Party conferences: a vapid kind of hell

As I may have intimated last week, political conference season is a particular kind of hell. Most of us just are not diverted by faked class warfare or efforts by Ed Balls to be more ‘butch’ than David Cameron.

Anyhow – whilst the few remaining members of political parties come together to remind the rest of us why we want nothing to do with them, here are some things that are actually happening.

1). In a video posted on Sunday, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood preacher  Wagdy Ghoneim declared that liberals, modernists and secularists are all ‘infidels’ who must be tried and killed for abandoning Islam: ‘If they do not repent, the judge must apply the penalty for apostasy… If anyone tells you that he is liberal, tell him directly that he is infidel.’ This kind of chat is not new. What is new is that the Muslim Brotherhood now runs Egypt, which means that nuts like Ghoneim have more influence this year than they did a couple of years back.

2). Also on Sunday, an adviser to Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi said that ‘removing the constraints of the Camp David [Peace] Accords’ with Israel has become a top national priority. In his interview with the Egyptian paper Al-Youm A-Sabi’, Mohammed Saif Al-Dawla also referred to Israel as ‘occupied Arab Palestine.’

Doubtless the implications of these sorts of unpleasant facts will be just the sorts of thing that the Labour and upcoming Conservative party conferences will discuss seriously, as surely as the Lib Dems did last week.