Now not only has the British National Party got its own Jewish candidate, so has the French Front National. Madame Arrouas does point out in her defence that some of Le Pen’s best friends are Jewish.
I remember when Britain’s (now defunct) National Front used to have a couple of black stooges who would speak to the media on their behalf back in the 70s so I suppose there’s a precedent for this strangeness.
This story combines this week’s weird sex theme with the Chewbacca Defence approach to getting your client off the hook.
This guy has one of the funkiest sets of academic homepages I have ever seen. Check out his collection of optical illusions—many of them animated. (Clicking on a thumbnail on the right takes you to the corresponding illusion.) Would you believe I arrived at his site by clicking on an uncaptioned image of a large-breasted blonde woman dressed in green?
Today the Stop the War Coalition will be marching in London against the “war”. I wonder how many of those caring sharing people will have even registered “the worst humanitarian situation in the world” (the words of the UN co-ordinator for Sudan).
WARNING: Only follow the link if you have already seen the movie. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Exorcist performed in 30 seconds by cartoon bunnies.
Not having a television, I missed the full horror of events on Budget day.
(In The Times on Thursday, Anatole Kaletsky explained in rather more detail than I did why Gordon Brown has completely outflanked the Tories. [Since it’s the London Times there’s no free access for you dirty foreigners, but then you probably don’t care that much about the UK budget anyway.])
First Tiger Woods; now Michelle Wie. She’s was born in Honolulu 14 years ago. She’s 6′ tall. She can hit a golfball 300yds. If she grows up without burning out she’s going to win everything in sight.
It took nearly 40 years, the invention of the Internet and $30m of Mel Gibson’s money, but it looks like Jesus could be getting bigger than The Beatles—in more ways than one.
(Of course, The Beatles don’t have the unfair advantage of being able to come back from the dead.)
Stop me if I’m getting boring about this, but…
I’ve just come upon a banner ad showing the edge of a crown of thorns and bearing the message
“You’ve seen the movie
Now understand its meaning”
. It leads to this page where the Catholic church takes full advantage of a golden marketing opportunity.
Don’t get a job; get a vocation.
Now Leasey is back at work to read this, I can congratulate her on passing her driving test and having two one-inch molars removed from her head without dying from the loss of blood. Well done!
Rod Liddle continues to rant incoherently about the Hutton Inquiry that comprehensively battered the show he used to produce, Radio 4’s Today Programme. In tomorrow’s Spectator, he contributes a similarly incoherent, but stimulating, piece about the relationship between the nominally Christian West and Islam. His argument is roughly along these lines:
It’s wrong, but register with The Spectator‘s unnecessarily confused Website and do a search for the article yourself—linking to the magazine’s drunken weave of pages is a mug’s game. Here’s a sample:
“If we are going to be phobic, here is something that we have a right to be phobic about. Fear of and aversion to Islam is as good a description of the mindset of our Western, Christian-lite societies as it is possible to get. Perhaps more than anything else, we are averse to the numbing certitudes and absolutism of Islam, something absent from most Christian doctrine (even from mainstream Roman Catholicism) for the best part of a century.
Not so long ago, I rang up the (moderate) Islam Information Centre and asked what would happen to me, an unbeliever, when I died. “You will go to hell,” replied the friendly and helpful young press officer, “where you will be continually doused with boiling water.” There was no malice in his reply, it was simply a matter of fact. I asked the same question of the Church of England and its response was, “Umm, sorry, haven’t a clue. We can’t be sure, mate. It’s all a bit of a mystery, death.”
There’s a bit of a problem with that link to Bruce Anderson’s Spectator article about The Passion, “Christianity and Judaism Cannot Be Reconciled”, so I’ve inserted a couple of choice quotes in my original post about it.
Also, some have suggested that this link might go to someone else’s illegal mirror of the Anderson piece. You might believe them, but I couldn’t possibly comment.
The British National Party’s leaders have managed to disguise their true intentions so successfully that they could have given themselves a new problem to solve.
Writing an article titled ” Christianity and Judaism cannot be reconciled”, Bruce Anderson of The Spectator might be the only person on the planet who agrees with me (up to a point) about The Passion. Unlike me, he’s seen the film and recently read the Bible. (Unlike everyone else I’ve linked to on the matter, I don’t think he studied at Balliol.)
[Mel Gibson] has been accused of glorying in gore, of pandering to sadomasochism, of turning the Gospel story into an anti-Semitic snuff movie. All these criticisms lead to one conclusion: that the critics have not read the Gospels.
The anti-Semitism is in the Gospels, especially Matthew. “Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be upon us and on our children.” If anything, Mr Gibson could be charged with political correctness. Although his Jewish mob shouts the words in Aramaic, they are not translated in the subtitles. In this film, the Roman soldiers beat and abuse Christ all along the route to Golgotha. That is not in the Gospels. One Roman soldier also sneers “Jew” at Simon of Cyrene: another invention of Mr Gibson’s. It is as if he wishes to retreat from the message of the Gospels and spread the blame more evenly between the Jews and Romans.
