There is now a gross inequality between the way Labour’s failings are (rightly) ruthlessly exposed, while Tory failings pass silently in the night.
You saw it in the London mayoral election. By the end, everyone knew Ken had met with a loathsome Islamist cleric and that one of his staff – spending less than 0.0000001 per cent of the mayoral budget – may have been dodgy. But who knew Boris had twice been sacked from jobs for outrageously lying, and had led a friend to believe he'd find him the address of a journalist he wanted to be beaten up? While Ken was exposed on front pages and on Channel Four documentaries, Boris was covered in candyfloss we journalists spent the campaign gently licking off.
In my column today, I describe some of the ways this is being replicated in the battle between Gordon Brown and David Cameron.
In response to my article arguing that Melanie Phillips (amongst others) uses false charges of anti-Semitism against people she disagrees with, Melanie Phillips has… accused me of subscribing to the notoriously anti-Semitic forgery the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Seriously.
I have disagreed with her view of Israel – that the Palestinians are a “terrorist population” who must be collectively punished – so she writes:
“The most remarkable and revealing comment of all by Hari is this: ‘Alan Dershowitz and Melanie Phillips are two of the most prominent figures sent in to attack anyone who disagrees with the Israeli right.’ ‘Sent in’, eh? By whom, exactly? By the world-wide Jewish/Zionist/Likudnik conspiracy, of course. Yup, it’s those Protocols again. Whoops, what a giveaway. Case proved, I think.”
Phillips and Honest Reporting choose Benny Morris as their follow-this-link example of a historian you can trust, a reasonable arbiter of what actually happened. So let’s just look at the Ben Gurion quotes we know he accepts because he draws on them in his own work. In a letter to his son Amos on 5 October 1937, Ben Gurion wrote: “We could not tolerate vast areas of Palestine that would not be colonized by us. We will expel the Arabs, the Arabs would have to go... If we have to use force, we will use force. The appropriate moment would come if not now, later...We can wait for great revolutions to come.' [Ben-Gurion Archives, the Correspondence Section, doc. 19-22]
In my column yesterday, I talked about the McCarthyite smearing that can descend on you if you criticise the actions of the Israeli government. I didn’t have space there to discuss this useful example. In a recent article discussing Israel’s 60th birthday, I tried to summarise the historical evidence as best I understand it about what happened in 1948. I cited the abundant historical evidence that David Ben-Gurion – Israel’s first Prime Minister – supported ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. ‘Honest Reporting’ and Melanie Phillips argued this was false and a malicious lie.
How do they rebut my arguments? There are smears, obviously: Phillips even entitles her post ‘The War Against the Jews’, the name of a famous history of the Holocaust. But for meat, they link to a statement by Benny Morris, the Israeli historian. Yet if you follow the link, you will find Benny Morris admits that Ben Gurion did in fact say “I support compulsory transfer”.
In my column today, I talk about how an organisation called ‘Honest Reporting’ orchestrates barrages of complaints against writers who criticise the Israeli government. I thought it might be interesting to give readers a taster of what these emails are like. Don’t read them if you are offended by swearing and references to child molestation.
Hundreds have asked a variant of “why do you never criticise Muslims or Arabs?” I always email back with links to dozens of articles in which I have vehemently criticised Islamic fundamentalists and the governments of Iran, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, and for which I have been widely (and stupidly) accused of “Islamophobia”. So far, one has written back to acknowledge they were wrong. The rest either go silent, or change the subject.
To be fair, a handful of the emails have been polite and rational, and I’ve had an interesting if heated exchange with those readers. But the vast majority are, I’m afraid, like the following three.
At last – a solution to my Boris blues! I have just forced myself to read the detailed election stats from last Thursday. It seems the media cliché is true: it’s the angry, whiter outer suburbs that elected Boris, out of rage with the congestion charge and council tax. Boris will forever be the mayor of Zones Four to Six, the chief executive of Watford and Bromley and Amersham.
Great swathes of readers have e-mailed me with an anxious question. They prefer Ken to Boris as mayor by miles – but he isn’t their first choice. So they ask: is it safe to vote Green or Lib Dem as your first preference, or will that in some way risk letting Boris in through the middle?
There’s good news. In this election, you get to put two preferences for mayor on the ballot paper: your first choice, and your runner-up.
Why did I dismiss Ken Livingstone’s decision to meet Yusuf al-Qaradawi – a despicable Islamic fundamentalist cleric who supports the killing of gay people, the beating of women, and the suicide-murder of Israeli children – as purely symbolic in my column today? Several readers have e-mailed demanding to know. The answer is: because it is purely symbolic.
I detest Qaradawi. He stands for everything I hate: homophobia, misogyny, theocracy. I think Ken made a horrible mistake by meeting him, and a worse one still when he said critics like Peter Tatchell were “Islamophobic”. I condemned it at the time; I condemn it still. I don’t find the mayor’s argument – that it’s necessary to engage with anyone who is opposed to Wahabbism and al Qaeda and has a broad following in the Muslim world – good enough.
I’ve had a tumultuous response to my article about whether we should boycott the Beijing Olympics. The most reassuring have been the Chinese whispers coming from within the country itself, saying they would gladly welcome pressure on the Chinese dictatorship from our athletes to release human rights activists. It's a useful reminder that critics of the Chinese Communist party aren't anti-China, as the dictatorial propaganda claims; we're on the side of the Chinese people, against their oppressors.
But I wanted to respond here to two points from readers that came up with surprising frequency.
