Not Just Another Death in Lebanon

Syrian intervention quite unlike some, say decent folk

Syrian forces have crossed into Lebanon and shot dead a Syrian man in an incident completely unlike recent Allied victories in the war on terror in Pakistan and points elsewhere.

The individual had a name, Ali al-Khatib, and was killed by flesh and blood assassins rather than detrimented by a remote control toy. Both factors have led some Western commentators to brand the shooting "indiscreet".

The United Nations says that 2900 people have been killed in the crackdown by Syrian president and Bad Man Bashar al-Assad, who intends to prevent as many Arabs as possible from living the Blairite dream.

"If Assad goes on restricting his murders to this sort of scale, his continuing place in the international community is far from assured," said commentator Bradley Ichneumon, author of Manufacturing Indignation: Martin Amis, the Taxpayers Alliance and the Moral Majority Market.

In order to qualify for genuine statesmanship status, the Syrian leader should at least demolish a town once in a while, Dr Ichneumon said.

Unlike Britain and its allies, the Syrian authorities have blamed foreign-backed groups for the violence, and have claimed they are trying to prevent unauthorised weapons from doing somebody a mischief.

Almost 4000 Syrians have taken refuge in Lebanon, according to the United Nations, whose figures are not open to dispute when dealing with miseries which have not been inflicted by the Righteous State.

In Touch

or, The Conference Season

Apolocolic humble stumble;
Difficultonic rumble bumble;
Economanic neurojangle;
Minimoronic gaffaclangle;
Sterilisuited vacuverbal;
Politicobblers masturburble.

Meron Eggiband

Just Napalm: Export USA

At night, these visions of helicopters and the Decent Muslim Zone
Love as mediated through the prism of humanitarian interventionism. Purity of motivation through strength of belief led him up the cerebellar stairway to the final chat show. His mind filled with the lonely heroes of World War III, he advised his students to give up on being loved.

fused in Tony's mind with the spectre
He had always believed that politics was always about belief. He believed that belief in his beliefs would bring an end to this temporary absence of self-belief in their belief in what he believed they believed he believed in, and that rediscovery of their belief in self-belief would resurrect their belief in his belief for the future of their beliefs.

of his children's faces. The lanterns of their eyes
Children as a factor in political economy. Emotional response to images of bombed and starved children exceeded response to images of healthy and educated children by a factor of between three and fourteen in normal adults, and between twelve and twenty-seven in tabloid readers.

winked from a million emblazoned mugs.
Politics as a branch of advertising. Respondents scored images of children consistently high for selling power. In the case of Roman Catholics, the degree of response to images of juveniles sometimes exceeded the response to images of sex and violence.

Worshipping him, they summoned from his sight all the legions of the bereaved.
Elements of an apocalypse: (1) Party membership card, somewhat soiled; (2) Copy of Principles of Ingsoc by "B.B."; (3) Reproduction of Francisco Goya's Disasters of War Plate LXI, "Perhaps they are of another breed"; (4) genital organs of a male poodle, packed in second-best Texan blueberry preserve.

By day Israeli jets crossed the damned causeways of the peace process,
The psychopath as hero. Grinning, he bends to show them the scars on his back. Lanes of proud flesh cross and recross the dorsal jaundice, marking new routes towards the holy bunkers.

unique ciphers of currency and sainthood.
As he tried to delay the orgasm building at the base of his urethra, one of his eyes began to twitch and glitter like a demented nuclear warning light somewhere in Albania. Without thinking, Cherie murmured, "Herbert Lom."

with apologies to J G Ballard

Me at Poetry-24
Party Colours

Non-Redeemable

Much to the comfort of its flock, the Greek Orthodox Church has taken a defiantly Christian stance over the austerity measures which the government has imposed. The Orthodox Church is as poor as a bank mouse: there is, according to a spokesbeing for the archbishop of Athens, "no comparison between the riches of the Greek church and those of its Italian or Spanish counterpart", the Greek church being merely the second-largest landowner in the country and under no particular constraint to publish its accounts if it doesn't feel like it. The church also holds a one and a half per cent share in the National Bank of Greece, with a seat on the board for the bishop of Ioannina. "We refuse to foot the bill for other people's mistakes," said the bishop of Ioannina; evidently the Orthodox church has no more interest than the Catholic or Anglican churches in imitating its putative founder. Doubtless entirely unrelated to this matter is the fact that three years ago the bishop of Ioannina received a beggarly twenty-four thousand euros in fees, which have presumably sufficed ever since to keep him at the level of asceticism to which the priests of national churches generally aspire.

A Hoody Less Huggable

Things look set to become more difficult even for those of our boys whose bravery Daveybloke does not intend rewarding with a redundancy notice. Some legalistic pedants at the high court, doubtless fatally influenced by the European Act of Human Rights or some such thing, have handed down a callously small-societal judgement to the effect that hooding prisoners for "transit and security purposes" is unlawful even when it's done by decent people. Their excuse was the risk posed to physical and mental health; evidently they took no thought for the risk to our boys who must now transport and secure facially rampant terror suspects.

Reporting on the matter, the Press Association makes a rather sneaky reference to "the war to overthrow Saddam Hussein", thus implying that the decent people's goal was régime change all along, rather than the actual and (when viewed in the appropriate frame of mind) very nearly legal goal of ridding the world of the threat from Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass ethereality. It is all quite shameful.

