The royal scam

Like Julie, I had the odd experience this week of finding myself in agreement with the usually Blair-phobic and Labour-loathing Daily Mail, about the guest list for tomorrow's big event: specifically, the failure to invite our last two elected prime ministers, while handing out invitations to leaders and representatives from dictatorial regimes that are currently gunning down their own populations in the street.


Almost as oddly, today I had the rare experience of nodding vigorously while reading the editorial in Murdoch's Thunderer. It's behind the paywall, so I'll take the liberty of quoting from it at length:

Many guests — a full measure of the foreign ambassadorial corps, for instance — will obviously be present for reasons of diplomacy and etiquette, rather than because of any personal connection to the couple.

This being the case, it is a matter of regret that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, two men who served William’s grandmother as prime minister for a total of 13 years, have not been invited. It has long been speculated that the curious delay in the announcement of William and Kate’s engagement might have something to do with the Queen’s low opinion of Mr Brown, which may have led her to feel unable to tolerate the thought of her grandson marrying while the Scot still occupied Downing Street. The surprising failure to invite the former Prime Minister, while welcoming the Zimbabwean ambassador, among several other undesirables, can only add fuel to such a theory.

The first duty of the Royal Family is that it presides over one, united, kingdom. Thus, it is doubly unfortunate that, while the two former Conservative prime ministers, Baroness Thatcher and Sir John Major, are invited as Knights of the Garter, the two former Labour ones, yet to be so honoured, are not. Such a distinction between the parties is a coincidence, no doubt. But it is a potentially damaging coincidence, and one that reflects badly on whoever is charged with avoiding such pitfalls at St James’s Palace. The royals cannot afford to appear to favour one political party over another. Had the Palace not been so reluctant to provide details of the full guest list, the consequences of this error might have been rectified.

Besides, to Mr Blair, for his guidance in the days after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the Windsors ought to feel more than a little indebted. It would be an exaggeration to say that Mr Blair’s assured guidance in those dark days of 1997 saved the monarchy. But it should not be forgotten that after their perceived insensitivity towards events in Paris, the Royal Family were teetering on the brink of serious unpopularity for the first time in decades. The royals were lucky to have Mr Blair on hand to give expression to the national mood in a way that they could not. It ought not to have been too much trouble to have offered him a seat at Westminster Abbey.

When the Mail and the Times, both of them normally deferential to the core, adopt this line, the monarchy had better watch out. And republicans and democrats can only cheer at finding new allies in unexpected places.

It’s a mixed up muddled up shook up world*

...when the latest edition of the supposedly liberal-left-leaning London Review of Books includes a major article on the so-called ‘Palestine Papers’ by Alastair Crooke of Conflicts Forum, an organisation that acts as cheerleader for the racist, misogynist, terrorist Hamas; a long lead article by Judith Butler, notorious for describing the same organisation as ‘part of the global left’, and a hagiographic review by the anti-rationalist pro-faithist Terry Eagleton of Eric Hobsbawm’s latest book, which glosses over the latter’s acquiescence in Stalinism.

…while the current edition of Standpoint, published by the right-leaning Social Affairs Unit, features a timely piece by David Cesarani on the part played by anti-Semitism in the downfall of NUS president Aaron Porter, a critique by Douglas Murray of public funding of reactionary Islamist organisatons, and an insightful and sympathetic on-the-ground account of the Egyptian democratic revolution from Shiraz Maher, not to mention reviews by stalwart liberal commenators such as Nick Cohen and Clive James.

Of course, left-wing readers of Standpoint have to put up with a bit of predictable rightwing-ery from the likes of John Bolton and Melanie Phillips, just as there are still occasional nuggets of liberal sanity to be found in the LRB. But it's come to something when your average anti-totalitarian secular-humanist social democrat can find more to agree with, and less to make him/her throw up his/her hands in horror, in the former publication than in the latter.

* copyright Ray Davies

Independent?

Weary of the anti-American anti-Israel reactionary chic of The Guardian, I've been experimenting with other daily papers. Recently, I've been giving The Independent a whirl (well, it does have John Rentoul, Steve Richards and Julie Burchill).

But the Indy's coverage of the Wikileaks saga has given me a distinct sense of déja vu. Yesterday's front page headline: 'Deceits, plots, insults: America laid bare'. And today's: 'Now we know. America really doesn't care about injustice in the Middle East'. A fair and balanced account of American foreign policy? I don't think so. Messrs. Milne and Steele couldn't have done better (Ah, I see: today's cover story is by Robert Fisk. That explains it.)

I shall seriously consider taking my custom elsewhere. But where...?

