Daily Archive

Things must have been going really sour poll-wise after the Reverend’s recent public performance, for Sen Obama to feel he had to do this.

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UPDATE, April 30: USA Today:

…University of Maryland political scientist Ron Walters, however, warned that denouncing Wright could produce a black backlash against Obama. “He’s caught in a racial vise not of his own making,” Walters said.

True. It might. But assuming most black voters stay in his camp, this may win him many more white voters, upon whom (assuming he wins the nomination) his November general election hopes will invariably rest.

Newsweek’s Rod Nordland is perplexed:

Why Britain’s P.M. Is Popular Abroad But Hated At Home

You don’t need to read the piece.  I’ll tell you.  Short answer: because people abroad don’t live in Mr Brown’s Britain.

The Independent’s 29 year old Johann Hari claims to know about being 60; but in reality he seems to know about as little as any other under-30 knows about how it really feels:

When you hit your 60th birthday, most of you will guzzle down your hormone replacement therapy with a glass of champagne and wonder if you have become everything you dreamed of in your youth…

Meaning, he imagines. However, that is not nearly as bad as his subsequently pretty much imagining the development of the state of Israel.

…When it became clear these Palestinians would not welcome becoming a minority in somebody else’s country, darker plans were drawn up. Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, wrote in 1937: “The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.”…

It is wonderful of course that a man who doesn’t remember Margaret Thatcher’s first election victory (or maybe he was just that precocious?) can write of David Ben-Gurion as if he had known him personally, and of those “darker plans” which he had helped brew, and, from 2008, can so confidently channel the mindset(s) that motivated desperate Jews of the 1930s and 1940s. However, his composing such a polemic on a remarkably complicated (and emotional) subject hardly leads one to be shocked Mr Hari is getting, urr, gently reminded that next time he might consider doing some better pre-publication fact checking.

Still, at least from this perspective it is a noteworthy piece. For it is oddly reassuring to be reminded how an Independent columnist actually (seems) to believe something tangible. Others can’t even muster the willingness to offer a stance on, for instance, whether women in Islam have the same rights as their sisters in the West. (Mr Hari himself is, alas, not immune, having bravely — seemed — to have supported the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s foul regime, and then, afterwards, bravely, suddenly he didn’t. Very Independent of him that.)

We regular Independent readers appreciate the paper’s editorial predictability: the only moral indignation it usually can muster (aside from the ethnic composition of model catwalks) is at the mere mention of George W. Bush, “climate change” . . . and Israel. And, yet again, we haven’t been let down. But the first of that lot will be gone from office less than a year from now. And the second will probably have run its course within the next few years — particularly once the next generation of scientists need to come up with a new way to secure research funding. (”You want to study climate change? I’ve got a pile of grant applications for that. What makes you different? Come up with something different.”)

But Israel? Since it isn’t going away, the Independent will likely be able to smash that country’s storefront windows until the paper itself finally goes out of business. Yet it needs more than Israel, which is why one always has to be prepared for any possible changing of the bogeymen guard in other areas. That may be why the paper appears to be nurturing a couple of other actual opinions, such as on British Airways. (Although, if Mr Bush’s successor turns out to be Sen McCain, one suspects Mr Hari and his colleagues will then simply transfer their night terrors to that President McCain, supported by regular out of context less than well-known statements from Theodore Roosevelt.)

So Mr Hari’s cri du coeur is really none too surprising emanating from the Independent. Far more disturbing, given that the paper has finally discovered blogging and reader comments . . . are the attitudes of some of Mr Hari’s commenters. Some make one’s blood run cold.

The other night, the wife and I had seen a re-run of Stephen Fry on “Who Do You Think You Are?“: an entire segment of his family was slaughtered in Auschwitz. “F*cking Auschwitz”, Mr Fry remarked tearfully. Fortunately, that there is, now, an Israel, means that there will never be another of those hells on earth, despite whatever immature sh*t drivel appears at your local news agent:

…How would we react if the 30m stateless, persecuted Kurds in the world sent armies and settlers into this country to seize everything in England below Leeds, and swiftly established a free Kurdistan from which we were expelled?…

That rather depends: for openers, was ancient Kurdistan centered below Leeds?

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UPDATE: Although, writing one’s mind can apparently get one put on trial in Ontario. The Independent probably needn’t worry, though. After all, its writers so rarely have anything substantive to say anyway.

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UPDATE 2, May 13: Mr Hari responds to critique . . . with a cutting intellect, smashing down weak rejoinders like a, well, know-it-all, tween-ager.