I have to hand it to you guys: you’re nothing if not inventive. The latest wheeze dreamed up by the Jews in their relentless quest for world domination is, it seems, the humble coffee bean.

Radical leftists and Islamists (we really must find an umbrella term that saves me typing all that out every time, so closely do they self-identify these days) are busily spreading the rumour that the Israeli assault on Gaza is being bankrolled by Starbucks, who have apparently donated all their profits this past two weeks to the Zionist war effort. For further details, over to our old chum Yusuf Al-Qaradawi:

“They used to hand a sign on the doors of their shops: ‘We benefit our most important partner, which is Israel, we help in the education of students in Israel, we help build up the Israeli defense arsenal,’ and so on. People go and drink their expensive coffee. Instead of paying 2 riyals for a cup of coffee, they pay 20 riyals. This Starbucks is Zionist. Why do we not teach the nation to make do with its own products, when possible, even if they are of lesser quality? This is the only way the nation will rise. My brothers, put the boycott against the nation’s enemies into action. Every riyal you pay turns into a bullet in the heart of your brothers in Gaza and in other Islamic countries.”

I’m sure I need hardly add that this is, er, grande crappucino. Starbucks has no special charitable or business links with Israel (indeed, it closed all its Israeli stores in 2003) and, as Snopes.com points out, the myth about Starbucks profits being used to fund the Israeli military comes from a spoof letter purporting to be from Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, but actually penned by one Andrew Winkler and published on the ZioPedia website with a subsequent disclaimer clearly identifying it as parody. (Schultz himself is an avowed friend of Israel, which is no doubt how the story got started in the first place.)

Needless to say, satire is not the anti-war movement’s strong point. Several branches of Starbucks have been attacked in cities from Beirut to London and the chain forced to issue an official denial of this ludicrous story. But the fake Schultz memo sticks, like some ersatz internet version of the Protocols; websites republish the claims, Facebook groups pop up, and Starbucks is now semi-officially one of the financial props of the Zionist entity.

Nor is the damage restricted to overpriced coffee shops; British supermarket chain Marks and Spencer has also been targeted by demonstrators; ostensibly that’s because it stocks Israeli produce, like every other supermarket chain in Britain, but I wonder if it’s entirely coincidental that ‘Marks’ is one of this country’s more famously Jewish-founded businesses and a long-standing bugbear of anti-Semites throughout the Middle East. Indeed, if you tune into Iranian TV - and even Iranians watch the Superbowl - you will discover that there’s barely a large multinational anywhere that doesn’t siphon off profits to support the miracle on the Med. (Pepsi stands for “Pay Each Penny to Save Israel”, apparently, which I must admit sounds rather catchy.)

Of course, some might say that this is all rather handy, given those close links between the far left and the radical Islamist right; for your average member of the Socialist Workers Party, the only thing more satisfying than smashing a shopfront is surely the knowledge that you’re striking a blow for Palestine at the same time. But, deeper than that, as Brendan O’Neill points out at Spiked Online, it is arguably symptomatic of a wider malaise, what he calls a “cultural anti-Semitism” – “the projection of disillusionment with Western culture and values on to Israel, also known, in our politically illiterate times, as ‘the Jews’”.

How far that’s true I’m not sure; but it’s an interesting article and worth reading in full. In the meantime, you could do a lot worse than stopping off at Starbuck’s on your way home. Sure, it’s overpriced, but at least all those profits are being spent on shiny fighter planes.

To Liverpool, then, and the MTV Europe awards, in an attempt to make sense of this historic week in politics. At the tender age of 24, Katy Perry is already a veteran of the culture wars; despite its utterly insipid lyrics, her chart-topping paean to lipstick lesbianism, I Kissed A Girl, attracted the ire of conservatives and gay groups alike. Who better, then, to interpret the sudden shift in the American zeitgeist for an audience of screaming European teenagers?

Jared Leto, from 30 Seconds to Mars, made the crowd stand in honour of the US President-elect Barack Obama. Amid rapturous cheers, he said: "Liverpool, let's hear it for Barack Obama."

Perry responded: "Maybe Europe will love us again now."

I can only speak for myself when I stress that Katy’s message was in no way compromised by the image of her entering the arena, moments earlier, straddling a giant chapstick. But her careful use of the qualifier “maybe” was entirely redundant; there’s no question about it. Europe loves you again now. Can you feel it? Doesn’t it make you warm inside? What? Oh.

Certainly U.S. visitors and residents over here noticed the change almost immediately; apocryphal reports even spoke of American girls spontaneously being offered flowers on the streets of Paris. (You must never underestimate the opportunism of a Frenchman.) Politicians from across the spectrum were maintaining a public silence, but privately crossing their fingers and praying for a Democratic victory; their subsequent congratulations had an unfamiliar tone to them which at first I couldn’t place, so long was it since I’d heard sincerity in their voices. If the member states of the EU had electoral college votes up for grabs, Obama would have swept the continent 27-0.

The press were especially pleased. The week’s most predictable about-turn was to be found in the UK’s Guardian newspaper, for eight years the house broadsheet of every self-respecting left-wing Bush-hater on this side of the pond. In a gushing editorial, they rejoiced that “So often crudely caricatured by others, the American people yesterday stood in the eye of history and made an emphatic choice for change for themselves and the world”, conveniently ignoring the fact that they have been doing much of the caricaturing this past decade. “Today is for celebration, for happiness and for reflected human glory. Savour those words: President Barack Obama, America's hope and, in no small way, ours too.”

This ludicrous theme recurs again and again in European reactions to Obama’s triumph. It is perceived in some sense to be a victory for Europe; somehow, it vindicates European values, the European outlook on the world. How or why this should be the case is not entirely clear, though there’s no doubt that Obama’s urbane cosmopolitanism hews closer to the way Europeans like to think of themselves than Bush’s grating cowboy image. But the myth has already started to take root; finally they have listened to us and seen the error of their ways, the European chatterati tell themselves, with a preening amour propre that is faintly ridiculous to behold.

Wiser voices have urged caution. Matthew Parris, the most sane and sanguine of British conservative commentators, tried to prick the bubble of misplaced euphoria in a column in the Times towards the end of last week:

He, we sense, understands. He cares. He is like us, understands us, surely agrees with us, even though he has not yet said so. He would be our friend if ever we were to meet him. In some strange way he knows us already, though we have never been introduced. He is the pop star whose poster adorns the adolescent's bedroom wall… the David Beckham who is surely deeper/cleverer/gayer/more cultured (depending on your bent) than he seems; the Queen Mother who, if she ever had come to tea, would have got on with us like a house on fire.

It is desperately important that we never meet these people, for reality would be cruel.

A reality check, too, from the head of Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission, Sir Trevor Phillips, who warned that a British Obama would never manage to rise to the top in our own society. Colin Powell, the son of Jamaican immigrants, once expressed similar reservations about his own prospects had his family chosen this country ahead of the US. But quiet surprise that Americans have chosen a black leader has been more in evidence than much critical analysis of the reasons why it hasn’t ever come close to happening here.

For those Europeans, and Brits, who delight in criticising American policy at every turn, it has been the convenient refrain of the past eight years that they are not anti-American but anti-Bush. When the last high-fives have been done and the balloons are cleared away, it will be time for Europe’s new pin-up to get down to business, and it will surely be a mere matter of weeks before the first howls of outrage start emanating from the usual quarters. We will see then what their excuse is this time.

Why is that Americans come over all queasy when discussing the glory that is haggis? After all, despite the most famous living Scotsman, Groundskeeper Willie, exhorting America’s youth to sample its delights ("Get yer haggis, right here! Chopped heart and lungs boiled in a wee sheep's stomach! Tastes as good as it sounds. Good for what ails ya!") it seems that popular prejudice against thGroundskeeper Willie: big fan of haggis, not so much Leviticus 11e “great Chieftain o’the puddin-race” is alive and well Stateside. Did I say prejudice? Call it discrimination: Scottish haggis is, outrageously, banned from the US on account of those delicious wee bits of lung and some nonsense about mad cows. So no haggis lasagne or haggis nachos for you guys, unfortunately, unless you make it yourself.

Of course, there’s another problem with haggis: It’s not terribly kosher. Leviticus 11 specifically names the haggis as – okay, that’s not quite true. Actually, even if you do keep strict kosher, most of the ingredients in the traditional haggis recipe are not inherently trayf – after all, I’m told it’s very similar to kishka - and if you journey to Scotland it’s not that difficult to find kosher haggis. Unsurprisingly, though, there’s not a big market in the US for properly kashered sheep’s stomach, let alone the regular variety, so you'd be forgiven for thinking that you may never sample the delights of this majestic dish.

But as we approach January 25^th, the annual night dedicated to Scotland’s national poet Rabbie Burns (who penned a famous ode to the national dish), I figure: Why should Rabbi Burns miss out? Here, then, is a recipe for kosher haggis - or haggisim, if you will. Go on, try it!

Ingredients:
1 clootie (means a little cloth). A clean linen dish towel will do.
2 lb. dry oatmeal
1 lb. chopped mutton fat, rendered, or suet, which is the cleanest fat on the animal's body.
1 to 1 1/2 lb. lamb or venison liver, boiled and minced
Small quantity stock (lamb by preference)
1 large chopped onion
1/2 tsp. cayenne pepper
1/2 tsp. allspice
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. pepper
2 tbsps soy sauce or suitable substitute

Instructions:
Toast oatmeal slowly until golden brown.
Mix all ingredients (except clootie) together; add stock until soft.
Fill clootie to just over half full, press out air, sew up securely with needle and thread.
Have ready a large pot of boiling water.
Boil slowly for 4 to 5 hours, ensuring haggis remains covered with water.
Serve with “bashed neeps” (swede) and “tatties” (potato).

And, of course, a good Scotch Whiskey.

[Recipe from the Capital Scot]

Fair play to Hugo Chávez: he’s not the sort of man to let pesky obstacles like the laws of economics derail his vision for turning Venezuela into a socialist utopia. A couple of typically bombastic pronouncements over the weekend confirm that Hugo is happy on his chosen path and not for turning.

The government maintains strict price controls on foodstuffs such as milk and bread in an effort to ensure that poor citizens have access to daily staples, but the unintended consequence - as even a freshman economics major sitting hungover in a morning lecture daydreaming of pussy could have told you – is that, despite being one of South America’s richest nations, food shortages are now a familiar feature of everyday life, as farmers prefer to scrape a living selling their produce in neighbouring countries, where prices are higher.