More flotilla reflections

Here are a few more flotilla-related reflections - all of them broadly sympathetic to Israel, but by no means uncritically so. In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, it seemed important to link to pro-Israeli voices, since these were getting silenced by the general clamour of online outrage. (Part of the massive PR disaster of this event for Israel was the result of a strange delay in providing a convincing official explanation for what happened.) Now that the dust has settled, more critical evaluations can emerge. One of the things that shocked and saddened me most over the past day has been the lack of willingness - among governments, media outlets, 'progressive' commentators - to give credence to pro-Israeli positions, and a preparedness among many of the same people to take the supposedly 'humanitarian' and 'peace-loving' nature of the flotilla at face value.

Yaacov Lozovick

Mickey Bergman

Elder of Ziyon

Solomonia

Update: more recommendations

Chas on the flotilla incident as Israel's history in microcosm

The New Centrist on the real purpose behind the 'peace' flotilla

Flotilla passengers attacking IDF soldiers

Any loss of life, especially civilian life, is a tragedy. But if you were attacked in this way by 'aid workers' and 'peace activists', what would you do...? (Via)

Gaza flotilla: some alternative views

The lack of comment on the Gaza flotilla incident from progressive pro-Israel voices has allowed knee-jerk anti-Zionists to dominate online reaction - well, Twitter, anyway. I guess most people are waiting for the dust to settle and the full story of this awful tragedy to emerge. It's almost certain to be less straightforward than the 'Israel-murders-harmless-aid-workers' narrative that's currently doing the rounds. In the meantime, here are some useful alternatives to the dominant narrative:

BICOM

Ynetnews

Haaretz

Z-Word

MEMRI

Saying no to Noam

Fisking BBC News' online report of Noam Chomsky's exclusion from the West Bank:

The report describes Chomsky as a 'renowned US scholar', and later as 'renowned for his work on linguistics and philosophy'. Nothing about his notoriety as a genocide denier and apologist for tyrants. Not even any mention of his 'renown' (which you'd think might be relevant) as an unrelenting critic of Israel.

Apparently Chomsky was on his way to give a lecture at the Palestinian university in Bir Zeit when he was denied entry:

Prof Chomsky said the officials were very polite but he was denied entry because 'the government did not like the kinds of things I say and they did not like that I was only talking at Birzeit and not at an Israeli university too.'

Note that we only have Chomsky's word for the rationale behind his exclusion: handy that it aggrandises his own reputation. Note too the characteristic Chomskyan attempt to cast himself as the fearless outsider:

He added: 'I asked them if they could find any government in the world that likes the things I say.'

Well, yes, that might be difficult, now that Pol Pot and Milosevic are no longer around. But I reckon authoritarian populist Hugo Chavez is quite pleased with the things Prof. Chomsky says, and he also seems pretty popular with the theo-fascist government of Iran.

The BBC quotes the reaction of Chomsky's Palestinian host, Mustafa al-Barghouti: 'This decision is a fascist action, amounting to suppression of freedom of expression'. Well, maybe. But there's also this quote from Israeli interior ministry spokeswoman, Sabine Hadad: 'We are trying to contact the military to clear things up and if they have no objection we see no reason why he should not be allowed in'. Even Chomsky admits that the officials who denied him were 'polite'. The incident has been widely reported in the Israeli press and has been the subject of protests by the Association for Civil Right in Israel. Sound like a fascist state to you?

Of course Chomsky shouldn't have been denied entry to the West Bank, any more than that other objectionable self-publicist Geert Wilders should have been refused entry to Britain. But to present this incident as the action of a repressive state against a poor innocent scholar is at the very least disingenuous (but unfortunately rather typical) of the BBC.

A few final (?) post-election reflections

The commentators seem to agree that, contrary to expectations, this was a television rather than an internet election. But in this peculiar post-election week, when the political landscape has changed from hour to hour, the web - and Twitter in particular - has come into its own. I've been a Twitter sceptic until recently, failing to understand our teenage offspring's compulsion to tweet at regular intervals, and certainly unable to see its relevance for myself: what one earth would I tweet about, and who would be interested?

But this has been the week that micro-blogging has come into its own, especially for political obsessives like me, as journalists have used Twitter to provide minute-by-minute updates on the coalition talks, and commentators have exchanged instant reactions to events. I signed up for Twitter last Friday, and already I can't imagine doing without it (mind you, the appeal might wear off as British politics settles into something like a normal rhythm again). It's hard now to imagine getting by without my regular updates from the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg, tweeting and twit-piccing even as she broadcasts to the nation from outside No. 10. The woman is a force of nature - US readers should try to imagine NBC's Savannah Guthrie with a Glasgow accent. (Speaking of whom: Savannah interviewed the BBC's Matt Frei on The Daily Rundown the other day. He claimed he'd flown over to Washington with a senior female member of Nick Clegg's party who was on the phone with the Lib Dem leader, urging him not to cut a deal with the Tories but link up with Labour instead: it must have been Shirley Williams.)

