The Politics of Dancing

The Unmentionable Odor of Death Welcome to 2015  Amidst the mass of justifications, apologia and weasel words that poured out following the Charlie Hebdo massacre, few comments were quite as disgusting as  the cry that has gone up if satirizing religion was ok why not to make jokes about the holocaust? Here is the execrable Mehdi Hasan:-   “Has your publication, for example, run cartoons mocking the Holocaust? No? How about caricatures of the 9/11 victims falling from the twin towers? I didn’t think so…” Mehdi Hasan Well once you manage to clamber over your sense of disgust and pondering of the question of “why would you want to,” you soon realize that sand is being thrown in your eyes. As David Paxton points out in his brilliant dissection , by far and away the best piece written about the Charlie Hebdo affair:-  ‘ Mocking Islam is not the same as antisemitism. Why? Because anti-Judaism is not the same as antisemitism. They were not abusing all...

For anyone considering voting Green this coming May I would say consider the US Presidential elections of 2000 and the role played by the Greens presidential candidate Ralph Nader. The 2000 election was of course famously close, a few votes more here or there deciding a contest that finally ended in the debacle of the Florida on/off recount. What may have been lost on this side of the pond was the role of the Green Party’s candidate Ralph Nader. To quote The Huffington Post “ Nader was indispensable to the Republican Party.” Nader cost the Democratic Party at least two states, Florida and New Hampshire, victory in these states would have won the presidency for Al Gore. Again to quote Huffington, “Nader drained at least 2 to 5 times as many voters from the Democratic candidate as he did from the Republican Bush.” In short the Green Party candidate was the spoiler who gifted the White House to George W Bush. The rest, as they say, is history.  It is perhaps worth a moment’...

  IT’S ALL OUR  FAULT Masochism and the War with Islamism It rained heavily the day after the massacre at the offices of Charlie Hebdo. The downpour felt apposite.  As I watched the scenes from France, Paris and London never felt so close. As indeed did Berlin, Madrid, Rome and all the other great capitals of Europe. That is how it should be, for it was Europe and the ideals of the European enlightenment that were under attack, in short, ‘Je Suis Charlie.’ However after the massacre, like insects after an earthquake, the apologists, the masochistic self-hating liberals and Islamist fellow travellers of the far left came crawling out from under their stones. It seems now that there is no act of barbarity too great that they will not seek to justify it. The usual mantra being it’s all our fault. It is Western Imperialism, the legacy of colonialism, the adventures of Tony Blair, it is poverty, and it is cultural hegemony, Western materialism or cultural insensiti...

Thoughts On The New Year, Politics and Anti-Semitism The odd thing about the first few days in January are that whilst they are supposed to represent a fresh start, a time for new beginnings, in reality they are infused with the stale debris of the year just gone. This in the form of discarded Christmas trees, decorations needing to be placed in bags and boxes, to be stored away until Christmas comes again. You did this last year and the year before that, stretching back in time. Thus the New Year is stained by familiarity, nothing changes. I was lifted from these rather depressing thought by the arrival of freezing fog. I have always like fog, the way it cloaks the familiar, shrouding the trees and houses in mystery; things look different, unfamiliar. The best writing about fog I have ever read comes from Jean Paul Sartre’s classic existential novel, Nausea . He inhabits the fog with a real sense of menace. In fog, as Sherlock Holmes would know, murders are committed. ...