Holocaust Memorial Day

2:32pm

A very fine piece has just gone up on Comment is Free, by Karen Pollock of the Holocaust Educational Trust. Do read it.

My post here is simply to despair at what I know is about to happen, because it follows as night follows day. As I write, someone has just posted the same observation:

Very touching article, but I am bracing myself for the flood of posters who will compare the Nazis to Israel.

UPDATE: It's started. And some imaginative variations on the theme, too.

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Mon dieu!

2:05pm

The Daily Mash has the inside story on what happened at Sócíété Générálé:  

Friends of rogue trader Jerome Kerviel last night blamed his $7 billion losses on unbearable levels of stress brought on by a punishing 30 hour week.

Kerviel was known to start work as early as nine in the morning and still be at his desk at five or even five-thirty, often with just an hour and a half for lunch.

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Hidden messages

1:01pm

Writing hidden messages can be a very silly - and dangerous - thing to do:  

A Burmese poet known for his odes to love has been arrested after penning a Valentine's Day poem that carried a hidden message criticising the leader of the country's military junta, Senior General Than Shwe. The poet, Saw Wai, was arrested on Tuesday, a day after his poem "February 14" was published in the popular weekly magazine A Chit, or Love, according to friends and colleagues.

The poem is about a man broken-hearted after falling for a fashion model, whom he thanks for having taught him the meaning of love.

But if read vertically, the first word of each line forms the phrase: "Power crazy Senior General Than Shwe." 

(Thanks to Damian Counsell.)

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A great writer

9:47am

There's a superb obituary in the Guardian by Mike Brearley of the great sports writer Dudley Doust, with whom Brearley collaborated on two wonderful books about the Ashes:

He was much more than a ghost (for example in our book on the tour of Australia in 1978-9, there were three chapters written solely by him, including a marvellous portrait of Derek Randall, From Rags to Riches. Cricket writer Scyld Berry says that this "is still the best reconstruction of an innings ever done. No one ever got inside the head of a batsman like that.")

I too was more than the ghostly figure who might provide some basis for a writer's perorations. It was a real partnership, in which he taught me, as he did many others, a lot about writing. I learned the difference between an academic essay and a good read. I learned how details - most stereotypically, what someone had for breakfast before a big game - could throw light on the person in unexpected ways.

Doust brought to English sports-writing techniques learned from Tom Wolfe and American journalism. He excelled as a portraitist. Later, in my work as a psychoanalyst, I realised that his approach fits in with a central notion of this field, that there is to a personality a sort of hologram or core that presents itself in all sorts of detailed ways.

Doust later also published books about Ian Botham, The Great All-Rounder (1980), a biography of Severiano Ballesteros (1982), and Peter Scudamore's Record Season (1989), along with a collection of pieces, Sports Beat (1992), in whose introduction Harry Carpenter wrote: "Doust is the Maigret of sports writers, gently but doggedly working on the case until the blinding light of revelation comes". In recent years, he wrote pithy letters to the newspapers, including one written after Conservative losses in local elections: "Sir, The Tories' problem is simply explained. Their message is getting through".

I have the books he wrote with Brearley, and his books on Botham, Seve and Peter Scudamore. They are on the shelf behind me as I write, and they are among the very best sports books I have ever read. I used to love reading his pieces in the Sunday Times when I was a kid. 

(It's interesting how there are some interviewers one warms to and some one can't stand, however lauded they may be. The main chap at the Sunday Times at the moment, Paul Kimmage, gets all sorts of plaudits and a wonderful double page spread every week. But I loathe his pieces; he seems to think we are as interested in him as his subject, and is always at great pains to show how the sportsman or woman he is interviewed treats him as an equal. 

Anyway, I'm sure he's a lovely chap.)

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The Brussels Journal and Muslims

9:06am

On Wednesday, I linked to to the story of the idiotic judges of an award who rejected a story based on the three little pigs:

...The feedback from the judges explaining why they had rejected the CD-Rom highlighted that they "could not recommend this product to the Muslim community".

They also warned that the story might "alienate parts of the workforce (building trade)".

The judges criticised the stereotyping in the story of the unfortunate pigs: "Is it true that all builders are cowboys, builders get their work blown down, and builders are like pigs?"  

The Brussels Journal is a site which many American conservatives read about matters European. Unfortunately, although some of its writers are far from stupid, many of their attitudes - prejudices, to be blunt - mean that the 'news' the site reports is often seen through distorting glasses. 