I guess the whole thing must look very odd from the other side of the Atlantic. Barack Obama, with his constant struggles to get key legislation through Congress, must envy the powers of the incoming British government to use its parliamentary majority to push through major reforms. Fixed-term parliaments might be a good thing, and everyone's now saying that the 55% needed to unseat the government is not as undemocratic as it sounds, but still: one could wish for a few more of the US constitution's checks and balances to restrain the executive from simply imposing this kind of change by fiat. There's something a little Chavez-esque about a new administration immediately changing the rules by which it can be kicked out. Tony Benn always used to say that, when he met a foreign leader, his first question was 'How do I get rid of you?' (Mind you, I don't recall him raising that issue in his infamous interview with Saddam.)

Turning to Labour: I still think refusing the temptation of a cobbled-together rainbow coalition was the right thing to do, morally and politically. I think Polly Toynbee and others were wrong to see refuseniks like John Reid and David Blunkett as tribalists. If anything, it was the pro-coalitionists, with their unwillingness to accept the public's verdict and desperation to hang on to power by their fingernails, by offering unrealistic concessions to assorted nationalists, who represented the old politics.

Now Labour has a chance to refresh its policies and its leadership. As regular readers will be aware, I've long been a partisan for David Miliband, though I wouldn't be unhappy if his brother, Ed (who has just declared his candidacy) were to win. You can already imagine a David vs. Ed divide opening up across progressive dinner tables across the land. Certainly most of my lefty academic colleagues, among whom disappointment with New Labour and dislike of Blair is de rigueur, are going for Ed, while to speak up for David is to mark yourself out as a hopelessly Blairite centrist. I'm sticking with David, but offer him a word of advice: for goodness sake shave off that half-moustache, it makes you look like an overgrown schoolboy - and get yourself a decent haircut.

Curtains for Clegg?

Two contrasting references to Nick Clegg on this morning's Broadcasting House on Radio 4. A couple of the newspaper reviewers blamed hostile press coverage for bursting the Clegg bubble and producing the lower-than-expected Lib Dem result. I think this is wrong: it affords too much power to the media and patronisingly paints the British people as passive dupes. Instead, I think many of those who had been impressed by Clegg's undoubted presentational skills in the first debate slowly realised that there was very little substance behind the platitudes. In the final debate on the economy, the Lib Dem leader had (almost literally) nothing to say, and the highlight of his election eve rally speech was a vacuous promise to 'deliver fairness'.

A rather different reference to Clegg on this morning's programme came in retiring MP Chris Mullin's diary of the election. Reflecting on the first debate, Mullin scoffed at the hypocrisy of Clegg railing against the sins of politicians when he himself is a 'maximum claimer' of expenses who was prepared to flip-flop on policy at the drop of a hat, carefully omitting his earlier call for savage spending cuts from his new improved message.

I've grown to like Clegg less and less as the election, and the post-election kerfuffle, has progressed. At best, I'm irritated by his repetitiousness, studied body language, and curious habit of bobbing up on down on his heels as he speaks. He's just too keen for my liking, and he and his jolly Lib Dems remind me too much of the Methodists among whom I grew up. (Not surprising: many of them are Methodists, and other species of Nonconformists, who really really want 'fairness', but without any of that nasty class conflict business. I bet they serve weak tea at their meetings.) At worst, he has some of the superior high-mindedness and 'above the fray' piousness of the worst kind of religious puritan - ironic, given his vaunted agnosticism. He seems to genuinely believe that he's more progressive than Brown, when one suspects that he would secretly feel more at home cosying up to the Conservatives.

In short, I don't trust Nick Clegg's judgement in these difficult days, and for once I'm grateful for the Lib Dems' chaotic constitution and grassroots bolshyness. Maybe his party members will keep him from a precipitate leap into bed with Cameron. He's in an unenviable position though. If he fails to seal a deal with either party, he'll be ditched by his party for having passed up the best chance of power in a generation. If he allies his party with either the Tories or Labour, he risks being scorned by the electorate for propping up an unpopular minority administration. At the inevitable second election (October, anyone?), it's likely the voters will see the need to make a decisive choice between one of the big two parties, and the Liberals could end up with even fewer seats than this time. Either way, it could be curtains for Clegg.

Freedom to criticise religion under threat again

Some people have a real problem understanding the difference between violent hatred of Muslims and legitimate criticism of Islam. And the same people often seem to have a pretty feeble commitment to principles of free speech.

