Oliver Kamm has a lovely quote from Christopher Hitchens about Mike Moore:

[S]peaking here in my capacity as a polished, sophisticated European as well, it seems to me the laugh here is on the polished, sophisticated Europeans. They think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious and ignorant and so on. And they‘ve taken as their own, as their representative American, someone who actually embodies all of those qualities.

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Rupert Read, the towering political and philosophical figure who is head of philosophy at the University of East Anglia, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

According to the Norwich Evening News:

A PEACE protester stripped off after a meeting with Norwich MP Charles Clarke to raise awareness of civilian casualties of the war in Iraq and the abuse meted out to prisoners.

...Rupert Read, head of philosophy at the University of East Anglia, removed most of his clothes and put a hood over his head to reflect the abuse of prisoners in Iraq.

Dr Read said his stunt was designed to raise awareness of the atrocities being committed in the name of the British and US Governments.

...“I felt like I started to understand a tiny fragment of the torture that so many Iraqis have been put through by British and American soldiers and mercenaries.

“I tried speaking to the other people nearby, but my words just echoed around inside the hood. I felt cut off and wondered what it would be like to have to feel like that for hours or days."

After such a display of his intellectual prowess, I will think again before dismissing him as a buffoon.

There. Thought again. He is a buffoon.

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I've only missed one Cup Final since I've known what football was - Man U versus Palace in 1990. For some reason I simply couldn't be bothered - a team I want to lose every match, and one I just can't see the point of (on which note, much as I dislike West Ham, I do hope they beat Palace in the play-offs; the Hammers are a proper team who should be in the Premiership, Palace a waste of everyone's time). I couldn't have been more wrong - it was a thrilling 3-3 draw.

But today? Ugh. Talk about wanting both teams to lose. I'll either be working, watching the cricket, or watching the Scottish Cup to see if Larsson scores on his farewell to Celtic. I'm certainly not going to watch Roy Keane and Dennis Wise, two foul thugs who are a disgrace to sport itself, let alone football.

Still, at least it's not the Gooners versus Millwall. That really would be hateful.

More generally, is there anyone - bar Man U or Milwall fans - who actually cares about the Cup Final any more? (And yes, I know: if Spurs made it to the final I'd care!) It seems to me the whole thing is media hype now. Not one of my friends has mentioned it to me in recent days, and that's been the case over the past few years. We used to have all sorts of parties to watch it, but no one I know is bothering with anything like that. It's just an end of season version of the League Cup now.

UPDATE: My brother in law makes a good point: much of the 'Cup Final magic' was because it used to be one of the tiny number number of live games on TV. Now, with more than one match on most days, it's all rather superfluous.

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The Exorcist performed by bunnies.

Well, why not?

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I can barely contain my joy. Ryan of Manchester - he of the gloriously ill-informed, illogical and plain stupid economics - has posted a comment beneath Oliver Kamm's latest Times piece.

He includes this glorious paragraph:

Regarding Oliver's statement that there is no market failure here, I would say that when farmers are being paid a price that does not cover their costs of production, this can reasonably be called a market failure. Surely the market is failing coffee producers when many do not receive a living wage for the job they do.

As the great Mr Littlejohn would say, you couldn't make it up.

Enjoy.

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Nice line by David Frum, re the laudatory reception given at Cannes to the odious Mike Moore:

If an American were to make a documentary about the (genuine in this case) links between French President Jacques Chirac and Saddam Hussein – how do you think he’d do at the Oscars?

(BTW, I cannot believe my own stupidity. How could I post something on Sian Lloyd who is, after all, just a weather girl, and leave unsaid my loathing of Moore? At least all I want to hit when Lloyd comes on is the TV. When I see Moore, I want to go much, much further.)

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These are the tunnels which don't exist.

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I thought the Panorama last night on the lack of readiness for a terror attack on London was a shoddy piece of work. As one of the callers to the BBC afterwards put it:

"What are Panorama trying to do? Run a terrorist training school explaining how best to attack London? I know from just the introduction to this programme that a simple and effective way to bring London to a halt and to kill at least 300 people would be to target three underground trains. Blow front and back to stop the emergency services getting to the injured."

