Catherine Bennett has some fun at the expense of Jane Root and The Big Read:

The Big Belief
Says Root: “This search for the nation’s favourite faith is about the BBC really throwing its power behind religion. We’ve all heard of Kabbalah, Christianity, Scientology and the rest but until now no one has ever bothered to find out which one is Britain’s best loved belief”.

With religious observance in Britain at an all-time low there could not be a better time for BBC2 to make faith a stronger part of the culture. In the run-up to a national Big Belief vote, display packs introducing religion will be sent out to churches, temples and mosques all over the country, while a dedicated website will show novice worshippers how to establish a prayer group in the faith of their choice.

To ensure that non-believers don’t feel excluded from The Big Belief, each faith will be championed in a short film made by a celebrity advocate who has never previously been associated with this form of spirituality. For example, while Jack Dee speaks up for the Rosicrucians and Sandi Toksvig makes a (tongue firmly in cheek!) case for Satanism, Protestantism will be introduced by Meera Syal, who travels to Germany for a hilarious, one-woman re-enactment of the Diet of Worms. June Whitfield fights Buddha’s corner and Graham Norton will preside over the magnificent, Easter Day finale, broadcast live from Westminster Abbey.

Three further events are described, including one in which this question comes up:

‘How will the nation’s pets vote? Will they go for JM Coetzee’s Disgrace, championed by Ann Widdecombe’s cat, Arbuthnot? Or Judith Kerr’s Mog’s Bad Thing – described by Elizabeth Hurley’s alsatian, Nico, as “A compelling insight into cat society informed by a sensual evocation of nature’s influence on the feline psyche which is the equal of anything in Colette.”

Happy Hanukah. (Better with sound. Hat tip: Sue Leaf.)

Ever since I started normblog four and a half months ago, I’ve been getting emails like the one below from Jane (in Los Angeles). I won’t say I’ve had a flood of them, but I get them regularly. I’m posting this one for others on the liberal-left who felt they had to support the Iraq war and may sometimes get to wondering how many other such people there are. There are plenty is the answer, even though we’re a clear minority in our particular segment of the political universe:

Surrounded as I am by liberal friends and relatives, I find myself checking out your blog page almost every day for a dose of sanity. As one who would describe herself (at least until 9/11) as a liberal Democrat, it’s been disheartening to find myself so isolated when it comes to my views of the Iraq war. No, I am not one of the polled Americans who believes there was a direct link between 9/11 and Saddam, but I am a person who believes strongly that military action was the only way to remove this tyrant. The abuses against his own people have been ignored too long by the world at large. While it’s true that there are human rights violations going on daily all over the world, we can rest easier knowing the suffering for one people is over. Will Iraq still face a struggle? Yes. Will there still be hardships? Yes. What they won’t face, however, is the knock on the door in the middle of the night. Thanks for keeping track of the views of so many! It makes me realize that left and right are, at best, incomplete labels to describe a person’s moral stance. Jane

Read The Dude on Saddam’s capture and some of its implications (via Michael Totten):

He wore a different uniform every day and built himself a vulgar palace in every city of his miserable country. Nice… to see him found like a rat in a hole, covered with grime, sprouting a dirty grey mane, and being shaven and combed for lice.

I actually think that is a better, more humane, reaction than this one (which is not to say it would be acceptable to treat Saddam brutally in custody) from Cardinal Renato Martino, head of the Vatican’s Justice and Peace department: ‘I felt pity to see this man destroyed, (the military) looking at his teeth as if he were a cow.’ Anyone can understand the sentiment of sympathy for another human being brought down; but there’s also the proper relief and satisfaction at seeing a filthy tyrant humbled, and it’s not clear why the balance between these two things here has tilted in the direction it has. The Cardinal also made the following point:

“It’s true that we should be happy that this (arrest) has come about because it is the watershed that was necessary… But it is not the total solution to the problems of the Middle East.”

He’s a clever man.

I find it surprising that so much detail is being given out about the exact mode of Saddam’s interrogation. See this story.

Christopher Greenwood, professor of international law at the London School of Economics, sets out the case for trying Saddam in Iraq. There are problems, he says, but ‘a trial in Iraq offers both justice and the chance for Iraq to break with its past’.

In the Jerusalem Post (registration required) Rafael Medoff has some interesting and obliquely relevant information on reactions, at the time, to the Eichmann trial. (Hat tip: SdeW.)

Al-Arabiya television has reported the surrender of Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, the highest ranking member of the former regime still at large. (Via Matthew Stinson).

It’s loosely related only, but this is good news:

In the strongest sign yet that antiwar European leaders are prepared to help rebuild Iraq’s devastated economy, France and Germany issued a joint statement with the United States on Tuesday, saying the three nations would work together to provide “substantial” debt relief for Iraq.

See also here and here.

Without actually naming him, Desmond Tutu has criticized Thabo Mbeki for his stance on Zimbabwe. Tutu speaks forthrightly:

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the moral leader of the fight against apartheid, turned yesterday on the African leaders who still support President Robert Mugabe’s regime in Zimbabwe.

