31 January 2009 – 2:11 pm
Nick Cohen in Standpoint (via):
a significant part of British Islam has been caught up in a theocratic version of the faith that is anti-feminist, anti-homosexual, anti-democratic and has difficulties with Jews, to put the case for the prosecution mildly. Needless to add, the first and foremost victims of the lure of conspiracy theory and the [...]
11 February 2008 – 11:37 pm
Like Splinty, I am not inconsiderably annoyed at Private Eye. Oh yes.
In the recent ruckus between Newsnight and the Decent Right thinktank Policy Exchange, the Eye (or at least the enigmatic ‘Ratbiter’) has unaccountably chosen to side with the latter.
Newsnight alleged that Policy Exchange or its researchers had forged the receipts which showed you could [...]
7 October 2007 – 10:53 pm
Yes, this is a very fine song (and this is a very fine version of it, which I hadn’t seen in 25 years).
You see Robin,
I’ve been searching for the young soul rebels.
I’ve been searching everywhere, I can’t find them anywhere – where have you hidden them?
How we laughed.
The strange thing about “There there, my dear” [...]
I agree with Andrew Anthony, up to a point:
My book is a polemical memoir. It’s not ‘The Truth’. It’s part of a debate. I may be wrong. It could be that if the troops are withdrawn from Iraq and we turn a blind eye to Islamic extremism at home, Jihadist terrorism will disappear. I happen [...]
19 September 2007 – 5:40 pm
Cohenwatch left this alone, possibly because the numbers are solid and the argument seems pretty reasonable. Slightly shorter Nick:
The murder of Rhys Jones told you next to nothing about modern Britain, he [Ed Balls] told the Guardian. In the Sixties, people worried about mods and rockers ‘beating each other up with their bike chains’. In [...]
21 December 2006 – 12:06 am
Who’s with me?
We have to wake up. These forces of extremism based on a warped and wrong-headed misinterpretation of Islam aren’t fighting a conventional war but they are fighting one against us – and ‘us’ is not just the West, still less simply America and its allies. ‘Us’ is all those who believe in tolerance, [...]
25 November 2006 – 10:36 pm
Robert Skidelsky, author in 1975 of a rather nasty biography of Oswald Mosley (on which I’ve commented before & will do again), is going strong as a cross-bench peer and occasional newspaper commentator. Witness this piece in last Friday’s Indie:
The elements of a “whole Middle East” peace settlement are easy to see, though they will [...]
19 November 2006 – 8:07 pm
Dave:
In a post yesterday, I pointed out that Tony Blair – currently in Pakistan to meet president Pervez Musharraf – at least did not feel the need to salute the military dictator’s ‘courage, strength and indefatigability’, as George Galloway famously did on meeting Saddam Hussein.
But I’ve just heard the World at One on Radio Four. [...]
6 November 2006 – 9:33 pm
Back here, I wrote:
my children are far closer to being ‘colour-blind’ than I’ll ever be. The other day my son got picked on in the swimming pool; we asked him to describe the kids who did it, and when we asked him whether they had brown skin he said “yes, but why do you ask?” [...]
My frustration with the bearpit that is Comment is Free was brought to a head by this bizarre post by David Hirsh. Once again, I’m going to reproduce my CiF comment here, because frankly I think more people will pay attention to it here than there.
First, a word about Hirsh’s argument. He opens thus:
Since before [...]
The blogs I read regularly have changed a little since I started blogging, but not the blogs I avoid. I can think of a few right-wingers whose frame of reference is so different from mine that, if I did read them, I’d spend all my time responding to them – I mean the kind of [...]
Chris has a point:
Whereas Britain pursues overseas expansion, England stays at home. The great statements asserting the rights and the dignity of the ordinary man – and it was the Englishman G.K. Chesterton who said there’s nothing ordinary about the ordinary man – are all English: Magna Carta, the Putney debates, Gray’s Elegy in a [...]
I probably shouldn’t go to National Trust houses. Visiting one this afternoon I was accosted by an attendant, who wanted me to know that the strip of linen in a glass case on the wall was a garter which had been worn by Charles I. As I walked away, I couldn’t resist giving a quick [...]
Like Dave, I’ve got a lot of time for some of the signatories to the Euston Manifesto. And, like Dave, there is no way in Hell I’m supporting it.
The problems start in item 1, which yokes together “We are committed to democratic norms, procedures and structures” with “We value the traditions and institutions, the legacy [...]
1 February 2006 – 10:43 pm
Steve Bell (via) anticipated Blair’s reaction to the hundredth death of a British soldier in Iraq since 2003: the deskbound patriotism of Kipling’s jelly-bellied flag-flapper, in a low-key, robo-managerialist form. But Blair’s actual reaction was quite different:
Mr Blair said the country had to understand why it mattered that “we see this through”. It was important, [...]
31 December 2005 – 8:36 pm
Thanks to Talk Politics, I’ve recently read – or at least glanced at – some remarks made by Hugo Chavez, Constitutional President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, on Christmas Eve 2005. Here’s the passage which has excited most comment (my translation).
I became a rebel and I dedicated myself to the true Christ – and [...]
Nick Cohen is getting careless. On the Guardian Web site, a recent Cohen column with the uncompromising headline “Face up to the truth” is now prefixed with the following health warning:
The comment piece below was wrong to say that the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was ‘delighted’ at the attack on the World Trade Centre, describing it [...]
Let us just take this issue of Iraq and expose it for a moment – frankly, the obscenity of these people saying it is concern for Iraq that drives them to terrorism. If it is concern for Iraq, why are they driving a car bomb into the middle of a group of children and killing [...]
Apparently the government’s much more left-wing now than it was a few years ago: much less authoritarian, much less pro-capitalist and generally much more sensible. I didn’t know that. Did you know that?
Nick Cohen, 2001:
The first Labour government for a generation, blessed with office in a time of peace and plenty, spent a smaller proportion [...]
Just to clarify, I’m not saying Johann Hari is crazy.
Language is weird – weird and treacherous. It gives thought a medium and a structure, and yet it has its own properties – both formal regularities like verb forms, and arbitrary quirks like puns – which cut across whatever it is you’re trying to say. (With [...]
