World

Cranmer is right about this: It really is quite incredible. Last week, a convicted murderer, Troy Davis, was finally executed in the United States, and it seemed as though the entire British (and EU) Establishment arose to denounce the barbarism. Even Pope Benedict XVI appealed for clemency. Yet today, Iran is scheduled to hang a Christian pastor for ‘apostasy’, and the collective silence from our scurvy politicians, trappist churchmen and hypocritical media is positively deafening. Pastor Yousef Nadarkhani was found guilty two years ago of ‘apostasy’, even though he was never a practising Muslim. His guilt was determined because he ‘has Muslim ancestry’ (which is a kind of convenient catch-all

I think it’s tiresome the way countries in desperate economic trouble are treated as lab rats by pundits far away whose sole interest in their travails lies in their providing an argument to buttress favoured policies back home. It’s a pretty grim game, really. So when Paul Krugman spends a summer writing about Ireland’s enforced austerity he’s not really writing about Ireland at all. He’s arguing about the United States and never mind what the hell happens to the poor, miserable Irish. The worse things go for them, the better they go for the Krugman school. Tyler Cowen documents all this rather neatly. This doesn’t mean that a return to

It’s important to insist that the argument about Troy Davis’s execution does not actually really rest on whether he is innocent or not. Nor is it actually the point that there are grounds for wondering if his conviction is entirely safe. We should not execute wrongly-convicted people is a necessary but not sufficient case against the death penalty. Guilt need not matter to the anti-execution party; it must or should matter to the pro-execution party. By way of demonstrating this, I submit that heinous as his crime was and despite the absence of any doubt, it remains grotesque that the state of Texas is executing this man: A white supremacist

Martin McGuinness’s campaign for the Irish Presidency is, of course, a disgusting affair. How could it ever be otherwise? But even by Sinn Fein’s grim standards, it’s off to a loathsome, disingenuous beginning. Speaking on Irish radio this morning, McGuinness complained that a coterie of “West Brits” in the Dublin media are out to get him. Only someone whose loyalty to the Republic might be questioned by the more rancid brand of nationalist, you see, would be vulgar enough to bring up McGuinness’s murderious past. Indeed, it’s just “people who are hostile to my candidacy” who have the gall to mention McGuinness’s IRA past. This is strange since, as Fintan

John Galliano, the fashion designer who likes to dress up as a pirate, was convicted of anti-Semitism in a Parisian court  last week, and fined. Galliano was once chief designer at Dior, but he got drunk in a Paris bar and screamed anti-Semitic abuse at some fat people (I am guessing they were fat) who were so upset they recorded it on their mobiles. I do not mind saying that the anti-Semitic element does not bother me in this case, even though I am a Jew. I have sharp antennae for the real deal, and this is not it. When I watch Galliano shout ‘I love Hitler!’ on that YouTube

If Mitt Romney is taking the role of John Kerry (2004 edition) then you can trot out a case that Rick Perry is playing the part of Howard Dean. Ross Douthat duly makes this argument: One interesting quality that Perry has in common with Dean, and which last night’s various back-and-forths brought out, is the extent to which both his national profile and his personal affect are much more ideological than his actual gubernatorial record. Dean was a center-left and fiscally conservative governor who rebranded himself as the leader of the “Democratic wing of the Democratic Party,” and whose public persona on the campaign trail — as a stridently anti-Iraq