But you do have to wonder just how thick some people are. According to the Grauniad:

The BBC was deluged with complaints today after it televised a mock-up of a terrorist attack on London last night.

The programme, which the government had denounced as "irresponsible", sparked widespread consternation among some viewers in a latter day re-run of Orson Welles' infamous War of The Worlds radio broadcast which terrorised sections of America in 1938.

"Presumably you did not intend to set the whole country into a state of panic, but that is what you did. My son phoned me from London, absolutely terrified. His friend had received a phone call from her mother who thought London was under attack, so she panicked and it snowballed," said one viewer by email.

...Around 50 viewers criticised the BBC for not flagging up the programme as a simulation during the broadcast, while 22 thought the progamme was too realistic.

Not only did the mock news reports have a banner running at the bottom of the screen saying it was fiction, they kept returning to Gavin Esler and his 'experts' for an analysis of the fictionalised attack. Then again, there are some people who thought Independence Day was a documentary. Really.

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It seems that Robin Cook has formed his own party in Italy:

Beauty gets its own political party in Italy
Italy's beauty is her international role

By Anna Somers Cocks and Vittorio Sgarbi

“Aesthetics first, ethics second” is the slogan of Italy’s new political party, the Party of Beauty, founded in April by former Under Secretary of State for the ministry of culture, Vittorio Sgarbi. Mr Sgarbi, a member of parliament for the same party as Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, Forza Italia, has nonetheless allied his new creation formally with the old, established Republican party, with which it will share the ticket in the June elections to the European parliament.

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To answer those of you who have asked:

No, Eve Pollard is not my mother, sister, aunt, cousin or friend. I've never met the woman.

Nor this woman.

(And this chap is fictional so, no, we're not related.)

UPDATE: Peter Briffa asks about Vicky Pollard. I am - surely you all knew this - her proud father.

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: And Jonathan Pollard is my brother.

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I'm in a rather sour mood for some reason. In which vein:

Is there anyone else out there who is physically unable to look at the TV when Sian Lloyd comes on with the weather?

I'm trying to think if there is anyone else who has the same effect on me, and I have to say I'm at a loss. Edward Heath? No. At least he's always good for a laugh. Fiona Bruce? Sort of. But I don't actually feel the need to throw something at the TV when I see her.

Time for a list. Suggestions, please.

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Everyone has misunderstood John Prescott's comment yesterday that "when plates appear to be moving, everyone positions themselves for it".

The word 'tectonic' has been inserted, assuming he was talking about great shifts in the political terrain.

I think not. He was, surely, talking about eating at a Greek restaurant, and how he had had to duck to avoid the low flying china.

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An idle thought:

has anyone ever read a Minette Marrin column?

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With all the concentration on the faked Mirror pictures, another example of grotesquely irresponsible tabloid behaviour seems to have escaped without much comment: the feeding frenzy over Maxine Carr. Today's papers are full of it.

Ian Huntley was clearly an evil murderer and should, in my view, have been hanged. But Maxine Carr was not, by any reading of the case, evil. She was - is - a stupid, easily led woman. But she is not evil and she is not a murderer.

She was properly sentenced and has served her time. She was not given the life sentence which some newspapers' behaviour has now imposed on her.

If, God forbid, she ends up a victim of vigilante justice then her blood will be on the hands of everyone who is now hounding her. She should be left alone to live out the rest of her sorry life. That is the meaning of the word 'justice'.

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Why Blame Israel? The facts behind the headlines

Icon Books £12.99

Reporting, comment and analysis of the Middle East are bedevilled by ignorance. Much of that ignorance is wilful, when facts are ignored and minds closed to reality. In recent years, for instance, it has become the received wisdom that the terrorism to which Israel is now regularly subject is a product of its own behaviour towards the Palestinians. Israel, in other words, only has itself to blame.