Two cases in the news today by way of illustration:

Case 1 (via B&W)

Anjona Roy, Chief Executive at Northamptonshire's Rights and Equality Commission, called in the cops on a local MP who criticised the veiling of Muslim women. Philip Hollobone, Conservative member for Kettering, committed the heinous offence of describing the burqa (I think he meant the niqab) as 'the religious equivalent of going around with a paper bag over your head'.

OK, so it may have been a crude way of drawing attention to a serious issue, and I'm no great fan of Mr. Hollobone's politics, but I'm in complete agreement with him when he argues that 'the whole idea of the burka is offensive to women, it demeans women and also shuts off those who wear it from the rest of us in society'. After all, much the same thing has been said by some Muslim women: is Ms. Roy going to inform the police about them too?

Perhaps the scariest thing about this report is Anjona Roy's claim that the decision to make a formal complaint about possible racial hatred was taken 'following discussions with local Muslim groups'. This is worrying for two reasons. Firstly, it comes close to giving a veto over issues of free speech to religious groups. And secondly, it looks suspiciously as though Ms. Roy fomented the 'offence' herself by spreading the word among those she thought likely to be offended.

This is just the kind of thing that campaigners warned would happen if the Racial and Religious Offences Act had been passed in its original form. But it appears that some over-zealous officials don't need an actual law to support their campaign to shut down criticism of religious beliefs and practices. Thankfully, the Crown Prosecution Service has decided to take no action.

Last time I looked, there was no right not to be offended in the Human Rights Act - but there is a right to freedom of expression. Surely a 'Rights and Equality' commission should be defending basic human rights, not shutting them down?

Case 2 (via Harry's Place)

An alliance of the Usual Suspects of the pseudo-left, plus some surprising additions, have added their signatures to a disingenuous letter in today's Guardian. The letter tendentiously seeks to link the thuggish activities of the English Defence League with the investigation by Channel 4's Dispatches of extremist activities at some British mosques:

We are concerned by the rise of Islamophobia, the negative coverage of Muslims in the media, the violent street mobilisations of extreme rightwing organisations like the English Defence League, and the rising electoral support for the British National Party. Following Channel 4's recent inflammatory documentary, Britain's Islamic Republic, which saw concentrated attacks on the East London Mosque, the English Defence League marched through central London with placards including the demand 'Close the East London Mosque now'.

This is typical of the rhetorical sleight-of-hand employed by the pseudo-left. Leave aside for a moment the spurious non-word 'Islamophobia', which carelessly elides criticism of Islam with hatred of Muslims. Are we supposed to believe that a legitimate journalistic investigation is comparable to right-wing street-fighting and fascist politics? And are we being asked to swallow the illogical argument that a Channel 4 documentary somehow caused these expressions of violent hatred? As if the bullyboys of the EDL needed an excuse to attack a mosque; I shouldn't think many of them would be able to find the Channel 4 button on their remotes.

The underlying argument seems to be this: we shouldn't draw attention to Islamist extremism (which actually has a lot in common with the fascism that the letter-writers claim to oppose), in case it leads to a backlash against Muslims. Shouldn't just a little of their condemnation be reserved for the mosques that harbour extremist preachers, thus bringing mainstream Islam into disrepute and besmirching the reputations of law-abiding Muslims?

As to why the likes of Helena Kennedy, Eric Hobsbawm, and Dr. Edie Friedman of the Jewish Council for Racial Equality, allowed their names to be added to this bricolage of illogicality (alongside the depressingly predictable litany of fellow-travellers like Ken Livingstone, Andrew Murray, George Galloway and Selma Yaqoob): perhaps they thought they were signing a bog-standard Great-and-the-Good protest letter against the BNP and the EDL, and the bit about Dispatches was added by someone on the letter-writing committee as an afterthought.

Some bits of the letter certainly look awkwardly cobbled together:

The East End of London is not new to having its communities attacked by fascists and the media. The 1930s saw the Battle of Cable Street when Oswald Mosley's blackshirts attempted to march into the Jewish community in the area. We cannot allow this terrible history to repeat itself. Further, the documentary, and articles since, have attacked the participation in politics by the Muslim community. We cannot stand by and watch this continue without remark or action.

'Attacked by fascists and the media': so it was the newspapers that oppressed East Enders in the '30s, not just those nasty blackshirts? This 'blame the media' line, creating an equivalence between fascist violence on the one hand and documentaries and newspaper articles on the other, is reminiscent of Chavez's Venezuela or Ahmadinejad's Iran.

And what on earth do they mean by 'attacked the participation in politics by the Muslim community'? Could this possibly refer to the recent furore over attempts by the fundamentalist Islamic Forum Europe to infiltrate the Labour Party and subvert democratic politics in East London? Are they questioning the right of journalists to report this kind of Islamist entryism?