It's a vicious circle: many otherwise well informed American conservatives get their information about Europe - specifically, the influence of Islam in Europe - through a site which views Islam itself as a cancer to be fought and which regards  an Islamic takeover of Europe as something which has effectively already happened. 

This distorts so many Americans' outlook, seeing Europe as essentially written off to Islam. The Brussels Journal should be seen for what it is: a hard line anti Muslim propaganda sheet.

Now I can hardly be accused of ignoring the threat to the West of militant Islam. I am regularly attacked by the likes of the MCB and the MPAC as an Islamophobe for highlighting instances of Islamism on the rise. I am very concerned by the influence and reach of Islamism in Europe and write about it here all the time. 

But it's one thing dealing with facts and rational analysis. It's quite another when pernicious sites like the Brussels Journal tar all Muslims with the same extremist brush and distort the news to portray Islam itself as destroying our society rather than Islamic extremists.

Take their report of the story above. The whole point of the story is not that Muslims complained (as far as I can tell, not one Muslim expressed anger at the tale of the Three Little Pigs). The point is rather, as Richard Littlejohn put it in his inimitable way today:

What we have here is another case of brain-dead white "liberals" taking offence on someone else's behalf to the point of mental illness.

But how did the Brussels Journal report it?

That's it I resign. This latest piece of lunacy has tipped me over the balance and I think I am going to start taking large quantities of drugs.

Wake me up when the Muslims have gone.

The last line is the giveaway. Yes, we in the West need to be relentless in defending Western values and free speech in the wake of Islamist demands. And it's liberals of all people who ought to be in the front line of that fight, defending those with lifetyles and attitudes which Islamists would kill.

But we need to be just as relentless in remembering what those values are, one of which is tolerating those of a different faith, when their faith does not impinge on our values. And it isn't Muslims who have sought to ban the story of the three pigs - it was 'brain-dead white "liberals" '.
 
Sentences like Wake me up when the Muslims have gone and the attitudes they reveal are the mirror image of the Islamists' own prejudices, and have no place in a proper defence of Western values.

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Oops

4:17pm

From the Australian:

In an article entitled 'Allegiance unsure of Jinchuan in Zinifex fight', published on p23 of The Australian on Friday, January 18, Allegiance chairman Tony Howland-Rose was quoted as referring to major shareholder Jinchuan as 'a right bunch of cookies'. The quote should have been 'a bright bunch of cookies'. The Australian apologises for the error.

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Curse of the DWP

11:04am

It used to be the DTI which was, under the Conservatives, the cursed department. It seems the curse has now moved to the DWP. The last three secretaries of state have been David Blunkett, John Hutton and Peter Hain. Two out of three departures in scandal-driven resignation is pretty good going.

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Dead but very much alive

5:44pm

Here's one for the list:

Alban Berg's Lulu.

(And, although it's pushing it a bit, one might also add Elgar's Third Symphony, as written by Anthony Payne.)

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Judge the judges

2:57pm

Here we go again:

A story based on the Three Little Pigs has been turned down from a government agency's annual awards because the subject matter could offend Muslims.

The digital book, re-telling the classic fairy tale, was rejected by judges who warned that "the use of pigs raises cultural issues". 

Wait. There's more:

The judges also attacked Three Little Cowboy Builders for offending builders

...The feedback from the judges explaining why they had rejected the CD-Rom highlighted that they "could not recommend this product to the Muslim community".

They also warned that the story might "alienate parts of the workforce (building trade)".

The judges criticised the stereotyping in the story of the unfortunate pigs: "Is it true that all builders are cowboys, builders get their work blown down, and builders are like pigs?" 

Who are these judges, who don't realise that children's stories are not the same as investigative journalism? The chairman is someone called Ray Barker, Director of the British Educational Suppliers Association. Is it any wonder one in five British adults is functionally illiterate when the director of the educational suppliers' association is an idiot?

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I'll do as Pret does, and boycott Pret!

2:27pm

Via Samizdata, it seems Pret a Manger has a pretty unpleasant agenda.

Pret appears to believe in a crude form of protrectionism:

Wherever possible we buy British. 

Pret thus believes in keeping wealth in the hands of those already wealthy. 

It's through trade and prosperity that the poor escape poverty. Pret wants to shut that door and keep the poor in their place.

And to make it worse, they dress it up in all sorts of posturing drivel:

They are, of course, free to decide from whom to buy their supplies - just as I am free to decide whether to buy their products. 

And since Pret makes an active decision to boycott developing world farmers, I'm going to make an active decision to boycott Pret. 

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