Chávez’ response was a masterstroke. (All that coke must be good for the brain after all.) “If there’s a producer that refuses to sell milk to the government and sells it instead at a higher price to a private company, we will expropriate their farm,” said Mr Chávez on his Sunday television programme, Aló Presidente [“Hello, Mr President!”] as he inaugurated a state milk processing plant. “If we must bring in the army, we will do so” he added.

Nationalization of farms? Bravo, Hugo! That’ll put bread on the shelves! Indeed, for an idea so elegant in its simplicity, one wonders why no-one’s ever thought of it before. What? Oh.

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Bobby Fischer, one of the great chess players of the last century, is dead, aged - what else? - 64.

The controversial former world chess champion, Bobby Fischer, has died in Iceland at the age of 64. The US-born player, who became famous for beating Cold War Soviet rival Boris Spassky in 1972, died of an unspecified illness, his spokesman said.

He was granted Icelandic citizenship in 2005 as a way to avoid being deported to the US.

“Controversial” is a very British way of saying that the guy was, at least in his latter years, a deranged, anti-Semitic loon.

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A few months ago I related how the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade were using Google Earth to target their rocket attacks on Israel. Well, I'm pleased to say that the Chosen People appear to be fighting back - kinda.

An Australian art collective called The Glue Society have been "using" Google Earth to create satellite images of notable episodes from the Bible, and the results are, I think, pretty cool. (Hover over the pictures if you need a clue.)

The set of four images, known collectively as God's Eye View, were commissioned by Eric Romano of NY's Pulse Art for their Miami art fair, and use real satellite imagery to achieve the slightly eerie effect. "Art has always depicted religious events," says the Glue Society's Jonathan Kneebone," and this is simply a new way to do it. We're playing with the whole idea that if you can capture something from a satellite it must exist."

Not that it's entirely Old Testament-based. Mel Gibson will be pleased to see that Google Earth's satellites also managed to capture the moment when you guys killed Christ:

The Glue Society plan to use the same technique in future to depict events from mythology and history. Some people might find it tacky: I think it rocks.

In the run-up to the start of the primary season, my fellow Brit blogger Andrew Sullivan somehow managed to endorse both John McCain and Ron Paul as the least worst alternatives in an uninspiring GOP field (eventually plumping for Paul).  But despite nominally being a conservative, there’s no doubt where Sullivan’s main hopes for the presidency rest; a series of gushing articles in recent weeks (most notably in December’s Atlantic magazine) confirm him as a fully signed-up Obamaniac. On his own blog, Sullivan even describes “what can only be called euphoria from America's allies and friends around the world at the prospect of an Obama presidency”. That strikes me as something of an exaggeration, to put it mildly, but there is no doubt that the eyes of the world are glued to this US election like no other that I can remember.

Of course, it’s not simply, or even mostly, down to Obama (whom my spellchecker obstinately insists on trying to rename ‘Osama’ – expect Fox to use that excuse some time soon). In fact, there are a number of reasons for the heightened interest. First and most obvious, the race is incredibly hard to call. A week or two ago the Dem nomination was Hillary’s to lose; at time of writing this she may be only hours from (effectively) being out. The Republicans, meanwhile, have eschewed the boy-girl matchup in favour of an all-male threeway; a sweaty tangle of shiny teeth, macho postures and barking mad attack ads that most outsiders find at once utterly baffling and totally compelling (Chuck Norris? I mean, what?).

Second, and probably equally obvious now I think about it, a lot of people over here would get excited about a sheep’s bladder on a stick if it was running to replace the current incumbent. Now, I have no time whatsoever for the kneejerk Bush-hatred of the European Left, which blames this administration, directly or indirectly, for everything from Benazir Bhutto’s assassination to David Beckham’s knackered knee; but you don’t have to be a alfalfa-munching Kos reader to see that most of the world will breathe a hearty sigh of relief in 54 weeks’ time. Of course, as most of the runners and riders are relatively unknown beyond your shores, observers of all political stripes can pin their own hopes and hobby-horses onto Bush’s departure; the new guy is going to disappoint a lot of people very quickly. But for the time being, people are – if not exactly “euphoric”, in Sullivan’s phrase – certainly optimistic. 

However, I think there’s something else at work here, too. The typical supercilious European view of the US political system (shared by many in Britain) is that it’s irredeemably broken; a messy combination of special interests, religious nutjobs and insane amounts of money weighing down a drawn-out process that seems to take about three years, and which usually conspires to pick the wrong guy anyway (and it is always a guy - and a Protestant white guy, at that), and then holds him hostage to the lobby groups who got him elected (big oil, the labour unions, the NRA and – of course – the Israel lobby).

Like all caricatures, it only works because there’s more than a hint of truth informing the broad brush strokes. But there’s a growing realisation that behind our sneering view of American-style democracy, something else is at work. There is, at least on the face of it, a healthy optimism about the political process in the US – yes, yes, it may only be skin-deep, and challenged daily by candidates whose interest lies in trading on fear rather than hope, but it still makes a refreshing change from the world-weary scepticism with which we greet every utterance from our own politicians in this country. Part of that is down to the possibility that a year from now we will see the first black President, or first woman. We beat you to the latter, of course, but our politics is still every bit as dominated by average white guys as it once was.

And worse is the stifling uniformity that has descended on the British political system in the post-ideological age. Tony Blair apes Conservative themes and policies, Gordon Brown poses with the hated [by him] Thatcher in Downing Street and steals Tory policies for short-term gain, and for their own part our Conservatives go out of their way to try and appropriate the rhetoric and language of the “progressive” left. To witness the slightly archaic system of caucuses and primaries that seem to be propelling Barack Obama past the slick Clinton machine, or seeing Huckabee giving Mitt Romney a richly deserved kicking in Iowa despite spending a fraction of his rival’s budget, is inevitably to look at our own stagnant political systems - in which we are lectured by increasingly similar-looking social democrats, who look like they should be selling homes but whom we would not dream of inviting into our own - and wonder if we’ve got things so great here.

Christmas time is silly season in the newspapers; stories abound of politically-correct churchmen replacing nativity plays with right-on interfaith ceremonies, local councils banning advent calendars for fear of offending Muslims, and so on. Some of these stories are true, most are bullshit, and the world continues to turn.

But now they’re coming for the Finest Christmas Song Of All Time ™, and it’s time to draw a line in the sand. ¡No pasarán!

BBC Radio 1 has said it will allow the Pogues' Fairytale of New York to be played on the station uncut, after criticism of a decision to censor it.

The words "slut" and "faggot" had been dubbed out from the 20-year-old festive hit by station executives. But after a day of criticism from listeners, the band, and the mother of singer Kirsty MacColl, they changed their minds.

Sanity prevailed on this occasion, but for a while there it looked as if one of the festive season’s few pleasures had been emasculated. Radio 1, which is still Britain’s most popular chart music station, has courted controversy before; famously refusing to play “Relax” by Frankie Goes To Hollywood after twigging to the pretty thinly-veiled sexual references, their decision to ban it sent the song rocketing up the charts and into immortality (it even spawned a bizarre computer game).

Banning songs now seems like a throwback to a distant age, but the whole arsenal of dubbing, bleeping and ‘clean’ edits to avoid offending the oversensitive souls among us still rankles. I don’t really care that much when such soft censorship is applied to gangsta rap, or whatever the hell you call it, because there’s only so many times I can hear the word “motherfucka” before I start to get bored anyway – but when a great song like Fairytale is targeted, we’re crossing from mere silliness into full-on absurdity.

Sadly but unsurprisingly, it seems like Peter Tatchell, for whom I have a lot of time, doesn’t agree. In condemning the BBC’s U-turn he argues, slightly disingenuously, that he’s not calling for homophobic language to be banned, merely for some consistency between homophobic and racist abuse. He has a point, of course – most of us wouldn’t belt out Fairytale with quite the same drunken abandon if the word “nigger” appeared in the slot occupied by “faggot” – but ultimately Tatchell’s complaint falls because he doesn’t address context.

Even Peter doesn’t claim to find the lyric offensive; I’ve never met a gay man who does. Fairytale doesn’t call for gays to be murdered, for example, as the Jamaican dancehall artists targeted by Tatchell's Stop Murder Music campaign do. The lyrics depict a drunken domestic fight, and the song uses earthy, ‘offensive’ language, but - news flash - this is the way people in the real world talk. People are more sophisticated than usually given credit for, and they understand that they’re listening to two characters talk and squabble, not an attack by the singer on their way of life. Most gays are no more offended by the use of homophobic language, in this context, than I was when Tony Soprano mocked Uncle Junior for enjoying “eating pussy”.

It’s not uncommon, where I come from, to taunt a colleague who’s sticking to the soft drinks on a night out by calling them a “poof”. I plead guilty to doing it myself, quite frequently. No offence is ever meant, nor taken. Yet if, in the midst of a drunken argument, I deliberately insulted a gay friend by calling him a “faggot”, he would probably be an ex-friend by the time we sobered up. Context is all; the word has only the meaning we choose to attach to it.

Such is our terror of “causing offence” these days, though, that companies like the BBC employ whole teams of people to ensure that it never happens, pre-empting any possible complaint by neutering the sentiments in the original song. And, as Brendan O’Neill points out in his response to Tatchell, it’s funny to note how censorship has, slowly but surely, mutated from a tool of the intolerant right into a weapon that is more frequently used nowadays by the oh-so-tolerant left. In its painfully angst-ridden-liberal way, the BBC’s elitist sympathies are there for all to see; appalled at such uncouth language befouling the airwaves at a time of family celebration and determined, in their own narrow-minded, thin-lipped and very British way, to uphold a certain level of decorum and protect the fragile diversity of our society. If we don’t stand up for the faggots, the towelheads and the niggers against this sort of rough abuse, they fret, who will?

The idea that gay men might not need to be protected from Kirsty MacColl, or that we might not want to see all the rough edges in our culture smoothed out into a bland homogenous soup, clearly doesn’t occur to these guys. But that, finally, is why Fairytale is so enduringly popular. Christmas isn’t all about crackling fires and kissing under the mistletoe any more than life is a bowl of cherries, and if it takes an addle-brained old piss artist to remind us of it, so much the better. Censoring art is more offensive than the word “faggot”.

UPDATE: Video of the song below. 

Since he took office in June, I’ve largely refrained from sharing my views on Gordon Brown - partly due to my inability to write more than two paragraphs on the man without descending into profanity, but mostly in the expectation that Jewcy readers are far too sensible to give a damn about the man, let alone his unpopularity among Brit bloggers.

Don’t worry: that expectation still stands, and I don’t intend to bore you with a long diatribe against that [redacted] Brown. But an op-ed in today’s New York Times does give me an excuse to draw a fairly broad comparison between Brown’s travails in the UK, where he languishes 10-15 points down in the polls after just six months in the job, and the growing perception that Hillary Clinton is, if not in trouble exactly, then certainly facing a challenge to her coronation that even a few weeks ago would have seemed unlikely.