Either the liberals and progressives who signed this letter genuinely believe that investigative journalism is somehow on a par with fascist thuggery, in which case they can no longer claim to be liberals or progressives. Or they are naive dupes of the Islamist-hard left agenda that underlies the slippery rhetoric of this letter.

Some gay folk church music for a Friday afternoon

Knowing what a fan I am of Arcade Fire, you probably could have guessed I was going to like The Hidden Cameras, if only because the two ensembles have some peripheral personnel in common. The band describe their sound as 'gay folk church music' : how could you possibly resist?

So you think they look and sound like a Toronto-based carbon copy of the Montrealian Arcaders? Well, maybe, but the latter have been starving their followers of new material recently, so those of us who like this kind of David Byrne-inspired eccentricity have to take our pleasure where we can.

This, in its oddly compelling wackiness, seems fairly typical:

I have Alexis Petridis' review in today's Guardian to thank for this latest musical discovery. The band seem to like performing in porn cinemas and churches: the other night they were at St. Leonard's Shoreditch (in aid of a worthy charity), where coincidentally many of my ancestors were baptised (they'd be turning in their unmarked graves).

Incidentally, Petridis seems intent on keeping up this week's Guardian habit of throwaway non-PC insults. The other day we had Tony Sewell telling us that mothers were unable to provide their sons with 'tough love' and that black boys were becoming too 'feminised'. Today's review describes the audience as 'an unlikely alliance of gawky dufflecoat-clad indie boys and their bespectacled girlfriends, older gentlemen with shaved heads and moustaches whose girlfriends are noticeable by their absence...' (my emphasis) How coy, Alexis. Ah, I've just noticed that the last phrase has been excised from the online version...

Schlock and awe

The caption alongside this image (entitled 'Shock and Awe') in yesterday's Sunday Times described it as an example of its creator Richard Hamilton's 'acute protest art'. Acute? Art? It's less subtle than Steve Bell on a bad day. There's no ambiguity, no originality, no nuance: just a trite encapsulation of a tired political stereotype. And yet this is the person whom Waldemar Januszczak praises in the accompanying article as 'the most important British artist currently at work'. Janusczak is positively giddy with excitement at the fact that, despite his age, Hamilton 'is an artist who cannot be tamed or brought into line':

Here he is, 88 years young, still turning down knighthoods and MBEs, still winding up 'The Man' at every opportunity he gets, still belting out the protests like a teenage agitator at a Trafalgar Square rally.

What a rebel. It won't surprise you that Januszczak is particularly thrilled about Hamilton's typically monochrome take on Middle East politics:

Given what he is saying here about the behaviour of Israel, don't be surprised if Mossad sends a squad of tennis players into Britain in the next few weeks to discuss Wimbledon with him. Which reminds me, where did I put my passport?

Gosh, Waldemar: having a go at Mossad, how daring. The truth is, whether his subject is Britain, Northern Ireland or the Middle East, Hamilton can never be accused of taking time to see both sides of the question, if a one-sided cartoon will grab a bigger headline, and appeal to posturing armchair rebels like Januszczak.

In another throwaway sentence, the art critic compares Hamilton's Blair picture with his early portrait of High Gaitskell, 'his fellow betrayer of Labour principles'. It's just another symptom of what Jeff Weintraub labels Blair Derangement Syndrome. As Jeff says, 'there are serious reasons why people might disagree with Blair's policies and his political style or even condemn them':

But in many cases these feelings about Blair go beyond serious moral and political criticism and slide over into the real of pervasive, all-consuming, obsessional, and even hysterical hostility.

An hysterical hostility to which Britain's cultural commentariat seems particularly prone.

A swift half with Martin Luther

My car journey this morning coincided with Radio 4's In Our Time. I'm always glad to be driving somewhere on a Thursday morning, as Melvyn Bragg's roundtable discussion programme passes the time in a pleasant and often stimulating way. (On the other hand, I dread having to go places on Wednesdays: Libby Purves' turgid Midweek can make the journey seem twice as long.)

Today's dissection of the ideas of John Calvin sounded promising. But I groaned when Melvyn introduced religious historian Diarmaid McCulloch as one of the guests. McCulloch is one of those academics who seems to be consciously remodelling himself as a celebrity intellectual, complete with a sing-song 'isn't this exciting' tone of voice and a tendency towards vacuous populism. Whereas Bragg's other guest experts did what they were supposed to, serving up detailed information about Calvin's life and thought that was genuinely enlightening, McCulloch responded with bland generalities whose aim appeared to be to get listeners to 'relate' to or 'empathise' with the past. So Luther became the kind of person you might want to go down the pub with, and Calvin someone you wouldn't want on the other side in a crisis. 'Media classicist' Mary Beard has a tendency to do the same kind of thing, often served up with a patronising use of Estuarian (though this is, of course, the least of Beard's offences). So devoid of content were McCulloch's answers to his questions, that Bragg often had to repeat them, in a vain bid to get the historian to say something substantial and informative.