Although he did not cite Thabo Mbeki by name, it was clear the South African president was the subject of Archbishop Tutu’s criticism.

The archbishop hit out at those who have called for the Mugabe regime to be readmitted to the Commonwealth in the face of continuing human rights violations and abuse of the rule of law.
…..
“I am sad that we South Africans declared that the last elections in Zimbabwe, though not free, were yet legitimate,” the statement said.

“That is distressing semantic games.

“Human rights are human rights and they are of universal validity or they are nothing.”

Hat tip: Anthony Cox.

… unless you’re interested in cricket. In which case you might like to read Gideon Haigh, one of the very best of contemporary cricket writers, on Australia’s defeat by India at Adelaide:

[It] is not an entirely new Australian problem. The failures of Plan A at Calcutta and Headingley in 2001, for instance, also seemed to generate some confusion about the exact nature of Plan B.

Shamelessly, I use this item as a peg on which to hang another plug (can you hang a plug on a peg? – no you can’t, it’s not that kind of plug, but what the hell?) for my book Men of Waugh: Ashes 2001. I have a gripe about Headingley 2001, not exactly unique to me, but I haven’t yet found anyone who has given it such a closely argued analysis. How can you resist? The book is available here, here and here – or directly from me. The earlier book, Ashes ’97: Two Views from the Boundary ditto. If you order both from me, there’s a good bargain offer.

I depart here from some of my more usual concerns to deal with a subject of a different kind. This is a story of harassment at work; or so the putative victim of it thinks, and so it also strikes me on the basis of everything I’ve been told about it. I’ve decided to blog it – with the permission of the person concerned – because it raises a more general issue which I think is of interest. But I’ll get to that. Here, first, is the story.

A woman friend of mine who works for a large institution (the precise nature of which I shall not disclose, for obvious reasons) has found herself the object, during the past few months, of unwelcome remarks and gestures from a male colleague with whom she comes into contact on most days, and occasionally has to work closely beside for reasons related to their respective functions in that institution. This male colleague (call him Bob) started by making unfriendly – tending towards hostile and even aggressive – comments, which my friend (call her Joyce) at first tried to ignore. It didn’t work, and the comments then moved towards the sexually suggestive, becoming more extreme as the weeks passed and abusively so. Bob began using explicit, insulting and obscene language about Joyce’s looks and her sexuality, and he has on several occasions resorted to graphic descriptions of how he would like to see her ‘mistreated’ by groups of men.

Joyce finally took a complaint to her and Bob’s common ‘line manager’ who, according to her account, has been unsympathetic from the start, declining even to enquire further into the matter. He (call him David) says she has no real basis for the complaint, nothing in the way of solid evidence. This isn’t true, as I’ll shortly come to; but I need to fill in on two other background matters before I do so.

First, Bob has a previous history of this sort of thing, it is known to his employers and it is known, in particular, to the ‘line manager’ David. A few years ago, there were complaints against Bob by several female colleagues in close succession, which resulted in his receiving an official warning from the organization, a warning making reference to the available sanction of dismissal. It is possible that David’s knowing this history is what motivates his reluctance to pursue Joyce’s complaint; but that is merely a speculation on her part, and I’m in no position to assess it. In any case, since the earlier complaints against him there has been no history, or no known history, of further such misconduct on Bob’s part, and this clean recent record is cited by David as one of the reasons for his scepticism about Joyce’s complaint.

Second, the origin of Bob’s harassing behaviour is tied up with a dispute Joyce was engaged in with another colleague, Maya, a dispute in which she – Joyce – concedes that she behaved badly, on more than one occasion shouting at Maya abusively in a way that was witnessed by several of their workmates. Joyce says there was some provocation on Maya’s side, but whether or not there was it is known that she herself is not blameless. And Bob’s first unfriendly comments to her began shortly after these incidents of semi-public altercation with Maya, and were explicitly linked by him to Joyce’s conduct then. Still, in Joyce’s perception, and not only hers, Bob’s behaviour soon came to exceed any justification which her bad conduct towards Maya might initially have provided him with. David has used that bad conduct of Joyce’s, as well as Bob’s recent better record, in defence of his not being willing to take up the complaint and look into it.

Here we come to the crux of the thing. Failing to persuade David of even a prima facie need for him to take this matter up, Joyce has involved two other people, one of them a colleague with a reputation in that workplace for good sense and fair-mindedness, the other a union representative. Both of these have made it their business to try to be around at strategic moments, and both have observed, more than once, the kind of behaviour by Bob of which Joyce is complaining. On the last occasion that she met with David to press her complaint, the union rep accompanied her and he advised David that he should now take the complaint seriously; otherwise he (the rep) would feel obliged to take the issue further together with fellow union officials. As of the end of last week, David remains unmoved. In so far as he’s willing to allow that Bob’s behaviour reflects any animus towards Joyce at all, he just insists on characterizing it as a reaction, understandable in the circumstances, to Joyce’s bad behaviour towards Maya.