Gordon Brown was Tony Blair’s heir apparent for over a decade; the partnership between the two was the driving force behind New Labour’s rise to the ascendancy in British politics, breaking the Conservative lock on government (though not, in many areas, on policy or language) and propelling Labour into an unprecedented decade of power. Despite re-electing them for a third term in 2005, voters seemed heartily sick of Tony Blair (largely though not solely due to Iraq) and so when Brown took over at the beginning of summer after being elected unopposed to the leadership of his party, the government enjoyed a significant boost in the polls.

Early crises – botched terrorist attacks in London and Glasgow, severe flooding of large swathes of England, and the return of foot-and-mouth – tested the new PM’s mettle, and his solidity and calmness under pressure impressed many and added to his reputation as the not-Blair, the dependable, competent leader who’d rein in the showbiz excesses of the last few years and deliver prosperity, opportunity for all, blah blah blah.

That was only a few months ago, but politically it seems like a different century. Brown has lurched from catastrophe to catastrophe – most notably by allowing speculation about a snap election to monopolise the political debate for so long that when he finally announced, in the face of some challenging opinion polls, that there would be no early vote, and then compounded the error by claiming that those polls had had nothing whatever to do with his decision, he was roundly derided from all sides.

Since then his misfortunes have been almost Biblical in their scale. A scandal over sensitive information on welfare recipients going missing, including bank account numbers and children’s names and addresses, fed into the collapse of the Northern Rock mortgage lender to shatter the strongest card in Brown’s deck – that of competence. Renewed allegations of money laundering and financial impropriety by the Labour Party have attacked his reputation for probity. And stealing several opposition tax cuts mere days after they were announced made him look like an opportunist. From a position of remarkable strength as late as October, Brown now faces speculation about his position and cuts a shambolic figure.

This lengthy exposition is enough to make it obvious that any comparison between Brown and the Democratic frontrunner must of necessity be very broad-brush indeed. And yet there is a similarity, if a tentative one. Brown and Clinton are, in many ways, the ultimate insiders, having both served nearly a decade at the heart of government (albeit, in Hillary’s case, in an unelected capacity). And yet this experience, which both constantly stress, is a double-edged sword, because both now find themselves having to present their candidacies as an opportunity for “change” when it’s patently obvious to many voters that they represent nothing of the sort.

Both Gordon Brown and Hillary Clinton face challenges from young pretenders - David Cameron and Barack Obama respectively - who eschew the “safe pair of hands” approach in favour of a reliance on charisma, and use buzzwords like “optimism” and “hope” as if they actually believe them. (That’s not to say they necessarily have the policies to back up the fuzzy sentiments, naturally, but that’s not really the point.) These are the oldest moves in the playbook, of course, but up against machine politicians you play the percentages. The cosy insiders fight fire with fire, but unless they’re gifted liars their mendacity is as transparent as their smiles. Mark Penn’s suggestion last week that only Hillary has “the experience to bring about change” was a triumph of doublethink, but will it fool the electorate?

Every politician talks about standing up for the little guy against the Beltway insider, but what comes across when watching both Brown and Clinton is that, for all their talk of change, they essentially represent more of the same; not quite as slippery as Blair, rather cleverer than Bush, but not exactly Mr Smith goes to Washington. Most damagingly of all, both have gained a reputation for being calculating, choosing policy positions on the basis of partisan political considerations, and never opening their mouth until they know what the shot is.

Dour solidity and competence in troubled times are what both Brown and Clinton are counting on to win them elections, but the signs are that voters want more than that. As Rachel Sylvester writes in the Daily Telegraph, they desire inspiration as well as perspiration. And just as the early flights of pro-Brown idealism have given way to a more sober appraisal of his potential, not even the most nostalgic Democrat pretends that Hillary will be able to speak to the hopes and aspirations of the voters in the way her husband, for better or worse, found so easy.

Don’t misunderstand; the smart money has to be on the two of them winning their battles and still being around in a couple of years’ time. That’s why machine politicians infest the streets of London and Washington like a thick carpet of rats while genuinely inspirational outsiders come along but once a generation; because the rats know all the best boltholes. Both Brown and Clinton have big organisations and big bucks behind them; both are wily, experienced campaigners. Their opponents have a real mountain to climb, and a few favourable polls mean nothing in the grand scheme.

And even when the seismic shock does happen and the new broom sweeps in to “clean up politics once and for all”, the machine immediately sets to work on them, smoothes down the edges and short-circuits the more ambitious plans; and four years later they’re running as the voice of experience against some new guy who waffles on about “hope” and “change”. And the cycle begins again. Cynical? Moi?

Give the appalling Mitt Romney a little credit. The Big Speech of ten days ago contained one striking image for which I hope someone on his payroll got a bonus:

I have visited many of the magnificent cathedrals in Europe. They are so inspired ... so grand ... so empty. Raised up over generations, long ago, so many of the cathedrals now stand as the postcard backdrop to societies just too busy or too 'enlightened' to venture inside and kneel in prayer.

He is, of course, right: church attendances in many European countries have declined to the extent that in Britain, for example, there are now more regular attendees at mosque every week than in our churches - fewer than 10% of the population are regular churchgoers and that is expected to halve in the next generation.

Romney chose to attribute this to the state establishment of religion(s) in European nations (but then, as the adherent of a minority faith, he would, wouldn't he?), but there are any number of equally plausible theories which might explain falling attendances, not least the rise of empiricism and the development - primarily, but not exclusively, in Western Europe - of the scientific method, which in turn allowed us to build an explanation of the world around us that did not rely on a God, gods or Flying Spaghetti Monster to make it tick.

Irrespective of the reasons for the different outlooks Europeans and Americans have towards religion in the 21st century, my problems with Mitt Romney have nothing to do with Mormonism and everything to do with moronism. Suspicions were first aroused back in May - which for a foreigner, I reckon, puts me in on the ground floor - when Mitt contributed this razor-sharp analysis of the jihadist menace facing the West:

"They want to bring down the West, particularly us. And they've come together as Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda, with that intent."

To say that this is an analysis which would shame a Fox news anchor is not just an easy shot, because Brit Hume doesn't have the nuclear codes. Either way, I began to wonder if there was anything between this guy's collar and his haircut. But I still didn't have much to go on, until a few weeks later from the Boston Globe came the infamous tale of the family dog Seamus, whose carrier Romney had attached to the roof of their Chevy station wagon for a 12-hour drive to Ontario, entirely oblivious to the possibility that bombing along the Interstate at 70 mph might terrify the mutt:

As the oldest son, Tagg Romney commandeered the way-back of the wagon, keeping his eyes fixed out the rear window, where he glimpsed the first sign of trouble. ''Dad!'' he yelled. ''Gross!'' A brown liquid was dripping down the back window, payback from an Irish setter who'd been riding on the roof in the wind for hours.

As the rest of the boys joined in the howls of disgust, Romney coolly pulled off the highway and into a service station. There, he borrowed a hose, washed down Seamus and the car, then hopped back onto the highway.

This, the Globe hilariously opined, was "a tiny preview of a trait he would grow famous for in business: emotion-free crisis management." To me he just came across as a wanker. Say what you like about Brit Hume, but to the best of my knowledge he's never driven 12 hours with a dog strapped to the roof of his fucking car. (Fortunately, dog lovers have a means of redress.)

But the more serious issues cannot be ignored. As many commentators pointed out, not least Jewcy's own Michael Weiss on these pages, Romney's supposed disavowal of a "religious test" for the Presidency was as disturbing as it was self-serving, because it was phrased carefully to be inclusive only of people of faith (such as, er, Mitt Romney and GOP primary voters) and made no mention whatever of those of us who profess none, or even whose faith does not inform their political decisionmaking. The crass crescendo of his speech - "freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom", which will be news to the people of Sweden and Saudi Arabia respectively - only served to underline the distance that separates modern American politics from its European analogues.

In Britain we have a slightly different kind of ‘religious test'. Tony Blair phrased it best in an interview aired some time after he stepped down last summer; "you talk about it in our system and, frankly, people do think you're a nutter". His Rove-esque media handler, Alistair Campbell, famously said to reporters that "we don't do God", because there was real terror within the Blair camp that any overt mention of religious faith, no matter how carefully spun, would alienate far more voters than it would impress.

When it comes to religion, British people really do play up to your stereotype; it's not really something we like to discuss in polite society - indeed, something slightly embarrassing. To the vast majority of Europeans - including those, like me, who count ourselves as being of the Right - a statement such as that of Mike Huckabee that "if anybody wants to believe that they are the descendants of a primate, they are certainly welcome to do it", would be grounds for instant dismissal as a serious contender for public office at just about any level.

No doubt Team Huckabee congratulated themselves afterwards on finding a formula that allowed them to sidestep a potentially tricky question but, as with the ridiculous Romney, I could only marvel at how close this dolt is to being the Republican nominee for the White House. (Hitchens gives him both barrels in Slate today, and as ever with the Dude it's an unqualified joy.) Indeed, Huckabee said later on in that same debate that "it's interesting that that question would even be asked of somebody running for president". Well, they wouldn't have to ask it if they didn't suspect that you'd have such an off-the-charts barking mad answer, would they, you twat?

I don't mean to come across as a militant atheist in the Dawkins-Hitchens mould, because by and large I am not. Powerful personal faith has a range of corollaries, many of them very positive - and there are times when I envy the certainty that religious belief can bring. Nor do I write this in a spirit of transatlantic mockery or superiority, because God knows - if you'll pardon the phrase - that when I look at the politicians in my own country I am filled with unutterable despair.

Is the British religious test - requiring of politicians that any religious belief be kept firmly private and in the background - healthier than the American position, particularly but by no means exclusively the preserve of the GOP, that candidates must wear their faith on every shirtsleeve in a frantic effort to assure the voters that they are people of moral solidity who can be trusted with the great seal of office? Yes, I think it is, but that's not to say that you're wrong if you disagree. And that, finally, is the point; I have no intention of forcing my moral code, such as it is, on you, but I naturally suspect all politicians of wanting to force their beliefs on me. And when those beliefs have the force of God's hand behind them, I start to get very nervous indeed, irrespective of the purity of His servants' motives.

Great news from the blogosphere. After a regrettable period of inactivity, I’m delighted to say that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has resumed blogging.  

Since my last post on the blog, a few months have passed. But this doesn't ‎mean that I have not been keeping my promise of spending fifteen minutes per week ‎on it. As a matter of fact, I have spent more than the allocated time on the blog. The ‎magnitude of the reception and acclamation from the viewers was beyond ‎expectations.