I find this approach at once deeply patronising, in that it assumes that listeners couldn't possibly grasp complex ideas if delivered 'straight', and anti-educational, as it's founded on the notion that it's more important to have a 'feeling' about a topic than to know something concrete about it. Presenting itself as populist, it is in fact elitist, since it involves experts keeping their hoard of knowledge to themselves.

Yes, I know all about Lev Vygotsky and the need for knowledge to be 'scaffolded' by teachers. But what faux-populists like McCulloch do is withhold understanding, rather than guide others towards it. By contrast, one of the joys of a programme like In Our Time (usually) is listening to specialists, often in areas with which one is totally unfamiliar, do their specialist stuff - speak their expert discourse, if you want to be technical. It's in the struggle to understand, the grasping of nuggets of new and surprising knowledge mediated by those 'in the know', that understanding dawns and learning takes place. Not in the shallow attempt to imagine having a swift half with Martin Luther.

Gosling, Glenn Beck and euthanasia

I have to admit, I’m not a huge fan of Ray Gosling. I understand he’s been a great champion of gay rights, which I applaud. But to me, he’s always been one of those irritatingly quirky Radio 4 'characters' with the kind of regional accent that the Crispins at the BBC just adore, but whose quirkiness and regionalism often seem to be the sum total of his u.s.p. And the style of his programmes can best be described as whimsical. Whimsy is what Radio 4 does instead of humour: tune in any weekday evening at 6.30 and you’ll see what I mean.

At the same time, I have an instinctive aversion to euthanasia. Maybe it’s the lapsed Catholic in me, or maybe it's just the usual catalogue of fears about eugenics, the rights of the disabled, and slippery slopes. But I can’t help feeling a sliver of sympathy for Gosling, who has revealed in an interview that he once helped a lover who was suffering from AIDS to die. The veteran broadcaster has now been interviewed by the police, but has refused to disclose any further details. Listening to the news reports, I found myself silently cheering Gosling on, despite myself. You have to feel sorry for the detectives in this case, though: compelled to investigate an offence against an unnamed victim on an indeterminate date, at an unknown location, where the only evidence is the confession of a man who won’t say any more.

Or perhaps the ‘crime’ never took place, and the whole episode is a clever means of attracting publicity for the pro-euthanasia cause? Even if it did happen as Gosling says, there can surely be no selfish motive in coming clean now, and maybe the whole thing is motivated by a desire to advance the mercy-killing cause?

Maybe I’m being paranoid: but not as paranoid as Glenn Beck, who exceeded even his own reputation for fearmongering foolishness on his radio programme this week, when he suggested that ‘progressives’ in Canada plan to kill off those with a 'poor quality of life’ and that the Obama administration will soon be following suit. If you can bear it, listen to the audio version for the full unhinged rant.

Where's the internet?

Another normlink: the always spot-on South Park imagines a world without the internet. I watched the clip with a shudder of recognition. We experienced a brief broadband outage of our own recently, and we were that family. Even worse: that panicked, powerless and ridiculous-looking dad in a dressing-gown - that was me.

Where is the Internet? - Click here for more amazing videos

Eh oh

This'll make a change from all the religion and politics...

Last week I heard Simon Mayo interviewing Andrew Davenport, the creative genius behind those contemporary classics of children's television Teletubbies and In The Night Garden, who has finally begun to emerge from behind his puppets and receive some of the recognition he deserves (it was the second BBC interview with him I’d heard in the past month).

Davenport’s creations hold a special place in the hearts of anyone who was a young child (or a parent of young children) in Britain in the Nineties or early Noughties. Our own children were born in the mid-Nineties, so for them (and us) Andrew will always be, first and foremost, the voice of Tiny from Tots TV. And the question I’d ask him if I was conducting the interview would be: how on earth did someone with such a deeply resonant voice achieve the high-pitched tones of that anarchic green-haired puppet?

Everyone now associates Davenport with Teletubbies, not surprisingly since it was the first of his creations for Ragdoll to gain international recognition. (On a serious note for a moment: John Bayley informs us that, once her dementia set in, Teletubbies was the only TV programme that gave Iris Murdoch any pleasure.) But Tiny and Tom, with their echoes of Laurel and Hardy and the Marx brothers (with the French-speaking Tilly their Margaret Dumont?), are surely one of the great comic partnerships. And for all the simple, wordless brilliance of Davenport's later productions, it's a shame he no longer has the scope to deploy the knockabout verbal wit he showed in the scripts for some of those earlier shows. If you don't believe me (and you've got a few minutes to spare) take a look at this clip, but make sure you watch it through to the end:

Our shelves also contain dusty, worn-out VHS tapes of some of Davenport’s other early programmes, such as Brum and Rosie and Jim. What's more, living as we did in the Midlands when our children were young, we made frequent trips to the Ragdoll shop (sadly, no longer there) in Stratford-on-Avon. Once, we even saw the actual Rosie and Jim barge tied up on the river outside the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.

