I’ve spent a fair bit of time on this blog saying why apologies dismissed by others as meaningless, because the apologies were made by people not alive at the time of the wrong for which they were apologizing or not implicated in it, were in fact both meaningful and justified. I want to say, for a change, why I think one particular individual’s apology for his own recent misconduct is pretty worthless.
The individual in question is Lord Ahmed who has lately apologized for a television interview he gave in Pakistan in which he said that Jews were responsible (£) for his imprisonment for dangerous driving:
In the Urdu-language television interview, Lord Ahmed claimed that Jews “who own newspapers and TV channels” placed pressure on the British courts to punish him more severely than was warranted by his offence.
Ahmed’s apology for this is given unreservedly, but what makes it next to worthless, in my view, is that it contains nothing that explains, for himself or others, what led him to blame Jews for the misfortunes he had brought upon himself. ‘I don’t really have any explanation or excuse’, he says; and he discounts, in particular, the suggestion put to him that his anti-Semitic outburst was given out to an audience he thought might be receptive to it. He has nothing to offer, for his own part, but this:
It must have been a twisted mind that said those things.
Or, to put it another way, it wasn’t him. So, he’s not taking responsibility by acknowledging what there might be in his make-up or his thinking which led him to what he said – something he must try to overcome in future. No, it’s just a momentarily ‘twisted mind’, for he himself is ‘not anti-Semitic’. Taken over then – inexplicably – by demons. Pull the other one.