Frankly I was worried that the President’s blog might have been wiped off the map, but it appears that the sheer volume of correspondence had simply overwhelmed him. (I’m not providing a link, tempting though it would be to flood his referral logs with Jewcy readers and watch his head explode, due to unsubstantiated reports last year that visitors with Israeli IP addresses were being targeted with viruses. Feel free to Google it.)

With commendable politeness, he even responds to hypercritical commenters such as John Walker from Germany, whose praise is distinctly conditional (“nice blog, but you should be posting more often”): 

I am apologetic to those who have been waiting for my new posts, but ‎fortunately overall, the analysis of the messages has got to a point that I can start ‎writing here again.

 

While it must be admitted that the President’s style can at times be a trifle dry, one has to commend his comments policy, which frankly is a lot more liberal than that of many political bloggers closer to home. True, there is some embarrassingly laudatory sunshine being blown up his arse here and there, like this from Adara, in Canada:

I in fact think you are a great leader and I am actually contemplating moving to Iran because of the ignorance of people and the harsh things they say about all middle eastern countries

And some commenters, like Nadim from Lebanon, are perhaps just a little confused:

Mr. President; Congratulations on your recent victory. I dont know much about you, and what I do know about you comes from many conflicting sources, but I wish you good health.

…but to his eternal credit, Ahmadinejad does not censor his critics – though American reader John Jacobs’ critique might have benefited from a vigilant editor’s pencil:

I hate you. you are retarted. that simple mentally retarted

Overall, though, the President’s blog is a resounding success; ranked at 2,713 on Technorati, which is not bad given that he’s only posted twice in 6 months. (Jewcy, by way of comparison, comes in at 5,149.) Would that we could all live in a country which encourages healthy pluralism, respect for others and meaningful dialogue with their critics, rather than labouring under the fascist-imperialist jackboot of BushCheneyHalliburton & Co.

So, after a few weeks of speculation, we know who Vladimir Putin would like to see succeed him as President of the Russian Federation – and even by the debased ethical standards of the Putinocracy, the level of brazenness on show in the Russian capital over the last 24 hours has been quite breathtaking.

On Monday, Vlad announced that his favoured successor would be Dmitry Medvedev, his former chief of staff, who currently combines the role of chairman of Gazprom with being deputy PM. It was something of a surprise ‘appointment’, but Kremlinologists were generally positive; Medvedev is viewed as the most liberal of the candidates for the job both in terms of his approach to economic policy and, crucially, politically as well. And, at 42, he is a young and dynamic figure, which gave some hope to those who were worried that Putin would simply try to install a stooge in order to control things himself.

Unfortunately, those hopes are looking a little tarnished this morning, as up popped Medvedev on TV to share his thoughts on who he’d like to be his Prime Minister if elected, and – well, I wonder if you can guess? 

“I appeal to [President Putin] with a request to give his agreement in principle to head the Russian government after the election of the new president of our country," Mr Medvedev said on Russian television on Tuesday. 

 

"It's one thing to elect a president - it's no less important to maintain the efficiency of the team," he said.

I don’t know what the Russian is for “reacharound”, but that’s pretty much what we’re watching. And the same factor that analysts had identified as a hopeful sign yesterday – Medvedev’s lack of any links with the state security apparatus, including the FSB – may in fact be one of the attractions for Putin in picking him.

It’s widely expected that Putin will continue to exert strong influence over the security services and the military, and he’s been quite open about his intention to remain as a back seat driver even once he steps down. Moreover, his cronies occupy most of the central positions in Russian political and economic life, from oil companies through TV stations to regional governorships. Without a strong power base, and with no political experience to speak of, Medvedev may well prove to be the puppet that conventional wisdom suggests is his fate, even if he does win next March – as now seems overwhelmingly likely.

Still, it’s not all bad news. Medvedev recently gave an interview to a Russian magazine in which he revealed that as a feckless youth he rebelled against Soviet oppression in pretty much the only way a Russian schoolboy could:

"Endlessly making copies of Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple." All these groups were on state-issued blacklists during Medvedev's Soviet-era schooldays. 

 

"The quality was awful, but my interest colossal," he said. 

 

Medvedev went on to boast of his collection of Deep Purple LPs, saying that he had searched for the albums for many years. "Not reissues, but the original albums," he added, concluding that, "If you set yourself a goal you can achieve it."

I guess someone who likes the Zeppelin - and on vinyl, mind you - can’t be all bad. Can they?

Well, I’ve got good news and bad news. The bad news is that the Chinese have once again moved to crush any hint of dissent or independent-minded political activity in Tibet. The good news is that it’s now politically correct to support beauty pageants. Who knew?

Miss Tibet 2006, Tsering Chungtak, has been forced to withdraw from the Miss Tourism Pageant in Malaysia after the Chinese authorities put pressure on the pageant organizers to bar Tibet from the event. China demanded that Chungtak, an ethnic Tibetan who lives in exile in India, wear a sash labeled “Miss Tibet-China” or pull out. To her eternal credit, Miss Tibet told the authorities to go and fuck themselves, but pressure from the Chinese consulate in Sarawak, where the pageant is being held this Friday, has seen her pulled from competition.

Tsering Chungtak is a million miles away from the archetypal beauty pageant airheads of YouTube legend. On her return to Delhi yesterday, she gave a press conference in which she expressed her disgust with the politicking that led to her expulsion from the competition:

"I felt that this was not acceptable to me at all. The Tibetan issue is still the same as ever. China is in control of Tibet, and there is no freedom in Tibet. China constantly violates human rights, and threatens the environment in Tibet, causing concern about the very survival of the Tibetan people," Chungtak said after returning from Malaysia.

Miss Chungtak went on to say:

"They gave me just two options and it was a nightmare," Chungtak said, adding the organisers told her they were under Chinese pressure to force her to take off her "Miss Tibet" sash while participating. "I did not go to Malaysia with a political agenda. I was there to spread friendship"

She’s being a wee bit disingenuous here, mind you. Your correspondent spent a couple of arduous hours on the Miss Tibet website this afternoon in the interests of nailing down the facts, and it’s pretty clear that this is not your usual talent show. The Miss Tibet organisation was set up in 2002 with the specific aim of drawing attention to the plight of occupied Tibet and providing educational chances for exiled Tibetans, of whom there are well over 120,000. Many of these live in India, where opportunities for young Tibetan women are often fairly bleak. When the new Miss Tibet was crowned in October her first order of business was to renew calls for freedom for the occupied nation.

Clearly, therefore, this is a beauty contest that every liberal should get behind. Put aside any thought that these pageants are demeaning to women; that’s just your cultural imperialism talking. By watching these girls parade around in swimsuits you are, in effect, getting into the trenches alongside them, and striking a blow for self-determination, women’s rights, and the aspirations of an embattled people in exile – and all without having to put down your beer, too.

I’m really struck by this idea that if something miraculous, really kind of movielike, could happen here, where we could all kind of send love and truth and a kind of sanity to Hu Jintao right now in Beijing, that he will take his troops and take the Chinese away from Tibet and allow people to live as free independent people again. So, thought… We send this thought - we send this thought out. Send this thought.

Alternatively, if the Richard Gere route doesn't appeal, there’s a contact page right there on the website.

I had to laugh over the weekend when the BBC website started reporting, under its dramatic "Breaking News" logo, "Putin party leads in Russian elections". (Never underestimate the power of 24-hour news media to wring every possible drop of drama even out of statements of the fucking obvious.) The aforementioned election campaign lacked just about every one of the components of a real democratic process; in the absence of any discussion of policies or clash of ideologies, with opposition politicians being arrested simply for holding meetings and the media abandoning any pretence of impartiality, it may occasionally have looked like an election - even, from time to time, sounded like an election - but Russia's parliamentary polls were irredeemably phoney, a pale shadow of the real thing. It was rather like watching Gus Van Sant's pointless remake of Psycho; we knew we were supposed to be in suspense, and yet we felt all empty inside because we had, in every sense, seen this movie before.

It's hard to get across just how surreal these elections were. Never mind your hanging chads and Supreme Court cliffhangers; when these people rig an election, they do it with panache. Only four parties made it into the Duma, and three of them are Putin's creatures; as well as his United Russia party, the Kremlin also controls A Fair Russia and the mordantly-named far-right Liberal Democrats, led by one-time Western bogeyman Vladimir Zhirinovsky. (The only independents in the new parliament, ironically enough, are the Communists.)

The media gave only fleeting, and largely negative, coverage to opposition parties. Regional governors, appointed by Putin, stood at the top of United Russia lists across the country, competing to deliver the most votes for the ruling party. Public sector workers were forced to go out and vote, and warned that they would lose their jobs unless they reported to their managers by midday to confirm that they had voted for United Russia. It seemed to work; in Chechnya, not hitherto noted as a hotbed of pro-Moscow loyalism, early results showed that United Russia had won 99% of the vote on a 99% turnout.

Perhaps most egregious of all, the [alleged] murderer of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko, Andrei Lugovoi, whom Moscow has refused to extradite to Britain to face criminal charges, was elected to the Duma and now enjoys immunity from prosecution as a direct result. He joins Vladimir Putin himself, who will continue to wield power behind the scenes when his Presidential term ends next year. The OSCE, who were forced to send only a token force of election observers to monitor the polls after Russian authorities played silly buggers with election visas and restrictions on movement, have confirmed that the elections were in no way free or fair.

Contrast this sorry state of affairs with - and I never thought I'd say this - the results from Venezuela yesterday. Hugo Chavez narrowly failed to win approval for his raft of constitutional amendments which would, among other things, have weakened judicial due process and strengthened the executive powers of the presidency during a state of emergency, removed term limits on the presidency, thus allowing him to carry on in power until his stated retirement date of 2050. I must confess that I thought this vote was every bit as much of a gimme as the Russian polls, and I was wrong. A newly emboldened opposition, led by a brave student movement, saw the danger in allowing Chavez to strengthen a hand that's already stacked in his favour, and the electorate reaffirmed their commitment to democracy in the face of strong pressure to vote yes to Chavez's "reforms".

As Gene says over at Harry's Place, a bit of perspective is no bad thing. Hugo Chavez is by no means uniquely evil among world leaders; far from it. He's a petty thug and a blowhard, not a fanatic or a mass-murderer; a sub-Peronist pantomime villain, little more. And if the choice is between using your country's oil money to bribe the poor, as Chavez does, or sustain a hyper-rich feudal monarchy, as in Saudi Arabia, I certainly prefer the former. But it's a source of constant amazement to me that the mere mention of his name is enough to get a certain section of the international Left purring in admiration.

