Disproportionate and Futile

This is not a conflict between equals (via); Israel has greater power and greater responsibility and will eventually be held to higher standards than oppressed desperadoes. Future generations will surely see this as an obvious evil comparable to the oppression of the native peoples in the Americas and Australia.

It is a sick joke that the man who is now an envoy to the Middle East is also the man who led the United Kingdom into the wicked and unexplained, possibly inexplicable, invasion of Iraq in 2003. If I can make any sense of this surreal appointment it does not indicate any realistic commitment to peace and justice.

Brand furore

Brandgate - to coin a snowclone - has added greatly to the world supply of empty rhetoric without much enlightening anyone, so I'll be brief.

Of course Brand and Ross were wrong to leave the offending messages, and they have said as much. The show was recorded, and other individuals are also to blame who may not (yet) have resigned or been suspended. However, the offence was to two individuals and not to the thousands of private individuals who have seen fit to complain, nor the many public figures - I could add links, but Google will keep up faster than I can - who have taken the occasion to sound off. News presenters and politicians alike seem unable to resist overblown terms like "lewd" and "obscene"; if the messages were a film, they would be PG.

The BBC has shown the same dignity and good judgement in the face of criticism that stood it in such good stead after the Hutton report. The presenters were suspended during inquiries - fair enough - but the BBC news shows Ross's studio being dismantled before any results have been announced. In my country we used to have the investigation first, then the trial, then the verdict and sentence.

The Mail seems to have stirred the whole thing up, and while I haven't read any of the Mail coverage that gives me just as much right to an opinion as any of their readers who chose not to complain to anyone until their minds were made up for them. If public affairs are being run to suit such people it seems only just that they should pay a higher rate of tax for the privilege; a punitive levy on the cover price of the Mail newspapers might lead some to learn a little from more challenging material.

And while the original incident doesn't matter much except to those involved, the fuss and the posturing, the empty rhetoric, the caving to fake popular pressure, and the injustice - fortunately against people who may be well able to weather the storm - don't promote much confidence in our ability to handle more serious issues. Though this, sadly, is not news.

Liz Forgan on Any Questions?

I've been wondering about something for more than a week now. On the BBC Radio 4 Any Questions? programme, one of the panellists was Liz Forgan and in answer to a question about Sarah Palin she said:

I have been a card-carrying feminist for 40 years and this woman has found somewhere in me a little kernel of sexism. She causes me to make a failure of sisterhood. Sorry Charlie but I cannot stand her candy-coated philistinism, I hate her crass creationism, I loath[e] her parading of her family about the place, God forgive me I even hate her teenage hair[.]

I can get behind part of this. There is a lot about Sarah Palin to dislike and to distrust, and it is deeply scary that she could be a heartbeat away from the nearest office that there is to leadership of the "Free World". Do not do this to us, America!

However, as I read this Forgan is saying that it is "sexis[t]" and "a failure of sisterhood" to dislike Palin - which I take in context to mean opposing her candidacy - at least for the reasons she gives - because Palin is female. This is not the same as saying that if a man and a woman are equally qualified, it would serve a wider purpose to choose the woman; or even that a woman should be chosen over a man so long as both are minimally qualified. This is saying that no man should get the job so long as there is any woman candidate, however badly she will do it; this gets some ugly names when men do it to women, and women shouldn't do it to men either.

I don't know if this is what Liz Forgan really thinks - I rather hope not. She has picked on a few presentational points - even though they are of a piece with Palin's character and attitudes - and not mentioned the bridge to nowhere, earmarks, troopergate or the other issues; so perhaps Forgan is expressing a personal dislike rather than a judgement about Palin's fitness as VP. I had expected a rather more considered answer based on substantive issues, but that could be my mistake.

It bothers me that nobody on the audience seemed surprised, nobody on the panel protested or asked for clarification. There may have been comment on the related Any Answers programme, which no longer seems to be online. Have I misread this, or should I worry that great numbers of people really believe that feminism is just inverted sexism?