Friday, July 22, 2005
the New Statesman
In recent weeks I've left Amnesty International over their shift of focus over the last couple of years best illustrated with "Gulag-gate"then stopped buying the Guardian because they were employing a fascist and giving him space to spread his hate (although they are to be commended for finally seeing sense on the issue so I'll probably be purchasing it again tomorrow). Now it seems I'll be cancelling my subscription to the New Statesman.
Via Oliver Kamm: Have you Left No Sense of Decency.
I don't mind reading things I disagree with - after all I still read the Guardian after some awful crap since 2001 from Seamus Milne and Tariq Ali and George Galloway and John Laughland and AL Kennedy and the whole sorry bunch. But there are lines to be crossed and leading articles and tasteless rucksack graphics blaming a democratically elected leader for the murder of innocent people by the Jihadist enemies of democracy - then that is one such line.
Via Oliver Kamm: Have you Left No Sense of Decency.
A few days after the destruction of the Twin Towers, the New Statesman ran a notorious editorial in which it asked whether the bond traders murdered at the World Trade Center had been "as innocent and as undeserving of terror as Vietnamese or Iraqi peasants". Its answer: "Well, yes and no."
There are many things that could be said of this. Jonathan Freedland wrote some of them in his Guardian column. The timing stank; the tone was gross; the hypothesis the editorialist assumed was itself, in Freedland's delicate understatement, "shaky at best". I would put it slightly differently. A man who can write such a sentiment, and at such a time, merits the question directed to Senator Joseph McCarthy by his nemesis Joseph Welch: "You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"
That editor (Peter Wilby) has gone. His replacement, John Kampfner, has distinguished himself by giving the cover story of this week's edition to John Pilger, illustrated with a picture of a rucksack and the title "Blair's bombs". Not al-Qaeda's bombs, mind: Blair's bombs.
I don't mind reading things I disagree with - after all I still read the Guardian after some awful crap since 2001 from Seamus Milne and Tariq Ali and George Galloway and John Laughland and AL Kennedy and the whole sorry bunch. But there are lines to be crossed and leading articles and tasteless rucksack graphics blaming a democratically elected leader for the murder of innocent people by the Jihadist enemies of democracy - then that is one such line.