Prior to the vote, a number of the leading lights of this movement in Britain - Harold Pinter, Ken Livingstone, Ken Loach, you know the cast - wrote a letter to the Guardian (where else?) urging the international community to respect the results of a referendum which they fully expected their hero to win. (How I'd love to have been a fly on the wall when Mrs Pinter read him the results in the paper this morning. I'll bet there was a Pinteresque pause after that.)

It's worth repeating for emphasis; not only are these people impervious to criticism that their pin-ups are, at best, authoritarian bullies, and at worst mass murderers (let's not forget that Pinter remains a leading light in the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milošević) - but they actively endorse, and lobby for, the removal of checks and balances on their idols' powers. The anti-democratic left's arguments are as discredited as those of any movement in modern political history, their criteria for beatification no more sophisticated than gauging whose anti-Bush rhetoric gives them the hardest erection; and yet they are garlanded far and wide.

Ultimately, though, it's been a mixed weekend for democracy. Venezuela has had a lucky escape, its democratic processes proving robust enough to withstand the best efforts of its loudmouth president to subvert them. Russia gives much more cause for concern. Unless you're a Venezuelan citizen, Chavez doesn't matter; but Putin matters to us all, and his influence in international affairs is almost entirely malevolent. As Oliver Kamm rightly noted earlier today;

The fiasco raises yet again the question why Western governments ever saw Putin as a prospective ally. He is in truth more like the late Slobodan Milosevic - in election fraud if not genocidal aggression. I noted a few months the strong circumstantial evidence of his campaign of assassination against political enemies, as well as obstructionism and anti-democratic instincts in foreign policy. To this list we may add his authoritarian meddling in Ukrainian presidential election, encouragement of Iran's nuclear deceptions, and sabotage of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations by his unilateral opening to Hamas. There is a new Cold War; and Vladimir Putin is its instigator. 

I fear that Vladimir Putin will continue to be a force in world affairs long after Chavez, and for that matter Harold Pinter, have been relegated to the status of punchlines.

There are no good wars, as Bart Simpson once famously advised us, with the exception of the American Revolution, World War II, and the Star Wars trilogy. If recent Western military adventures have tended to reinforce the theory, the NATO campaign to protect the people of Kosovo at the end of the last century has generally been considered another exception to Bart's rather doctrinaire rule of thumb. (I'd say the jury's still out on the first one as well.) Strict isolationists and fringe "anti-imperialists" notwithstanding, most people saw military action against Milosevic's aggressive Serbian state as a necessary evil that delivered the people of Kosovo from a potentially grim fate, despite some wobbles in the prosecution of the war itself.

The best part of a decade has gone by since then but, quietly and almost unnoticed, the situation in Kosovo is once again giving serious cause for concern. Months of negotiations have failed to find a solution to the vexed question of Kosovo's "final status": the Albanian majority, who constitute 90% of the population, are strongly in favour of independence, but this would be utterly unacceptable both to Serbia and their patrons, the Russians, who have threatened a Security Council veto.

The international community's preferred option had been what was referred to as "supervised independence"; Kosovo would in effect become a sort of EU Mandate, with guarantees for the Serb minority, including self-government. This, too, was rejected by Serbia, and may no longer be on the table. Talks have stalled and there appears little realistic chance of progress.

However, two factors have now combined to shift the situation from merely intractable to downright urgent. The first is the UN's December 10^th deadline for a resolution to the talks on Kosovo's future; the second, last Saturday's parliamentary elections in the province, which were won by the Democratic Party of Kosovo, led by a former leader of the KLA guerrillas, Hashim Thaci. Thaci's victory has been compared to the electoral success of Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland; the moderates have been pushed to one side as ethnic Albanians grow tired of the protracted wrangling, and the Serb minority boycotted the polls altogether. Thaci now says that he will immediately and unilaterally declare independence if there is no agreement by December 10^th - which there ain't going to be. Western diplomats are trying to stave that off, but no-one knows if they'll succeed.

A UDI could set off a terrible chain reaction, with the prospect of a revolt by Kosovan Serbs which would surely draw support from Belgrade, possible knock-on effects in Bosnia (where the EU's peacekeeping mandate expires this week) and the 16,000 NATO troops of K-FOR sitting in the middle of the powder keg. Moreover, the crisis comes at a time when Russia shows absolutely no interest in playing nice with the West on a whole range of issues, let alone one as emotive for Slavs as this one, and the arm-flexing is not ending any time soon. The US, for its part, has said that it will recognise an independent Kosovo, but some EU members might not follow suit. The situation has all the makings - not to put too fine a point on it - of a gigantic clusterfuck.

The prospect of a fresh outbreak of violence in the middle of a harsh Balkan winter is very real, and causing a lot of sleepless nights. For the European Union, which has an almost pathological aversion to military conflict, this is shaping up as a foreign policy nightmare - memories of our utter inability to prevent bloodshed in the 1990's without American help are still very fresh.

Is it realistic to expect America to back European words with US boots on the ground? I doubt it, in an election year with a president focused on Iraq and Iran, but Bush may have no choice. It may be Pristina, not the Persian Gulf, where events force our hand - and soon.

Last week, Britain saw the first conviction of a woman under new anti-terror laws. Samina Malik, a 23 year-old from west London who worked in a bookshop in Heathrow Airport, had a wealth of literature in her home on such topics as bomb-making and hand-to-hand combat, as well as weapons manuals and something called "The Mujaheddin Poisoner's Handbook". Perhaps most revealing was her poetry; under the nom de plume of "the Lyrical Terrorist", Malik wrote poems like "How to Behead" and "The Living Martyrs" which explored her fascination with Islamic extremism: 

I always sit alone to think and ponder how it would be to unite with the Muslim ummah and to go shoot rocket-launchers, help them load their ammunition, nurse the wounded, and what the atmosphere would be like...

The clincher was a handwritten note on the back of a shop receipt which read, "The desire within me increases every day to go for martyrdom." She was found guilty of possessing material likely to be useful in terrorism and will be sentenced next month.

Should she be on her way to jail? A lot of people aren't convinced. This case seems to straddle the blurred line where the harmless meets the dangerous; no one wants to see poets imprisoned for conjuring up violent imagery, but the extensive list of "how-to" terrorist manuals and bomb-making information found in her apartment surely vindicate the authorities' decision to act. For those, like me, whose commitment to free speech is near-absolute, cases like these present real difficulties. Not having seen all the evidence for myself, I can only assume that the jury's decision was correct and that our streets are a little safer, but our anti-terrorist legislation is so broadly phrased that it is hard to read about this case without feeling some misgivings.

Others are clearer in their view of the case. Inayat Bunglawala, the ubiquitous spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), was in no doubt that this would have a chilling effect on freedom of thought in this country. "It is to be hoped that this case may yet serve as a demonstration of just how badly-framed some of our anti-terror legislation actually is", he wrote earlier this week.  "In a truly free society, it should not be a crime to merely download and read such material."
 
Groups such as the MCB brandish the banner of ‘free speech' quite frequently these days. When the think-tank Policy Exchange published a report into some of the copious Saudi-funded hate literature to be found in Britain's mosques, up popped Bunglawala on cue to unfurl the standard of civil liberty on their behalf. You wouldn't shut down a bookstore that sold Mein Kampf or Lolita, went the argument, so why pick on Muslim titles that explain how Jews are like pigs?

Bunglawala's passion for free speech bears all the zeal of the born-again. It wasn't so long ago that he was calling for The Satanic Verses to be banned and demonstrating in favour of Khomeini's fatwa - youthful hot-headedness he now regrets. Even now, though, he shows regrettable lapses. As the pseudonymous English blogger Gracchii notes in a recent post, the MCB's commitment to free speech seems to fizzle out when considering recent changes in British law that ban "religious hatred" which they're all in favour of. You can write screeds and screeds about how you would like to cut my head off for not being a Muslim and they will defend you to the hilt; but dare to criticise a religion that can order the victim of a gang-rape to be given 200 lashes and 6 months in jail, and you are on shakier ground.

More troubling still is the trope that pops up again and again in the discourse of Bunglawala, the Muslim Council and similar bodies. "The MCB considers [the knighthood for Rushdie] yet another example of insensitivity to Muslim opinion that will only result in their further alienation." The extradition of a computer programmer who ran terrorist websites would contribute to "further alienation" among Muslim youths. Publishing the Danish cartoons will have the "unfortunate outcome... that extremists are best placed to benefit from the situation". In all these cases the subtext is clear, because since home-grown suicide bombers hit the London Underground, we all know what "alienation" leads to, don't we? Engage with us, the MCB are saying, because if you don't listen to us we can't be responsible for what happens. The fact that they, like so many other "community leaders", are utterly unrepresentative of their constituents, is conveniently ignored. Until recently the British government humoured these people. No more, I'm glad to say; and their pride has been suitably dented.

This week, two Spanish cartoonists were found guilty of offending the royal family for depicting the Crown Prince and his wife having sex; fined over $4000 each, the magazine in which the offending cartoon was published pulled from newsstands all over the country by the police. I don't see bloggers sporting banners in defence of the Spanish cartoons; no sign of them on Michelle Malkin at time of writing. This antediluvian Spanish law shows that freedom of speech is never 100% safe even in a modern Western democracy, but has constantly to be safeguarded and fought for. I have no argument with the suggestion that freedom of speech should apply consistently and to all; that's just obviously true.

But you'll forgive me if I take the commitment of Mr Bunglawala and his ilk to free speech with a hefty pinch of salt. The term means something different, I suspect, to the Muslim Council of Britain.

In 2002, Tony Blair’s wife caused controversy by expressing some sympathy for the ‘plight’ of Palestinian suicide bombers, just hours after a bus bomb in Jerusalem killed 19 and injured over 40. (Whatever happened to suicide attacks in Israel, anyway? It’s like someone built a wall around the country.) “As long as young people feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up,” Cherie Blair said, “you are never going to make progress.”

Despite the fury at her remarks, she was doing no more than expressing the sort of view that is common in polite society in this country. Even among those genuinely and utterly opposed to the use of violence as a tactic in the Palestinians’ struggle for statehood, there is a widespread view that suicide bombing is the inevitable last resort of the poor, the dispossessed, and the hopeless. Though no moderate himself, London mayor Ken Livingstone echoed the thoughts of many when he said in July 2005 that while Israel has fighter jets and planes, Palestinians “only have their bodies” and “no other way to fight back” - this from a man whose city had just suffered its first suicide bombing three weeks previously. 