Now here’s my bid for Pseuds' Corner. If Tots TV - full of eccentric wit, but retaining a conventional narrative structure and recognisable characters - was Andrew Davenport's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, then maybe the more symbolic and mythopoeic Teletubbies is his Ulysses, and In the Night Garden, with its dreamy, half-conscious associative technique, his Finnegan's Wake. Or maybe Teletubbies is Davenport's Waste Land and In the Night Garden his Four Quartets?

I should stop now...

Turn it up!

At last, it's on Youtube. Those who control the Van Morrison brand have finally overcome their copyright objections to sharing this electrifying performance of 'Caravan' with the world. But they still won't let you embed it. Never mind the uncool side-parted and blow-dried hair, the portly appearance, the naff fashion sense, the surly demeanour: this is Van the Man at his best.

Facing facts about Fort Hood

It seems to be my week for disagreeing with Rachel Maddow. When news of the Fort Hood tragedy broke, the MSNBC presenter was quick to dismiss as 'right-wing' suggestions that suspected shooter Major Nidal Malik Hasan might have been inspired by Islamist ideology. This was rather like those annoying claims that Christopher Hitchens had somehow 'moved to the right' because he supported a war to remove a fascist dictator.

To be sure, the events at Fort Hood were the occasion for some predictable moonbattery from the usual right-wing conspiracy theorists, but as more information leaks out about Hasan, it becomes clear that a similar myopia has prevented some on the left (such as Maddow) from seeing things as they really are. Here's Ibn Warraq:

In the wake of the murder of 13 and the wounding of 38 soldiers at Fort Hood on November 5, media analysts, politicians, and other sundry experts scrambled to present the accused perpetrator of the acts, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, 39, as a victim. In so doing they served, knowingly or otherwise, as apologists for radical Islam. From CNN to the New York Times, NPR to theWashington Post, the killings were presented as a result of racism. They were attributed to fear of deployment in Afghanistan and harassment from other soldiers. Cited were Major Hasan’s supposed maladjustment to his life and his sense of not belonging, pre-traumatic stress disorder, and various personal and mental problems. All these explanations are variations on what I have called “the Root Cause Fallacy,” which has been committed time and again since the terrorist acts of September 11, 2001. The Root Cause Fallacy was designed to deflect attention away from Islam, in effect to exonerate Islam, which, we are told, is never to blame for acts of violence. On this view we must not hold a great world religion of peace responsible when individuals of that faith resort to force. We must dig deeper: the real cause is poverty, U.S. foreign policy, the Arab-Israeli conflict, Western colonialism and exploitation, marital problems of individuals, and so on. The present “psychological” interpretations in the case of Major Hasan are just the latest example of the Root Cause Fallacy at work.

Warraq argues that Hasan's 'jihadist intentions are there on the surface for everyone not paralyzed by political correctness to see':

According to CNN (Nov. 7), on the morning of the shootings Hasan gave copies of the Koran to his neighbors. According to the Associated Press (Nov. 6), soldiers reported that Hasan shouted out “Allahu Akbar” [God is Great] – the war cry of all Jihadis – before firing off over a hundred rounds with two pistols in a center where some 300 unarmedsoldiers had lined up for vaccines and eye tests. NPR informs us that Hasan was put on probation early in his postgraduate work at the Uniformed Service University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md., for proselytizing about his Muslim faith with patients and colleagues. The Associated Press (Nov. 11) adds that classmates who studied with Hasan from in that postgraduate program reported Hasan making a presentation during their studies "that justified suicide bombing" and spewed "anti-American propaganda," denouncing the war on terror as "a war against Islam." Classmate Val Finnell and another student complained about Hasan, shocked that someone with "this type of vile ideology" would be allowed to wear an officer’s uniform. But, importantly, no one filed a formal complaint about Hasan’s views and comments for fear of appearing discriminatory -- in other words, out of political correctness. According to The Telegraph (Nov. 6), Army colleagues reported that Major Hasan had condemned U.S. foreign policy, that he clearly declared that Muslims had the right to rise up and attack Americans, that he expressed happiness when a U.S. soldier was killed in an attack on a military recruitment center in Arkansas in June, and that he said people should strap bombs on themselves and go to Times Square. It has been widely reported that Major Hasan attended the Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Virginia Falls during the time that Anwar al-Awlaki, a Yemen-based al-Qaeda preacher with extensive terrorist connections, was its main preacher. Awlaki even praised Major Hasan as a hero on November 9, four days after the Fort Hood attacks. The Times of London revealed (Nov. 10) that Major Hasan had been in direct correspondence with Awlaki, in connection with which Hasan had already been under investigation by the F.B.I. Almost every news source has reported that Major Hasan was also under investigation by federal law enforcement officials for his postings to an internet site speaking favorably of suicide bombing.

