, more of an advisory bureau. That means, surprise surprise, Musk will not have to go through the arduous Senate-approval process for his new position. DOGE’s role, aside from boosting the value of a dodgy cryptocurrency, is to advise Trump on dismantling the regulatory state. Will the richest billionaire in the world specifically target the regulations that limit his own profits? It’s hard to see how he wouldn’t. Musk has also been accompanying the President-elect in a series of meetings with world leaders. He’s so determined to be involved in government that Trump is seemingly already getting sick of him. There’s a word for this phenomenon: oligarchy. A billionaire president and his billionaire friend are laying out their plans to strip the country for parts. Musk has no electoral mandate to be involved in this process in any shape or form, and it’s no wonder he’s opted to dodge even the flimsy accountability processes the US has in place. Things are about to get dark Stateside, and quickly. Rep Matt Gaetz (convicted sex-trafficker) will run Trump’s law enforcement, Tulsi Gabbard (known purveyor of Putin propaganda) will be the nation’s intelligence chief, and a former Fox News host will run Defence. What could possibly go wrong? We know that Trump’s acolytes here in the UK, led by Nigel Farage, want to make the same thing happen here. Trump successfully sold his pack of lies in the United States, but Britain is not America. If we batten down the hatches and rebuild our broken democracy, we can avoid the same fate – but we need your support now more than ever to do it.

All the best,

Matt

Matt Gallagher

Comms Officer

Open Britain’

Back a decade or so, Harvard University published a report concluding that, thanks to corporate influence, most Americans felt that their opinions did not count politically, and that the country was not a true democracy but a quasi-oligarchy. That old American conservative, Thomas Sowell, apparently showed how his side feels about democracy. He’s put up a video accusing Kamala Harris and the Democrats of trying to transform America into a democracy.

Say whaaat? I thought America was already a democracy. I thought Americans believed, or at least used to believe, that theirs was the best democracy in the world. Or at least, Americans generally did have this positive view of their country’s fundamentally democratic nature before current concerns about institutional racism, White supremacy and corporate corruption, the latter turning the US into the best democracy money can buy, as the saying goes.

Are we heading back to the 18th and 19th centuries when the Founding Fathers were keen to introduce property qualifications for voting to prevent the poor getting above their station and stopping the country being run by worthy, wealthy men. Not to mention that at the same time a woman’s place was in the home, well away from the polling station and until the Civil War most Blacks were slaves with no rights.

I’ve also come across another video asking if Trump is the American caesar, the USA’s version of the emperors who emerged after the fall of the Roman Republic. Well, Nero competed as charioteer and as musician, playing the lyre and reciting poetry at the Greek cultural festivals. Trump hosted the Apprentice in America, so that you could say both have a background in entertainment. I’ll guess we’ll know for sure when the Orange Orangutan holds orgies in the White House and makes his horse a member of the Senate. As the Roman Emperors were also paranoid and murdered everyone around them, including and especially their own families, it might be wise for some of his relatives to start thinking about finding ways they could claim asylum abroad. Just in case.

As for that bit about the Department of Efficiency having two co-heads, it reminds me of one of the policies of the Monster Raving Loony Party, as was: ‘And we’ll be asking, ‘Why is there only one Monopolies Commission?’ Except with the Monster Raving Loony Party you knew it was all a joke. Trump is serious.

R.I.P. Screaming Lord Sutch. He’s so sorely missed. Jesters like him and the late Peter Cook would have had so much fun with the current bunch of clowns on both sides of the Atlantic.

Secular Talk on Donald Trump Breaking Wind During Rally

Okay, it’s not big, and it’s not clever. But as this is Donald Trump, who has no qualms about launching ad hominem attacks on his opponents, it is funny. In this clip from Secular Talk, host Kyle Kulinski talks about Donald Trump very audibly breaking wind at campaign rallies and elsewhere. He posted other videos about this issue several months ago following speculation among Democrats that Trump may be incontinent. This apparently resulted in the hashtag #diaperdon. He speculates whether it’s due to old age or amphetamine abuse, as the drug can make people lose control of their bowels. There’s a story here that Trump was in a restaurant in New York in 1983 and passed gas, and the smell was so foul that some of the other diners asked him to leave.

I’m posting it up as some of the other material coming out about Trump is grim. Kulinski has also posted a video in which Trump goes on about the importance of genetics. He declared that murderers have bad genes. Trump, on the other hand, says that he’s a winner and therefore has good genes. They’re German genes, ‘excellent stuff’. This, Kulinski comments, is pure eugenics. And if you take that genetic determinism far enough, you end up getting rid of the welfare state, because nothing you do will help those with bad genes. He also says that Trump declaring he’s got good genes a homage to the Nazis. Well, the Nazis would certainly have agreed that Trump is a biological superior man with good genes because he’s a millionaire businessman. Even though the only reason he is, is because his dad bailed him out something like four times. He also claimed that he’s good at English, which is highly questionable given that his staff were told not to give him documents with more than a page of text and use lots of diagrams. He also attacked Kamala Harris for wanting to house and feed people, which is what the government should be doing for people who are too poor eat for reasons beyond their control.

A few days ago Now This Impact, an American left-wing site, posted a text piece in which the producers of the American version of The Apprentice blamed themselves for presenting the misleading image of Trump as a successful entrepreneur. At the time they launched the show, he definitely wasn’t. In fact, he’d been bankrupt four times. But for the sake of the show, they needed to pretend that he was.

Trump wasn’t the great businessman he claimed to be. His administration in the White House was chaotic and incompetent, but it took money away from America’s hard-pressed blue collar folks and gave it to the megarich. So he can’t really complain if people start wondering about the state of his bowels.