The idea that Palestinians do not have access to weapons is not one that need detain us long. But the belief that terrorism generally, and suicide bombing specifically, grow almost organically out of the nexus of political frustration and - crucially - economic deprivation, has become a commonplace, to the extent that even George Bush now enlists the war on terror as justification for signing up to ambitious foreign aid and poverty relief programs. Raise educational standards and give young people opportunities, the argument goes, and fewer of them will be tempted into the arms of the jihadists.

Well, maybe. But this conventional wisdom is challenged by a new book, What Makes a Terrorist: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism, by Princeton's Alan Krueger. In this month's American magazine Krueger, er, explodes the myth of suicide bomber as undereducated and materially deprived victim of circumstances. On the contrary:

The available evidence is nearly unanimous in rejecting either material deprivation or inadequate educa­tion as important causes of support for terrorism or participation in terrorist activities. Such explana­tions have been embraced almost entirely on faith, not scientific evidence.

Krueger’s thesis is based on a wide variety of sources. Prior to writing this book, he had studied hate crimes in the Germany of the 1990s and found no link between socioeconomic background and the incidence of violent attacks against foreigners. Drawing on this experience, Krueger turned first to global opinion surveys on support for terrorism, and then to those who actually participated in it – Palestinian suicide bombers and Hezbollah militants, and even members of Al-Qaeda.

In all cases, the research pointed the same way. Suicide bombers are far more likely to be from relatively well-to-do backgrounds than the average citizen, more likely to have a high school education, or even college educated. There’s a lot more in Krueger’s article that repays further reading but, as an economist, his thesis is clear; in the fight against terrorism, it is pointless to focus on the supply side. There will always be those who are willing to die for a cause, whether it’s because of nationalism, fanaticism or their personal circumstances. 

If we address one motivation and thus reduce one source on the supply side, there remain other motivations that will incite other people to terror.

That suggests to me that it makes sense to focus on the demand side, such as by degrading terrorist organizations’ financial and technical capabili­ties, and by vigorously protecting and promoting peaceful means of protest, so there is less demand for pursuing grievances through violent means. Policies intended to dampen the flow of people willing to join terrorist organizations, by contrast, strike me as less likely to succeed.

Perhaps it’s the phraseology that tempts so many people to think of the suicide bomber as dispossessed victim, using his own body as a last resort when all else has failed. The idea of honourable suicide, while it certainly exists in Western culture, has never been particularly deeply embedded in our psyche.

Catastrophic professional failures might in times past have been 'resolved' with a pearl-handled revolver in a locked room; nowadays such people won’t even resign without being dragged kicking and screaming towards the exit.  In the modern material world, suicide is, almost by definition, an act of hopelessness, carried out by those who are deeply miserable with their lives. We feel an instinctive sympathy for the suicide; horror at the forces that must have driven them to an act of such shuddering finality. As Karol Sheinin correctly points out elsewhere on these pages, when we look at the plight of ordinary Gazans, it is a hard-hearted observer indeed who does not feel the most profound despair and sympathy for their wretched plight. The idea that suicide can be born not of hopelessness and deprivation but of fanaticism and hatred is such an alien one to our way of thinking that we clutch at familiar tropes instead.

I think the time for such lazy thinking is past. I don’t imagine that the phrase “suicide bomber” began life as a euphemism, but it certainly reads as one nowadays. Far better, I think, Christopher Hitchens’ favoured formulation, “suicide murderers”. The suicide may be central to their ideology, but it’s the murder that’s the principal sin in mine. Sure, it’s a heavily loaded term, but if we can’t use pointed language to describe people willing to immolate themselves and innocent civilians in the name of religion, then we all have bigger problems anyway.

Great stuff from Santiago, Chile, where one of the crowned heads of Europe has finally spoken up for an increasingly bored silent majority by publicly telling Hugo Chavez to go and fuck himself. 

Spain's King Juan Carlos told Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez to "shut up" as the Ibero-American summit drew to a close in Santiago, Chile.

The outburst came after Mr Chavez called former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar a "fascist". Mr Chavez then interrupted Spanish PM Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's calls for him to be more diplomatic, prompting the king's outburst. [...]

Mr Chavez called Mr Aznar, a close ally of US President George W Bush, a fascist, adding "fascists are not human. A snake is more human."

Mr Zapatero said: "[Former Prime Minister] Aznar was democratically elected by the Spanish people and was a legitimate representative of the Spanish people."

Mr Chavez repeatedly tried to interrupt, despite his microphone being turned off. The king leaned forward and said: "Why don't you shut up?"

Not only that, but JC's choice of phrase - "¿Por qué no te callas?" - was the sort of thing you might say to a particularly obnoxious teenager.

To the King's eternal credit, it silenced Chavez - but, predictably, the respite was brief. By yesterday, he was accusing Juan Carlos of complicity in the abortive 2002 coup, and launching the fightback: "I think it's imprudent for a king to shout at a president to shut up", he was quoted as saying. "Mr King, we are not going to shut up."

Maybe not. But if it takes an unelected monarch to speak truth to power, then so be it.

Some long-overdue good news - perhaps - from Turkey yesterday, where the European Union's carrot-and-stick approach, so often criticised in the past, may be about to see the repeal, or at least reform, of the Turkish penal code's infamous Article 301, which bans ‘insults' against Turkish identity or national institutions on pain of jail. The article has been used to prosecute Orhan Pamuk and Hrant Dink, among others; though both were acquitted, of course, Dink tragically did not escape the ultra-nationalist's ‘justice' for long.

In the light of the furore over the Foxman affair, it's worth recalling that the situation in Turkey is one without parallel in the Western world (and since that is the category into which nation aspires to be bracketed, let's run with that for the time being). It's only a few months since the European Union unveiled plans (eventually diluted) to make Holocaust denial a crime EU-wide, and several member states maintain and enforce Holocaust denial statutes rigorously, as David Irving found to his cost. Yet in Turkey it is not genocide denial which is the criminal offence but genocide affirmation.

Opinion is divided on what happened to the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire 90 years ago. Everyone else in the world says they were systematically massacred; Turkey says they weren't. If the historical debate was closed long ago, the Turkish state seems to have misinterpreted the resulting consensus. The rethink on Article 301, then, is not the fruit of introspection but has been forced on them by the EU, whose enlargement Commissioner, Olli Rehn, presented a report on Tuesday that was highly critical of continuing restrictions on free speech in the most high-profile of its aspirant members:

"The infamous article 301 must be repealed or amended without delay," Mr Rehn suggested [...] "This is not acceptable in a European democracy that writers, journalists, academics and other intellectuals are prosecuted for simply expressing a critical but completely non-violent opinion."

That was the stick. The carrot was a promise to open negotiations on the judicial and human rights chapters of accession talks as soon as the penal code was cleaned up to Brussels' satisfaction. This may be the first step in that process.

Europeans are wont to compare their masterful use of ‘soft power' with the heavy-handed, bull-in-the-china-shop belligerence of American policy, though we've heard less crowing from that quarter since the good-cop bad-cop routine with Iran went tits-up. Ankara can hardly be compared with Tehran, of course, but the principle remains the same; draw them in rather than freeze them out, more leverage with friends than enemies, etc. etc. It's reasoning such as this that leads Tony Blair to visit Gaddafi's tent, or the EU to invite the likes of Mugabe to their summits; a touching but naïve belief that since we put aside our differences by setting up a giant talking shop, it'll work with others too.

The problem with is that Turkish public opinion has long since grown tired of this elaborate diplomatic dance; there's little appetite for further concessions. The saber-rattling in Kurdistan shows that Ankara is not afraid to give the West the finger when it sees fit. Nor is there much real enthusiasm on the Continent for Turkish accession, except in London: and even here you can be sure that if there were any realistic prospect of Turkish entry into the EU the tabloid press would swing into full scaremongering mode - just think of all the swarthy immigrants! - and the government would start backtracking at some speed. Moreover, several other EU members have stated their outright hostility to Turkey joining the Union, and that's not likely to change any time soon.

So whilst the repeal of Article 301 is clearly good news, one swallow does not make a summer; it doesn't presage any real shift in Turkey's official stance towards the Armenian genocide, which remains utterly hardline, and it doesn't mean that the path to acceptance in the European family of nations is going to get any smoother.

Heartwarming scenes in Kampala, Uganda, today, as emissaries from the notorious Lord's Resistance Army arrived in the city on a rather belated mission of peace. The gruesome civil war has been going on for over two decades since President Museveni took power in a coup in 1986, but it seems the end may finally be in sight. The rebels are in town for the first time since the war began all those years ago to talk peace with government officials, and they certainly talk the talk:

LRA spokesman Godfrey Ayoo admitted that the team had security fears about their visit but insisted that they will forge ahead with their mission.

"The value of what we are doing starting today is much higher than the fear, we want this to be the last conflict in Uganda whereby people will never again take up weapons to resolve their problems"

Stirring stuff indeed. It's a bit late, of course, for the tens of thousands who have died in the years of fighting, but better one sinner repenteth than ninety and nine who have no need, right? Well, maybe. But the LRA's belated decision to talk turkey is, as you might expect, less about peace and reconciliation and more to do with their growing isolation.

Even by the standards of African conflicts, the Ugandan civil war has been particularly pointless and bloody. The government has been guilty of war crimes, but in the Lord's Resistance Army it has found itself up against an almost unbelievably brutal band of rebels who have shown themselves willing to stoop to almost unbelievable levels in their fight for power.

The LRA's activities were laid bare in a chilling Vanity Fair article by Christopher Hitchens last year (one that I urge you to read when you have the chance), and among the most nightmarish aspects of their rebellion, apart from their fondness for cutting off the breasts, lips and noses in the villages they raid, has been their widespread use of children, both as soldiers and sexual slaves. Terrified of being abducted and forced into service as soldiers, the children walk for miles every night to towns and shelters where they can find a measure of safety, thus earning the name "night commuters". Hitch:

Here's what happens to the children who can't run fast enough, or who take the risk of sleeping in their huts in the bush. I am sitting in a rehab center, talking to young James, who is 11 and looks about 9. When he actually was nine and sleeping at home with his four brothers, the L.R.A. stormed his village and took the boys away. They were roped at the waist and menaced with bayonets to persuade them to confess what they could not know-the whereabouts of the Ugandan Army's soldiers.

On the subsequent forced march, James underwent the twin forms of initiation practiced by the L.R.A. He was first savagely flogged with a wire lash and then made to take part in the murder of those children who had become too exhausted to walk any farther. "First we had to watch," he says. "Then we had to join in the beatings until they died." He was spared from having to do this to a member of his family, which is the L.R.A.'s preferred method of what it calls "registration." And he was spared from being made into a concubine or a sex slave, because the L.R.A. doesn't tolerate that kind of thing for boys. It is, after all, "faith-based." Excuse me, but it does have its standards.