Neil Lochery’s superb ‘Why Blame Israel’ is a useful antidote to this grotesque distortion of reality. Lochery has no religious affiliations with Israel, but as Director of the Centre for Israeli Studies at University College, London, is well placed to describe the reality of Israel’s situation. Although he apportions blame where appropriate, his purpose is not to convict but to explain, and to deal with the many untruths which bedevil reports of the Middle East conflict. Take the most basic issue: Israel’s strength and size. There are some reporters who give the impression that Israel is a giant nation, forcing its strength on its tiny, defenceless neighbours. Yet its population is a mere six and a half million – roughly the size of Scotland – and it is surrounded by hundreds of millions of Arabs who will be placated only when it and its inhabitants are wiped out. Geographically, it is so small that one can stand at one end and see the other side – surrounded by vast Arab lands.

Lochery makes clear that mistakes have been made by all sides in the conflict, but that there are two fundamental problems which lie at the root of the current crisis. Israel is the only democracy in the world surrounded by countries bent on its destruction. The Arab and Palestinians’ refusal to recognise Israel’s right to exist meant that, from the start, Israel has had to focus overwhelmingly on its own security and defence. More recently, supposedly more moderate Palestinian leaders have not only refused to renounce the suicide bombing tactics of the likes of Hamas, they have, to varying degrees, given them the space in which to operate.

Lochery shows how, in much of the reporting of the conflict, basic facts are either ignored or deliberately misreported. Take the so-called massacre which, we were told, took place in Jenin in 2002. The Israelis had information about terrorist activity in the refugee camp. Their response was to take military action. It is, of course, perfectly legitimate to question whether or not they were right to do that. What is not legitimate is to portray what happened as a massacre, as many of the reporters, spoon fed lies by the terrorists’ supporters, then did. They then compounded the lie by implying that the Israelis had effectively destroyed the camp.

A subsequent UN inquiry made perfectly clear that no massacre took place (as became obvious after the event to anyone who visited the site). But because it suits the agenda of some reporters to portray the Israelis as butchers who oppress the Palestinians, massacre it was, evidence or not. And the fact that, as an aerial picture of Jenin made clear afterwards, the Israeli action was confined to an area which, in relative terms, was smaller than a goalmouth compared with a football pitch, was barely mentioned. It didn’t fit the pre-ordained picture.

Lochery’s title – Why Blame Israel? - is slightly misleading. His focus is entirely on specific historic issues such as how Israel came into being, the wars it has had to fight to save itself, and the so-called peace process. All that is critical, and his dispassionate laying out of the facts is sorely needed. But to answer his question requires something rather different: a look at just why it is that so many are so unwilling to recognise these facts, and so willing to ascribe all blame in the Middle East to Israel. And that means looking at two inter-related themes: anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. Israel is seen as the US’s staging post in the Middle East, and its culture of democracy and western thought is entirely alien to the Arab states; the two fuse with the now widespread anti-Americanism into a potent cocktail of hatred.

Beyond that lies the oldest hatred of all, that of the Jew. A full answer to the question ‘why blame Israel’ must, in the end, deal with anti-Semitism. Yes, there are political reasons to blame Israel. And yes, there are strategic reasons. There are indeed many valid reasons why Israel can be blamed for some of its problems. But, as Lochery’s analysis of the facts makes clear, they don’t add up to a convincing explanation of why it is that Israel is now so consistently maligned. That requires the addition of an extra factor: anti-Semitism.

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Hear, hear:

I am still a hawk, if only out of contempt for those who seem to think that if John Kerry is elected President in November and Gordon Brown becomes Prime Minister in the near future, the Islamic fundamentalists will defuse their bombs, put down their rifles and leave the West alone. Do the opponents of the war really believe that appeasement of this sort will stop the men who cut off the head of the US contractor Nick Berg and then paraded it to a camera? How deluded is it possible to be?

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Michael Jennings makes a pertinent point about the departure of Piers Morgan:

[T]he Chairman and Director-General of the BBC and the editor of the Mirror have now all lost their jobs due to their organisations essentially lying in order to make their case of opposition to the Iraq war.

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Peter Briffa has a corrective to the idea that the only people to have lost their jobs over Iraq are journalists.

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Sorry for the absence of posts of late. I am a fortnight away from the deadline on my book and hence manic.

I will keep posting sporadically for the next couple of weeks and then resume normal service.

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You are Sven-Goran Eriksson. You have at your disposal one of the best central midfielders in the world. Where do you think you'll play him?

On the left.

Step aside Taylor the Turnip; come forward, Sven the Swede.

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