On Publishing

Because their noise was not to be escaped,
He sketched and let flame flicker near the beast;
Which reared and galloped as the children gaped -
It kept them quiet, for a while at least.

In twenty thousand years the critics came,
Dug splinters of the children's children's bones,
And argued that he'd sketched to draw the game
Toward the hunters and their sharpened stones.

Later a blogger wrote that we had done
With dead-tree books, with paper and with pen;
A brief magnetic belch escaped the sun,
And no-one saw a word of him again.

Knapper Brandbord

Private Criticism

Willem den Haag, the Minister of Wogs, Frogs and Huns in a government which gave a big rah-rah to the imposition of prison sentences for offences such as writing silly things on Facebook, has registered mild disapproval at the Bahraini monarchy's "disproportionate" sentencing of twenty medical personnel for treating injured protestors. The sentences were "worrying developments that could undermine the Bahraini government's moves towards dialogue and the reform needed for long-term stability", in contrast to the more unacceptable behaviour of régimes to which Britain does not sell weapons. The British ambassador to Bahrain, who arrived a few months after the application of a British-made urban sharpshooter programme to the situation, has paid tribute to the warmth of the Crown Prince's welcoming hand; while the prince has declared the relationship very special indeed: "a model for relations between allied countries". Naturally, such diplomatic niceties are merely a front to disguise the British government's private criticism and deep moral concern: sales of spares for armoured personnel carriers have been officially banned, and three British trainers were withdrawn at the end of February when it became clear their work was done, while any other sales of military equipment have to be laundered through the Bahraini air force. The fact that the Bahraini monarchy seems to have withstood the pressure so far is nothing less than a tribute to its indefatigability.

Mere Legality

Part of the price of being visionary and radical and all those other jolly things is, of course, that one may be misunderstood and even hindered by persons who are rigid in their thinking, or who have a vested interest in the status quo, or who are simply too stupid or superannuated to know any better. Doubtless this explains why the House of Donors has joined with the health service bureaucracy, medical professionals, non-private patients and other inflexibly small-societal elements to suggest yet further alterations to Twizzler Lansley's anti-NHS bill. The Lords are worried that the Twizzler may be trying to squirm out of his constitutional responsibility for ensuring the provision of key services to NHS patients, despite the issue having been addressed, oh, ages ago: "While we respect the view of the committee," oozed a Department of Twizzlerisation spokesbeing, "things have moved on since it did its research and we have already addressed the issue raised." The Government has, in fact, promised to amend the bill, but the Lords committee's report shrewdly suggests that "it may well be necessary to amend the bill" in the actual universe as well as on the Cleggeron Pledge Planet, just in case of a misunderstanding.

That Environment Thingy Again

Britain's Head Boy has issued a stark warning that the juniors need to start taking better care of the playground. The environment, of course, is one of those matters on which Daveybloke likes to huff and puff now and then in the interests of keeping up his cuddliness quota, as when he tut-tuts over bankers' bonuses or implies that he's letting Twizzler Lansley demolish the NHS because that's what little Ivan would have wanted. Presumably, therefore, he wasn't thinking of plastic bags merely because the likes of Yvette Cooper and Caroline Flint were plastered across the news. The number of plastic bags used by shoppers has in fact gone down significantly in the last five years, since environmental campaigners publicised the damage they do; although their use rose again in 2010 with the advent of the greenest government ever. As one would expect, therefore, Daveybloke singled out major retailers and the Daily Mail for particular praise, but noted with the Brownite fluency characteristic of the properly educated that "progress overall went backwards last year". Daveybloke then warned that unless progress stops going backwards he may well become cross enough to ask somebody for an explanation.

Me at Poetry-24
Why We Fight

There's Got to Be a Fairer Way to Treat Asylum Seekers

Well, here's a thing: despite the famous restraining and civilising influence exerted in Daveybloke's Cuddly Coalition by Wee Nicky and his Deputy Conservatives, the Government is still happily deporting people to countries which hold staunchly to New Labour values on matters such as detention without trial, torture and accidental death in custody. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Freedom from Torture all say there is evidence that Tamils who are forced to return to Sri Lanka are undergoing the local variety of extraordinary rendition; naturally, from the viewpoint of the Foreign Office and the UK Border Agency this constitutes an eminently satisfactory situation. The Border Agency has even taken the trouble to ask Sri Lanka's secret police chiefs whether there was any truth in the allegations of torture; naturally, any minds the Border Agency may have were quickly set at rest: "They denied this was the case and added that many Sri Lankans who had claimed asylum abroad had inflicted wounds on themselves in order to create scars to support their stories." Asylum seekers are cunning fiends, as we know; certainly they must run rings around the Border Agency, whose incompetence in lying about its own humanitarian arrangements appears to rival that of the Metropolitan Firearms and Headbangers' Club. Lawyers acting for deportees were told that the responsibility for monitoring the welfare of Britain's ejected had been subcontracted to an organisation called the International Organisation for Migration; the lawyers, with fiendish cunning, then went and asked the International Organisation for Migration whether the Border Agency had spoken true. The Border Agency then admitted the actual extent of its interest in whether the people it deports are in genuine need of asylum: "Individuals are provided with the contact details of the high commission in Colombo and may contact them if they require any assistance." We must hope that the high commission in Colombo isn't too soft a touch.