The turning point in the LRA's fortunes seems to have been the 2005 peace deal in Sudan, which deprived them of the succor and support of the Islamist government in Khartoum. A strange, if not unholy, alliance, given the LRA's Christian fanaticism and their claims to be inspired by the Ten Commandments - but convenient for the Sudanese; their own troublesome rebels were supported by the Ugandan government prior to the peace deal, so it made sense to provide the LRA with bases to launch their attacks on the Ugandan regime. And so two sets of proxies were employed to sow violence and death in their neighbors' countries. A squalid mess indeed.

There are still sticking points, most notably over the International Criminal Court's arrest warrant against the LRA leader, Joseph Kony, a self-professed spirit medium and fearsome thug, who is wanted for crimes including the killing of children and mutilation of civilians. President Museveni has stated that he is happy for rebel leaders to submit themselves to traditional tribal justice such as mato oput, in which the offenders accept responsibility for their actions and make reparations to the families of their victims, before sharing a bitter drink made from the herbs and root of the oput tree. But the ICC are, understandably, not wild about letting mass murderers off with a punishment barely worse than a challenge from Survivor, fearing it may set a worrying precedent.

Whatever happens, cynicism should not blind us to the reality that 21 years of suffering may be coming to an end for the Ugandan people. But cynicism is hard to shake. The leader of the LRA delegation that traveled to Kampala today, Martin Ojul, made a dramatic symbolic gesture for the assembled press in an attempt to affirm his movement's seriousness about the peace talks. Unfortunately, though - well, here's the guy from Reuters:

As a symbol of what he said was the LRA's commitment to peace, he released a live dove into the air, which flapped about before flopping downwards into the lap of a diplomat.

Let's hope the humans can do a bit better.

They came in their hundreds. Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah is in Britain to pay a visit on Her Majesty, and he ain't travelling incognito. The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques showed up at Heathrow yesterday in five - count ‘em, five - jumbo jets, with an entourage of 400 assorted princelings, aides and factotums in tow (all male, naturally), and 84 limousines were on hand to whisk the royal visitors to a variety of top London hotels; Buckingham Palace doesn't have space for them all. This is clearly not a man who gives a shit about his carbon footprint.

His visit is not without controversy. Even before he left home, Abdullah gave an interview to the BBC in which he claimed - and you're going to like this - that Britain was "not doing enough to fight terrorism". As soon as he arrived, human rights protesters were out on the streets, protesting against the brutal treatment meted out to criminals, homosexuals, and women who fall foul of the strict religious laws of the repressive kingdom. The negative press coverage was hardly ameliorated by a risible statement this morning from Foreign Office minister Kim Howells, who opined to general hilarity that the two states could "unite around their shared values", whatever the hell they may be.

The protesters who greeted King Abdullah today wouldn't stand a chance, though, even if they weren't outnumbered four to one by the monarch's retinue. British trade with Saudi Arabia is worth a very great deal of money; we send billions of pounds' worth of commercial exports to the Kingdom, not least in arms. Last year, a long-running probe into corruption charges surrounding a massive defence contract for 72 Typhoon Eurofighters was abruptly cancelled on the orders of Tony Blair, after diplomatic pressure from the Saudis. And then of course there is the small matter of 25% of the world's known oil reserves. Even more crucially, Saudi Arabia is a powerful ally in a region where those are few or far between. He may be a bastard, as the old saying goes, but at least he's our bastard.

But is he? It was [perhaps] unfortunate timing that his visit coincided with the publication a major report by a British think tank, Policy Exchange (pdf here), on the prevalence of extremist hate literature in Britain's mosques, which concluded that much of it came directly from the Kingdom. The malign influence of Saudi petrodollars in spreading the particularly intolerant strain of Islam known as Wahhabism is a well-documented phenomenon, but even so, this report makes sobering reading. Researchers despatched to a wide sample of mosques in the UK found literature in 25% that they assessed as ‘radical' and ‘extremist' in nature. These were not just small underground radical bookshops run by obscure sects, but large community mosques and education centres funded by Saudi initiatives and, in some cases, officially opened by members of the British Royal Family.

Here, for example, is an excerpt from a textbook for High School Grade 1 pupils (11 year-old boys) at the King Fahd Academy in London, titled Al-Hadith wa'l-thaqafa al-Islamiyya [Prophetic Tradition and Islamic Culture]. The name may not be familiar, but the gist will be: 

Protocols of the Elders of Zion:

It is a secret document which is thought to come out of ‘the conference of Bal.' It was revealed in the nineteenth century. The Jews tried to deny its existence, but there is a great deal of evidence which proves its existence and the fact that its source was indeed the Elders of Zion. We can summarise the content of the protocols with these points:

1 To shake the foundation of the current world society and its system of governing, in order to allow Zionism to exclusively rule the world.

2 The destruction of Nationalism and religions, especially the Christian nations. 

3 To work towards increasing the corruption of the current governing European regimes, for Zionism believes in their corruption and elimination.

4 Controlling of media, propaganda, and newspaper venues. Using gold to instigate instabilities. Tempting the masses with physical pleasures and spreading pornography.

The indisputable evidence of the truth of the existence of these Protocols and their contents of the hell-raising Jewish plans is: the fact that a lot of the schemes, conspiracies, and instigations found in it have been implemented. Although it was written in the nineteenth century, it will become clear to anyone who reads it the extent of how many of its articles have been implemented.

I repeat for emphasis that this is a textbook used in a flagship London academy which operates under the direction of the Saudi embassy, teaches around 1000 pupils including the children of Arab diplomats, and has in its time been visited by the Prince of Wales, Baroness Thatcher and her successor John Major, as well as Abdullah himself and his late half-brother, King Fahd, after whom the school was named.

The report contains scores of similar examples, from texts on the stoning of ‘adulterers and sodomisers', through injunctions against mixing with Christians, to a charming volume called "Women who deserve to go to Hell" that I might just pick up myself. And time after time, the books were clearly of Saudi Arabian origin; stamped with Saudi imprimaturs, or marked "not for sale" because they had been distributed free of charge by the Kingdom and its agents. As the report's conclusion states (p169), "The shadow of Saudi Arabia falls heavily across these pages".

This isn't solely a British problem; a particular problem in the US is the radicalisation of young Muslims in prisons, by groups such as the Al Haramain Islamic Foundation, which distribute radical pamphlets and Wahhabi translations of the Koran inside US jails, as described in The Weekly Standard last year by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, who once worked for Al-Haramain (and is, among other things, the only Jew I've ever met who converted twice; first to Islam and then to Christianity). The Saudis use their oil wealth to proselytise on a vast, global scale.

It's been estimated by a leading writer on the Wahhabi sect that the House of Saud has spent some $70 billion on Islamist missionary work since 1979. But if it's difficult to control such immense sums of money, it's impossible to control the consequences of spreading such radical teachings to mosques, schools and madrassahs around the world. Many of the extremists that their seed money helped to nurture now believe that the Saudi royals are corrupt and decadent (hard to disagree with that, of course); we may see them as intolerant, brutal reactionaries, but to radical Islamists, it seems, Saudi ultrafundamentalism doesn't go far enough. Hence Osama bin Laden's stated aim of overthrowing the dynasty and the 2003 bomb campaign in that country; and hence the Saudi royals' newfound concern in fighting terrorism. Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap; or at least so it says in my holy book.

We walk a fine line when we treat with dictators, human rights abusers and intolerant regimes, whether theocratic or not. It is clearly unrealistic to expect Britain and the US to suddenly cut all ties with Saudi Arabia, and the consequences of such a move might potentially be disastrous. And it's a fantasy to imagine that the fall of the House of Saud would lead to a cuddly liberal democracy springing up in the Arabian peninsula; after the brief flurry of starry-eyed idealism that saw neoconservatives proclaiming that the Arabs were ready for democracy, the State Department seems to have looked at the gains made by Islamists in countries like Egypt, Sudan and Palestine where they have been able to contest national elections, and come to the conclusion that Arabs may or may not be ready for democracy, but we are probably not prepared for its results.

But, as realistic as I am, I'm glad that I am not the only one who watches us sign ever more lucrative contracts with these people and grow ever more dependent on their oil, and watches our politicians bow and scrape and promise tough talk on human rights that everybody knows is insincere bullshit... and wonders if there really is no alternative to simply gritting our teeth and sucking it up, let alone putting Her Majesty (pbuh) through all this for the sake of a few fighter planes. We put up with it because we believe the benefits outweigh the costs, but it seems to me that we ask for - and get - very little in return, except a massive global program of state-exported bigotry and intolerance that now threatens our own way of life in the most direct way imaginable.

"There needs now", concludes the Policy Exchange report, "to be a proper audit of the costs and benefits of the Saudi-UK relationship." I'll second that.

Alexander Lukashenko, the wannabe despot in charge of Belarus, has fairly been described as "Europe's last dictator". Of course, like any self-respecting authoritarian these days, he is fond of the veneer of accountability, and does submit himself for re-election now and again; at the last one, in March 2006, he won well over 80% of the vote, albeit with the help of a compliant state-run media that refused to mention his opponent, Alexander Milinkevich (who coincidentally has a strange tendency to get picked up by police every few weeks, accused of everything from drunk driving to drug trafficking). With admirable frankness, Lukashenko later admitted to rigging the elections - but claimed, brilliantly, that he'd had no choice but to fiddle the numbers, because the true figure - 93.5% - was just too embarrassing.

Lukashenko has shut down opposition newspapers, used the riot police to break up unlicensed rallies (try getting a license), and rewritten the constitution to remove term limits from the Presidency which he has now graced for 13 years. He presides over a Soviet-style command economy and a secret police that would have Vladimir Putin drooling. And he gives good megalomaniac, too; TV stations get memos advising them on approved colour schemes for their news sets, and his official website is a joy to behold ("A.G. Lukashenko is notable for his in-depth understanding of events, hard work, sense of duty, realism, fairness and fidelity to principle"). Yep, when it comes to tinpot dictatorship, ‘Lucky' Lukashenko is old school.

He's also resolutely anti-capitalist and anti-American, which explains why he likes to seek out the company of nutballs like Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and it is therefore unsurprising that a small but vocal group on the fringes of the Left are quite fond of him. Witness Jonathan "Darfur ain't that bad" Steele in the Guardian newspaper before last year's rigged election, bigging up the moustachioed strongman:

Would you expect a European leader who has presided over a continual increase in real wages for several years, culminating in a 24% rise over the past 12 months, to be voted out of office? What if he has also cut VAT, brought down inflation, halved the number of people in poverty in the past seven years, and avoided social tensions by maintaining the fairest distribution of incomes of any country in the region?