So, the general issue which I said at the beginning I would get to is this. How can David be so confident, in view both of Bob’s previous history of abusive conduct towards female colleagues and of the testimony of others than Joyce herself to the fact that such conduct has now recurred, that there is nothing for him to look into? He puts it all down as a response on Bob’s part to the way Joyce acted towards Maya. But, even allowing that this may be partly so, how can David be so unshiftably confident that that is the whole story? It baffles me.

OK, small-scale analogies for large and complex social realities are always going to be messy. They will fail to match up to their intended object in certain ways. This parable – for such (in case you haven’t already got there) is what it is – is imperfect in many ways. I’m aware of that. But here is the point it was designed to get at. Joyce is the Jewish people (including that component of the Jewish people that is Israel). Bob stands loosely for the phenomenon of what some of us perceive as the recent growth of anti-Semitism – in Europe in particular, but also in the world more generally. I’ve argued before on this blog the would-be aphorism, ‘Just because you’re a critic of Israel, it doesn’t mean you’re not anti-Semitic’; and I do myself believe it to be pertinent today. But, in logic, the riposte is available which the aphorism is based on reversing: ‘Just because you’re a critic of Israel, it doesn’t mean you are anti-Semitic’. The parable is offered as posing this question: how can the Chomskys and others who are just so certain that it’s all down to understandable responses to the wrongs done by or on behalf of Israel to the Palestinians sustain such a certainty, when (a) you’re talking about a 2000-year-old hatred which has led to much persecution and suffering, including one of the outstanding barbarisms of the twentieth, or indeed any, century; and (b) there is now evidence clear as daylight that things have been getting worse again?

I think their standpoint is not one that can, or should, be taken seriously by reasonable and conscientious people; just as I don’t think any reasonable and conscientious person could take David’s response seriously in the above story in the light of all the story’s ‘facts’. However messy the fit might be, I believe it’s tight enough in the respects that matter here.

The following story is from a letter from Zimbabwe, above the name of Cathy Buckle:

One night this week the usually pitch black view from my window was disturbed by a brilliant but un-natural spotlight. The light came from the direction of a nearby cemetery and I didn’t stay to inspect it, rapidly closing the curtains and praying that the light was in fact coming from further away. Goose bumps covered my arms as I thought about the latest horror story in Zimbabwe. At night grave robbers are descending on cemeteries and digging up newly filled graves. They are removing the corpses and taking the empty coffins for resale. I don’t know if this appalling practice is being conducted by money making entrepreneurs or just by desperate people trying to get enough money to stay alive.

And this is from a report on the state of tourism in the same country:

It is a ghost town. The few tourists on the streets – Japanese, German and South African and a sprinkling of Britons – are followed by polite hawkers with wood carvings. “Give me some business, please, I haven’t eaten today.”

Hat tip to John Abeles for the first story. John recently forwarded me an email circular coming out of Zimbabwe, headed ‘Grimbabwe Newsletter’.

Simon Hoggart: ‘Mr Blair doesn’t do gloating. Or rather, the way he gloats is to be utterly non-gloatmental.’

Ian Kershaw, distinguished historian and Hitler biographer:

Should [Saddam] then be condemned to death, many in the west (though not in Iraq) will face another moral dilemma. I won’t lose any sleep over it myself. I’m against the death penalty, but if ever there was a candidate for it… [Ellipsis in the original]

David Aaronovitch:

In Tikrit yesterday… [a] small crowd had gathered to demonstrate support for the captured dictator. “Saddam is our hearts!” they shouted, “Saddam is in our blood!” To which the American apparently quietly replied, “Saddam is in our jail!”

Anthony, round the corner at Black Triangle, writes:

Sometimes, the questions you ask reveal more about you than the the person you are questioning… When John Humphries suggested that any trial of Saddam Hussain might be embarrassing for America because it might show up involvement of the US with Saddam, he perhaps betrayed what seems to have been an underlying current on the Today Programme. He could have chosen to note.. the potential embarrassment for countries like France, Germany and Russia – all of which have more recent dealings with Saddam – but no the capture of Saddam has been turned into a stick to beat the Americans with.

Coming up, the dnoc-letter of the year, is it? I couldn’t honestly say, so many of these have there been. But big it up anyway for Buck Rutledge:

The extraction of a haggard Saddam from a hole in the ground is only more evidence that Iraq never posed a serious threat to the US.

Run that one again? On the other hand, don’t bother; just savour it. I mean, how much of a threat Iraq posed is arguable, from none at all, through some, right up to a great threat. But how does Saddam’s being pulled from a hole in the ground in December bear on the question? Aaaaanyway, early indications from a reliable source suggest that Saddam’s blogging days may now also be over:

Saddam’s laptop and wireless connection were discovered during a body cavity search, and quickly confiscated. This would seem to indicate he’s made his last blog entry.