Nick Cohen: Writing from London

| Nick Cohen | Comment is free | The Observer Here

I am on this week’s Moral Maze talking about the limits of the Net here

Although largely forgotten, the Bosnian War remains the defining conflict of our age, reshaping what it means to be left or right wing. The sight of Europe standing by while Serbs slaughtered the Bosnian Muslims was a major recruiting tool for Islamo-fascism. The supposedly centre-right Major government disgraced itself by anticipating Michael Moore and degenerating into ever more bizarre anti-Americanism and the left, which claims to be against Islamphobia, was just as bad. (I cover the confusions and betrayals of the time in my book What’s Left?) As I and many others noted the most devious apologist for crimes against humanity was Noam Chomsky. It is a sign of the decadence of Amnesty International, an organization which professes to oppose crimes against humanity, that it has invited the professor to deliver a lecture in Ireland.

My colleague Ed Vulliamy, whose honest coverage of Bosnia infuriated Chomsky and his crew, delineates in detail Amnesty’s shame.

Read on

Godwin’s justly celebrated law states that as an online debate grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving the Nazis or Hitler approaches one. Anyone who engages in reductio ad Hitlerum instantly loses the argument because he or she begs questions and makes false comparisons. It is a handy measure that unlike most laws costs nothing and saves you time and effort you could better spend elsewhere.

Example One. In today’s Daily Mail AN Wilson states that we should not trust scientists who say that cannabis should be reclassified as Class C drug. “Some people think that Hitler invented the revolting experiments performed by Dr Mengele on human beings and animals,” he explains
Read on

Emma Woodhouse, “handsome, clever and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition”, seemed to unite most of the blessings TV drama producers ever wanted. Nothing in her life could vex them. They could hire an actress who was more ravishing than “handsome”, without doing undue violence to Miss Austen’s intentions. They could instruct her to turn Emma’s “happy disposition” into the feisty style that so commends itself to today’s commissioning editors. And if the location manager decided that Emma’s “comfortable home” should be a Georgian mansion of the type long coveted by Britons of all classes, no one but a cavilling critic could object.

What a catch that girl has been over the decades: as reliable as an inheritance in the funds. A flock of Emmas schemed their way through the mid-1990s. Clueless set the story in LA and had Alicia Silverstone play Emma as a Beverly Hills girl. Andrew Davies produced a conventional TV adaptation, which found itself up against a second Emma-the-movie in as many years, this time starring Gwyneth Paltrow. Bollywood is proposing to move Highbury to New Delhi and now the BBC has a new version.

Emma is Austen’s most technically brilliant work.
Read on

Once, it took effort to protest. Now, fury can be whipped up so swiftly, it threatens free speech

The Observer

There have always been people who have found reasons to take offence. In moments of high tension, you have always been able to find people who are offended if you will not give them reasons to take offence. But the heresy hunters who took offence at the feeble joke Andrew Neil used to introduce the BBC’s This Week are a novelty. They belong to a new breed of digitally enabled puritan the internet has unleashed.

In case you missed it, Neil began his political show by mocking Gordon Brown for failing to answer an inane request to name his favourite biscuit. He then turned to his guests, Diane Abbot, who is black, and Michael Portillo, who is not, and said: “And here we have our very own chocolate HobNob and custard cream of late-night telly.”

A few viewers complained, not because they thought that if the imperious Ms Abbott were a biscuit she would be a Bourbon, but because the accusation stirred in their ever-suspicious minds that Neil was a racist.
Read on….

Nick Cohen and Anne Perkins join Tom Clark and Allegra Stratton for a lively digest of the week in politics Here

Piece in Standpoint

The achievement of political Islam in Britain has been to suborn the liberal Left and cut off the most promising escape route for dissidents in the process. An abused woman, a young man fighting religious authoritarianism, an Iranian exile seeking to gain support for the campaign against the Archbishop of Canterbury’s and Lord Chief Justice’s endorsement of Sharia law or a British Bangladeshi trying to bring the Islamist criminals who massacred civilians in the war of independence to justice, would once have looked left for succour. If they do so now, they will find that progressives take their cue from the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-e-Islami, rather than the best of the liberal Left’s traditions, and dismiss Muslims who fight for values they profess to hold as being at best irrelevances and at worst stool-pigeons for imperialism.

Read the whole thing

The Community Security Trust, which works to protect Britain’s Jews from fascism in all its forms, has a very good guide on the BNP’s use of media friendly language to cover up its racism. I was very critical of how the broadcasters give neo-Nazis powder-puff interviews in the Observer at the weekend. (You can see Andrew Marr’s dismal effort here.) So I should say in fairness that the tape showing Griffin explaining to American neo-Nazis how he would play the media was dug out by the BBC’s better journalists. Anyway, this post from CST is well worth reading before Question Time this week. Check the list of circumlocutions and see how many Griffin uses.
Carry on reading

The last principled feminist in the British media, now has a website here