Of course not, you would say. In Bill Clinton's famous phrase, "it's the economy, stupid". Unless there are overriding issues of political or personal insecurity - incipient civil war, ethnic cleansing, mass arrests, pervasive crime on the streets - most people will vote according to their pocketbooks. And so it is likely to be in Belarus in nine days' time.

Why, then, are western governments, echoed by most western media, developing a crescendo of one-sided reporting and comment on one of Europe's smallest countries?

And so on. Even Steele doesn't go so far as to suggest that Lukashenko is a socialist's wet dream, but the message is pretty clear; my enemy's enemy is my buddy, and what's a couple of jailed opposition leaders between friends?

Well, Lukashenko's back in the news this week, but not, sad to report, for the reasons he might have chosen. No matter; among the lunatic left, his kudos is unlikely to have been harmed too much by the unguarded comments he made to journalists last week.

Talking to a group of Russian journalists on October 12 about the past living conditions of the southeastern town of Babruysk, Lukashenka said, "It was scary to enter, it was a pigsty. That was mainly a Jewish town -- and you know how Jews treat the place where they are living."

"Look at Israel, I've been [there]. I really don't want to offend anyone -- but they don't care much about, say, grass being cut, like in Moscow," Lukashenka said, in comments broadcast live on national radio.

Lukashenka also called on Jews "with money" to return to Babruysk, once a thriving Jewish center. Last year, the town, as the host of a harvest festival, received a large injection of state cash. [...]

Valeri Karbalevitch, a political commentator at RFE/RL's Belarusian Service, said Lukashenka has made anti-Semitic statements in the past, for instance comparing dishonest oligarchs with Jews, or likening his critics to people with "hooked noses." [...] But this time, Karbalevitch said he believes that Lukashenka's comments were "simply a slip of the tongue."

No doubt those who rushed to condemn Martin Amis for his rather unreconstructed comments about Muslims will be equally quick to decry Lukashenko's "slip of the tongue". Or maybe they'll claim that he was mistranslated; he didn't say "pigsty", he said "manger", it's all a State Department conspiracy, actually a charming fellow, blah blah blah. You know the drill. Anyway, it's not anti-Semitic to point out that the Zionists don't maintain their gardens properly. (I mean, what?)

The fallback position will no doubt be that Lucky is more Borat than Ahmadinejad; a casual anti-Semite, not a potentially dangerous player on the world stage. (Which of us, after all, has not accidentally referred to hook-nosed Jews living in ‘pigsties' from time to time?) Well, maybe. Oh, wait, here's something interesting; a speech he gave last Thursday.

Belarusian President Aleksander Lukashenko on Thursday declared his government 'willing to consider' a return of nuclear weapons to the country, and hinted a US plan to deploy missiles to Central Europe might well serve as a catalyst. Asked about his attitude towards a Washington proposal to base anti-missile missiles in East Europe, Lukashenko responded: 'Belarus would react extremely negatively.'

Great.

Headlines were made in Britain this week when it emerged that some checkout workers at one of our largest supermarket chains, Sainsbury’s, are refusing to handle alcohol products because of their Muslim beliefs. The supermarket has pronounced itself happy to accommodate their sensibilities, and so if your cashier objects to the bottle of wine you’ve got in your basket, you’ll have to wait for another member of staff to come across and ring the purchase through for you. There has been some pleasingly acerbic commentary from the blogosphere as a result, notably Scottish schoolteacher Shuggy, who’s now on the lookout for a new posting:

Quite. But a private retailer is perfectly entitled to make whatever arrangements it sees fit with its employees; if my local Sainsbury’s has long lines at the checkout, maybe next time I’ll take my custom elsewhere. The consequences of allowing people to pick and choose which parts of their jobs they are happy to perform, however, go much further than queuing to buy booze. Some Muslim doctors in the British National Health Service are going so far as to purposely avoid lectures on alcohol-related or sexually transmitted diseases, because it offends their religious beliefs. From the Sunday Times:

Nor, of course, is this solely a Muslim issue. In the US such religious considerations are more often voiced by Christian doctors, particularly in the context of emergency contraception and fertility treatments. Notable cases have included a lesbian woman in California was refused artificial insemination because of her sexual orientation, and a doctor in Washington refused to fill out the prescription that would have put lead in a gay man’s pencil.

Religious groups argue that individual physicians and pharmacists should be allowed to choose what procedures they will perform (being pro-choice isn’t always bad, then, eh?). And some degree of accommodation for religious sensibilities does seem sensible – no doctor is forced to perform abortions, and indeed many on both sides of the Atlantic do not, and this is surely right.

But abortion in the US and UK is, by and large, freely available. You schedule an appointment to have the procedure done and it is done; you don’t give a damn if someone has passed on performing it. And, despite the best efforts of activists, time limits are generally fairly generous; a delay of a day or two is seldom of much consequence. But not all medical situations have time on their side.

Picture the case of the woman who has been raped and goes to an emergency room to try and get the morning-after pill, only to be turned away on religious grounds. It’s been claimed – by a pro-choice Catholic group – that only 167 of 597 Catholic hospitals in the US offer emergency contraception to women who have been raped. Quite apart from the emotional distress involved in having to go from hospital to hospital to find a non-judgemental pharmacist (“I sympathise, honey, but you don’t have the right to kill that baby”), emergency contraception is more effective the quicker it is taken. (Nor, by the way, is this a mere debating point. It’s estimated that there are 25,000 pregnancies in the US every year as a result of rape. Read that sentence again.)

Freedom of religion is an important right and, in the sphere of private worship, inviolable, but it seems to me that if you take the Hippocratic oath then you don’t get to turn patients away at the door because you don’t approve of their lifestyles. I say this as a libertarian who believes, strongly, in an individual’s freedom to believe whatever he likes and practice his religion accordingly. But when we have a situation where doctors are not even willing to learn about diseases like gonorrhea, or cirrhosis of the liver, simply because they disapprove of the lifestyle choices that hasten their onset, then those choices are putting lives at risk, and that’s just not acceptable. Refusing to show up for those bits of the course you don’t care for just shouldn’t be an option.

And who’s to say it ends here? What about white supremacists that don’t want to treat black patients? Are we to permit Christian fundamentalists to refuse treatment to drug users? Democrats? Jews? (If so, that’s Aaron Sorkin fucked.) And if you think that’s ridiculous, exactly what is the bloody difference? If you call yourself a doctor, and you’re tempted – even for a second – to pass on treating a patient with liver damage because your religion forbids you from drinking alcohol, you might want to stop and ask yourself if you aren’t in the wrong profession. Wouldn’t you be happier cutting hair or running a dry cleaner’s instead? 

Bigotry is bigotry, no matter what religious garb you dress it in. It’s a shame so many people are willing to make excuses for it.

An emotional Sylvester Stallone told the Associated Press this week that he had witnessed some horrendous things during the filming of his action movie “John Rambo” on the Thai-Burmese border recently. “Survivors with legs cut off and all kinds of land-mine injuries, maggot-infested wounds and ears cut off… We hear about Vietnam and Cambodia and this was more horrific.”

Sly’s political antennae have always been finely tuned. The last time we saw John Rambo, you will recall, was some twenty years ago, when he almost single-handedly liberated [sic] the people of Afghanistan from Soviet rule in Rambo III, a movie that immediately entered the Guinness Book of Records as the most violent ever made. I say ‘almost’ single-handedly because Rambo doesn’t have to do everything himself, of course; he enlists the help of the plucky mujahideen to kick the invaders’ collective ass, and the film is famously, if with hindsight slightly ironically, dedicated “to the gallant people of Afghanistan”. Sample dialogue:

Mousa: This is Afghanistan... Alexander the Great try to conquer this country... then Genghis Khan, then the British. Now Russia. But Afghan people fight hard, they never be defeated. Ancient enemy make prayer about these people... you wish to hear?
Rambo: Um-hum.
Mousa: Very good. It says, 'May God deliver us from the venom of the Cobra, teeth of the tiger, and the vengeance of the Afghan.' Understand what this means?
Rambo: That you guys don't take any shit?
Mousa: Yes... something like this.

Rambo was scarcely the only celluloid franchise to lionize the bravery of the mujahideen, of course; perhaps the apogee of this late 80’s trend was The Living Daylights’ ludicrous, Oxford-educated Kamran Shah, who helps a grateful James Bond escape from a Russian airbase in a commandeered cargo plane. (Hollywood, for all its faults, sniffs the zeitgeist carefully. By 1994, Art Malik’s heroic mujahideen rebel had morphed, with eerie prescience, into True Lies’ controversial Arab terrorist, Salim Abu Aziz, threatening to “rain fire” on American cities unless US troops were pulled out of “the Persian Gulf area immediately and forever”.)

The Afghan freedom fighters were anti-imperialists for the Reagan era; Rambo gave us license to cheer on the good guys against a easily identified enemy, but was careful not to require us to bring our brains into the theater if we didn’t want to; no complicated politics for audiences to digest, just a quick set-up to establish that the Soviets were the bad guys and on with the shooting.

So if the grizzled Vietnam vet is now setting his sights on the bastards who now subjugate the Burmese people, maybe there is hope yet for this forsaken corner of the world. Rambo doesn’t have the time, or inclination, to wrestle with the great geopolitical issues of our day; he was never a political animal, after all, but just wanted to be left alone. Stallone says that he decided on Burma by phoning up Soldier of Fortune magazine and asking them who the worst guys in the world were, a conversation I would have paid good money to listen in on. (“It’s who?”) It may be a crassly simplistic way of getting across a complex political message, but if this dull-witted action hero reminds ordinary moviegoers of a long-forgotten injustice, than maybe some good will come of it after all.

Lest you be tempted to belittle the Stallone effect, witness the shameless bandwagon-jumping on the part of the UN’s infamous Human Rights Council, who this week caused a minor sensation by adding Burma to the hitherto rather short list of countries singled out for censure by that august body. In fact, until Sly weighed in earlier this week, only one country had ever been condemned by the UNHRC (I won’t demean your intelligence by wondering if you can guess which one). Hell, even the Chinese voted for censure – having carefully vetoed an earlier Security Council resolution to the same effect. The pecs may not ripple quite as brightly as before, but John Rambo still has the power to make men tremble, and we can learn a surprising amount from watching cultural trends, however low-brow. If I were a Sudanese government minister, I’d take out a subscription to Variety.

This week's guest editor is Mr Eugenides of the eponymous blog. No, that's not his real name. No, he isn't the author of The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex. Yes, he is full of Anglo rage. Perhaps this is him as a child.