You might have to register (for free) with The Spectator site to view the article, but it’s worth the minor inconvenience involved. Here’s my original post, by the way.
It’s Budget day in the UK. Gordon Brown has produced a boring budget with one absolutely brilliant strategic move: he promised to reduce the number of civil servants by 40 000 and move 20 000 of the remainder out of London to the provinces.
As an employee of the Medical Research Council there’s every chance I might be one of those 40 000, but that doesn’t stop me recognizing it as an inspired plan. The Tories simply can’t find a way around it. “Cutting government waste” is their (indeed, every party’s) favourite scheme for paying for tax cuts and increased spending on health and education. They’re going to have to find a different approach if they want to differentiate themselves from Labour at the election next year.
Today is also an appropriate day to share two British statistics with you:
Britain is now the only country in Europe with more credit cards than people.
We account for 75 percent of all credit card spending in Europe.
Always getting themselves into all sorts of scrapes.
Even the BBC man described the shift in the Spanish vote as being “a disturbing development” in European democracy this morning. Then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw put in a clumsy performance when he was interviewed about those same elections by John Humphrys. I wish Radio 4 had interviewed Mark Steyn instead.
We’re on the plane. They’re on the plane. If we do as they say then everyone will die.
This site seems to carry a lot of good advice.
You’ve got to admire his originality:
A British academic has provoked controversy by calling for female drug addicts to be paid to take contraception to stop them having children.
Cricket doesn’t often feature here, but this is too strange a result to ignore. What are the Windies smoking?
(It was pretty tough choosing the freakiest sports story to feature here, on a weekend when Villa won 0-4 away and Man U lost 4-1 to Man City.)
As I always write: Nick Cohen is Left wing; I frequently disagree with him; his journalism is often superb. In today’s Observer he defends human rights against the “War on Terrorism” crowd, attacks poor little rich boy terrorists and worries about the dangers of anti-Muslim racism.
Nothing has been sillier in the past few years than the wishful thinkers who instantly try to explain every outrage as a brutal but understandable reaction to Western, usually American, policy. In its own way the argument is a species of racism, which holds that the answers to all questions lie in the West and denies that the Islamic world is capable of producing apocalyptic movements just as irrational and inexplicable as the communism and fascism of Europe.
When the Prime Minister said that supporters of a psychopathic fundamentalism would happily kill 300,000 if they could, he’s telling the truth—in fact they have already killed hundreds of thousands in the Sudan, Iran and Afghanistan. The question is whether they can kill thousands of people or even hundreds of people in Britain. Because if they can and do, Herzen’s ideal of the Englishman doggedly clinging on to his civil liberties may not stand the strain and everything will go.
I see Amber’s unbelievable Texan miscarriage of justice story and I raise with a British one.
WHAT do you give someone who’s been proved innocent after spending the best part of their life behind bars, wrongfully convicted of a crime they didn’t commit?
An apology, maybe? Counselling? Champagne? Compensation? Well, if you’re David Blunkett, the Labour Home Secretary, the choice is simple: you give them a big, fat bill for the cost of board and lodgings for the time they spent freeloading at Her Majesty’s Pleasure in British prisons.
On Tuesday, Blunkett will fight in the Royal Courts of Justice in London for the right to charge victims of miscarriages of justice more than ,A#(B3000 for every year they spent in jail while wrongly convicted. The logic is that the innocent man shouldn’t have been in prison eating free porridge and sleeping for nothing under regulation grey blankets.
Paddy Hill was one of the Birmingham Six. He spent 16 years behind bars for the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings by the IRA. Hill now lives on a farm with his wife and children near Beith in Scotland. He has been charged ,A#(B50,000 for living expenses by the Home Office.
Teenage pregnancy rates in Britain continue at more-or-less the same depressingly high level they’ve been at since the 70s. The BBC covers the question of why. Whenever there’s a debate about this you get the usual answers: on the Left concerned types talk about how more sex education is needed; on the Right concerned types talk about abstinence. In the report someone gets to the real point, one I heard made in a radio interview years ago (I think) by a woman working at a family planning clinic: “Effective contraception is when a girl doesn’t want to get pregnant.”
According to Oxford Today, BBC Oxford has produced a popular online murder mystery game, introduced by Colin Dexter. One piece of advice I have read: don’t view the last clue until you’re sure whodunnit. I don’t know the answer myself, but I suspect it would also be wise to cover up the public poll results that run down the right hand side of each page while you’re playing.
That’ll give Judith another mystery to solve today.
Met up with the Kids of the Campus in the end last night—in the street. How very now.
Judith, according to Claire, your email account is bouncing her messages!
So far, my friends seem to be as one in their disagreement with my rant about The Passion (and gay marriage). Wow.
Recent Comments