Errrr… I just need to clarify something. About once every two or three weeks, I get a phone-call from one American journalist or another, asking me to “talk publicly” about “Daniel Craig’s homophobic assault” on me. Yes, that’s Daniel ‘007’ Bond, he of the blue trunks, a man who leaves us all shaken and a little stirred. “You need to talk out!” they cry. “For all gay people!”
They have got it into their heads that Craig “attacked” me at the BAFTAs last year because I’m gay. The story cropped up again in this weekend’s Independent on Sunday, where one of Craig’s friends had to defend him at length from charges of being a homophobe.
Defenders of George Galloway – there are still a few left – offer one last lingering defence. Yes, he has one of the worst voting records in the House of Commons, leaving his bitterly poor constituents unrepresented in parliament. Yes, he smeared a gay man who was murdered by the homo-cidal tyranny in Iran, saying he was a paedophile. Yes, he performed political fellatio on Saddam and his sons, and said the fall of Soviet tyranny was “the worst day of my life.” Yes, he’s a creationist. But at least he consistently opposes the invasion and occupation of poor countries by imperialist powers.
So what do we do about the fact the super-rich are scamming the British tax system for £41bn a year? In my column today, I point out the super-rich are dishonestly wriggling out of paying tax billions that are enough to treble spending on primary schools, or increase every single pension by nearly 50 per cent. This is being repeated across the Anglo-economies, from the US to Australia.
There is a kind of pessimism about our ability to stop the rich unilaterally exempting themselves from the tax system. They live in our societies - dependent on the same police and army and emergency rooms – but they increasingly refuse to pay the membership fees. Indeed, they demand we show “gratitude” just for them gracing us with their presence.
Whenever I stumble into something horrific, to watch and to write – whether it’s the wars in Congo, the crushing of Gaza, the vast rubbish dumps of South America inhabited by children, or the selling of slave-children in Bangladesh that I’ve written about today – there’s a quote I keep close, to ward off the feeling of impotence and despair.
In my column today, I talk about some of the different ways the rise of the internet is remaking our lives. There’s dozens of dimensions I didn’t have space to touch on: the way internet porn is transforming the sexuality of young people, which I wrote about here, for starters.
In my column yesterday, I talked about John Edwards’ dazzling – and probably doomed – campaign for the Democratic nomination. I only had space to touch briefly on the reaction of the American right, which has been hideously revealing. For decades they have claimed to speak up for the Ordinary Joe against The Snotty Elites. Look – John Kerry speaks French, while Bush loves burgers! Look – Al Gore knows the names of leaders in the Balkans (where?) while Bush only knows the names of baseball teams!
But when they are confronted with real populism, one that actually would improve the lives of ordinary and poor people, they are enraged, and resort immediately to incandescent abuse. Look, for example, at Fox News’ highest rating host, Bill O’Reilly.
For a long time now, George Galloway has been drifting towards religious fundamentalism. He opposes abortion rights; he has broken away from the Socialist Workers’ Party, because even they have gagged at his habit of hugging Islamic fundamentalists too hard; and he rants and howls about how “militant atheists” like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are trying to “silence religion.”
(The only place militant atheists have tried to silence religion is in the Soviet Union – which he supported, and whose fall he describes as “the worst day of my life.” Oddly, he doesn’t mention this to his new religious supporters. Of course, in reality Britain today is a country where the religious are guaranteed unelected seats in the legislature, a state-backed faith, faux “respect” at every turn, and billions of pounds to indoctrinate innocent children into their superstitions. Far from “silencing” the religious, we militant atheists are simply asking that they compete on a level playing field with us.)
The portly, shrieking pantomime dame Christopher Biggins is favourite to win ‘I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!’, and to no doubt become the nation’s favourite eunuch for a few months. He’s part of a long tradition of gay men welcomed into the British mainstream who I’ve written about before: the safe, sexless, self-hating homosexual who doesn’t make you think about anything frightfully distasteful like men actually having sex with each other other. No – Biggins reassures you that homosexuality is about nice things, like wearing dresses and being friends with Joan Collins, dah-ling!
As it happens, on a personal level, I think he seems like a nice man. There are some gay men (a small proportion, as it happens) who simply are naturally camp, and they shouldn’t be condemned or lectured for simply expressing their true nature. But I thought we were moving beyond a time when this was The Face of the Gays on national television. I thought we were beginning to see that gay men are just as likely to be soldiers or war correspondents or brickies as they are to be pantomime dames or howling drag queens.
It’s when you look at the birth-pangs of a religion that you can see most clearly how it was invented not by some mystical "God", but by human beings – usually for cynical reasons.
The Tutenkhamun exhibition of ancient bling in the old Millennium Dome – opening today – is doubly deceitful. The publicity material is dominated by an image that looks like the famous death mask of the boy-king, the one everyone flocked to see in 1971. But when you get there, you stumble around the exhibition, with its terrible eye-straining lighting and insufferable Egyptian pan pipes music piercing into every room – and you can’t find it. It’s not there. The closest thing is a tiny twelve-inch mini-version that was used to contain King Tut’s liver. They have blown it up to more than triple its size and stuck it onto the posters.
Imagine a novelist who hated black people with a deep, intense loathing. Imagine he reacted to the civil rights movement by writing a raving, howling book-length polemic saying it was “evil” and wanted to “destroy white people.” Imagine he took this loathing so far that one night, in a drunken drugged-up rage, he stabbed a black person in the stomach and nearly killed him, and was only let off because the black guy chose not to press charges.
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