And Warraq concludes:

It is time to abandon apologetics, and political correctness. Not all Muslims are terrorists. Not all Muslims are implicated in the horrendous events of September 11, 2001 -- or of November 5, 2009. However, to pretend that Islam has nothing to do with 9/11 or the Fort Hood massacre is willfully to ignore the obvious. To leave Islam out of the equation means to forever misinterpret events. Without Islam, the long-term strategy and individual acts of violence by Osama bin Laden and his followers make little sense. Without Islam, the West will go on being incapable of understanding our terrorist enemies, and hence will be incapable to deal with them. Without Islam, neither is it possible to comprehend the barbarism of the Taliban, the position of women and non-Muslims in Islamic countries, or -- now-- the murders attributed to Major Hasan.

We are confronted, after all, with Islamic terrorists; and we must take theIslamic component seriously. Westerners in general and Americans in particular no longer seem able to grasp the passionate religious convictions of Islamic terrorists. It is this passionate conviction, directed against the West and against non-Muslims in general, that drives them. They are truly, and literally, God-intoxicated fanatics. If we refuse to understand that, we cannot understand them.

(Via Mick)

If this information about Hasan's Islamist inclinations proves correct, then (sadly) it disproves one thesis - that America is immune from the virus of home-grown jihadism that has taken root in parts of Britain - and provides further evidence for another: that terrorism, rather than being a response to social and political disadvantage, tends to infect members of the educated and privileged middle-class and is a product of individual pathology linked to ideological fanaticism.

Dancing in the aisles

After The Sun's announcement that it's deserting Labour, there's a kind of poetic justice in the decision by Waitrose to boycott that other arm of the Murdoch empire, Fox News. It seems the supermarket's customers are unhappy about its ads appearing alongside the increasingly unhinged anti-Obama rants of right-wing loon Glenn Beck:

"We take the placement of our ads in individual programmes very seriously, ensuring the content of these programmes is deemed appropriate for a brand with our values," said a customer services spokesman. "Since being notified of our presence within the Glenn Beck programme, we have withdrawn all Waitrose advertising from the Fox News channel with immediate effect and for all future TV advertising campaigns."

Some may be surprised at this outburst of political sensitivity from an upscale high street food retailer, but remember that Waitrose is part of the John Lewis chain. And as my nephew (who has a Saturday job on a Waitrose fish counter) reminded me recently, the founder of the department store chain, John Spedan Lewis, was a radical entrepreneur who established a system of employee ownership which continues to this day. I had some experience of this when the adult education project I was running in the '80s was approached by the local John Lewis store to provide literacy classes for some of its employees, who were always referred to as 'partners', however lowly their job. OK, so it's not exactly workers' control, but it's better than nothing.

I'm no great fan of boycotts, but it's surely a healthy sign that a number of companies, including Wal-Mart, have now decided to pull their ads from the Beck show, because they fear being 'tainted by association'. How long before the Republican Party wakes up to the fact that its brand is being similarly compromised, and distances itself from the Becks, Bachmans, Palins, Limbaughs and other assorted birthers, death-panellists and conspiracy-theorists?

Jefferson and the Motoons

Second historical quotation of the day. From what Oliver Kamm argues is 'the most significant document of the Enlightenment', the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, proposed by Thomas Jefferson in 1779 and adopted in 1786:

No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion.

That surely includes being free to 'profess, and by argument to maintain their opinions' about religion. As Oliver writes in another piece, it's a freedom that has been undermined by the decision of Yale University Press to exclude all illustrations of Mohammed from Jytte Klausen's scholarly account of the Motoons episode. Yale appears to endorse the restricted version of freedom of expression articulated by a UN spokesperson after Islamic extremists reacted to the Danish cartoons with violent protests: 'We believe freedom of the press entails responsibility and discretion, and should respect the beliefs and tenets of all religions.' As Oliver says:

That principle is moderate, balanced and pernicious. The idea that people’s beliefs, merely by being deeply held, merit respect is grotesque. A constitutional society upholds freedom of speech and thought: it has no interest in its citizens’ feelings. If it sought to protect sensibilities, there would be no limit to the abridgements of freedom that the principle would justify.

Jefferson! Thou shouldst be living at this hour.