Buy Carlsberg and Danepak! Wait, Danepak doesn't exist any more. Lurpack! Lurpack!

"The strength and survival of free society and the advance of human knowledge depend on the free exchange of ideas. All ideas are capable of giving offence, and some of the most powerful ideas in human history, such as those of Galileo and Darwin, have given profound religious offence in their time. The free exchange of ideas depends on freedom of expression and this includes the right to criticise and mock. We assert and uphold the right of freedom of expression and call on our elected representatives to do the same. We abhor the fact that people throughout the world live under mortal threat simply for expressing ideas and we call on our elected representatives to protect them from attack and not to give comfort to the forces of intolerance that besiege them."

Here.

"We're going to fucking kill you."

As previously noted, "animal rights" terrorists are not renowned for their modesty or healthy self-doubt any more than they are for their ability to sustain a coherent debate without resorting to intimidation and outright thuggery. It can't really be all that surprising, then, to observe the boorish, bullying tactics employed against the 16-year-old Laurie Pycroft, founder of Pro-Test, for having the temerity to speak his mind.

Pycroft's successful organisation of a march through the streets of Oxford yesterday to demonstrate and encourage support for the construction of a replacement (as opposed to further) biomedical research laboratory in that city, during which he was hailed as "human excrement" by the terrorists (in another shining example of their willingness to debate civilly), was dismissed by Robert Cogswell, spokesterrorist for Speak (the organisation responsible for that facile, fatuous attempt at a character assassination linked above), with the usual revealing resort to self-aggrandising military vernacular:

It is an indictment for [sic] the vivisectionists if the only forces they can muster against us are led by a 16-year-old boy. We have made clear from the outset that Oxford University is the battleground where the arguments for or against will be won or lost. We are going to pursue Oxford University wherever their interests may be.

Is it, though? Is it not rather an indictment of the terrorists that a) the case against them is so obvious that even a 16-year-old can articulate it with sufficient conviction to inspire hundreds of civilised people to mount a protest, and b) it falls to a teenager, with the adolescent's fine disregard for personal safety, to take up the case against these vicious, violent, self-righteous fascists? Out of the mouths of babes, indeed.

Time to eat the hat....

I yield to no-one in my contempt for "Mayor of LondON" Ken Livingstone. As with George Galloway, the primary impression I get of him is of someone so boundlessly impressed with himself that he no doubt considered it nothing less than his very duty to go into politics: I consider the two of them the foremost exemplars of the adage that any man with the kind of self-regard necessary to offer himself as leader cannot possibly deserve such a position. In Livingstone's London it is, for example, almost certainly impossible to make a journey, by any means, of more than about 500 yards, without coming across that fatuous logo of his, usually on posters - or trains - telling us what to think or on things boasting of achievements that are either nothing to do with the office of the Mayor or have been won at staggering cost to the public purse or to individual liberty (I'm particularly fond of the classic Communist style of this and other posters. You used to see them on buses, great Stalinist buses effortlessly crossing the city (itself a triumph of monolithic architecture) with captions like, "Faster through the mighty metropolis", as though saying it made it so, even while one was fuming in a snarl-up caused by badly timed traffic lights. If the style was supposed to be postmodern, they were sailing a little close to the wind; if not, it was spectacularly artless). His abuse of the monopoly on public transport held by Transport for London has led to some truly staggering price rises - well above the rate even of real inflation, let alone the heavily massaged rate Gordon Brown relies on as calculated by his bastardised Consumer Price Index - and, in the last couple of years, the relegation of non-Londoners to the status of second-class citizens by virtue of the introduction of the Oyster card, with which one may pre-purchase Underground travel tickets some 25-30% cheaper than with the cash which is the only option of tourists or provincials (and let's not even get into registration process for these cards, which are of course personalised and therefore make incredibly simple the monitoring of the movements of cardholders. In other words, submit to being monitored or pay the financial penalty, which we'll make stiffer every year). Let's not forget, either, his praise for the mediæval "cleric", "Dr." Yusuf al-Qaradawi, in a classic example of the Left's disease du jour: denial or just plain ignorance of the knots in which it ties itself when it instinctively sides with anyone who hates Israel and ends up allying itself with women-beaters and gay-bashers. Then there's his relentless politicking, such as in the statement he made following the 7/7 bombings where he was unable to resist suggesting that "working-class" Londoners had been the primary target, when of course a) the bombers were utterly indiscriminate and b) people of all classes died that day; his general distorting ignorance, his vendetta against the motor car and those with the temerity to desire the independence of movement they confer (which of course translates as a vendetta against business, but I suppose that's only to be expected from someone with so little appreciation of the roots of prosperity) and, of course, his insane profligacy.

You may naturally conclude that I don't intend to vote for him when (inevitably) he runs again for Mayor in 2008. Quite so. Nonetheless I find it difficult to support (apart from in an immature, gleeful way) the judgement of the Adjudication Panel of England (what the fuck is that?), which has suspended him from office for a month following his casually bigoted remarks (some excellent comments there too) to a Jewish Evening Standard hack. Of course he's a moron. Of course it's good to see his true colours. Of course it's entertaining to see how he believes anyone who disagrees with him is a reactionary bigot (shades of Galloway again). Of course he's a hypocrite, having worked for ES himself when they offered him free meals as restaurant critic. But he's unfortunately right when he says it is not for an unelected body to censure him. More unfortunately still, it may have done him a favour: if he had gone unpunished, in the public estimation, for his pathetic lapse of judgement and decorum, they may have been more inclined to vote him out. Now many may consider the matter closed and may have no qualms about re-electing him. *shudder*

Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right....

Following the publication of an edited version of this article by Andrew Neil in The Spectator, I was inspired to read F.A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, which as well as being breath-takingly prescient in its discussion of the seemingly inevitable Gramscian direction taken by British society in the 60 years since its publication, and generally thoroughly incontrovertible in just about every assertion it makes or argument it proffers, has crystallised an argument that has been germinating at the back of my mind for the last couple of years, and especially since I read in the same periodical a few months earlier an attack on Darwinism and Darwinists by Paul Johnson.

Neil's article dissects Hayek's notions of constructivist rationalism and evolutionary rationalism, the former wherein it is held that "all social institutions are, or ought to be, the product of deliberate design", the latter wherein it is held that "there exist orderly structures which are the product of the actions of many men but are not the result of human design". Needless to say, and while both have wider ramifications, in terms of socio-economics the former boils down to statist/fascist collectivism, the latter to free-market individualism.

So in crude terms the Left buys the constructivist ethos, from Descartes via Marx and Keynes; the Right buys the evolutionary ethos, from Smith and Locke via Hayek to Friedman and Rand. The Left believes in central planning, in the benign, incorruptible magnificence of the state, in the state as enabler and provider; the Right believes that "for all its apparent duplication, unfairness, inequalities and instability, the market economy leads to wealthier, freer and fairier societies than all the great plans of constructivism". (Perhaps that is being excessively kind to Ayn Rand, for whom selfishness was always a philosophical, Objectivist end in itself and not merely a function of the logical axiom that no man can fully understand the entire system and so is better off looking after his own part of it.)

So far, so obvious. "Wow, Novus," I hear you gasp. "Do you really mean to tell us that the Right is into free markets and the Left likes to control stuff?" Like, duh. The very obvitude of these remarks serves only to underscore the paradox I've been mulling over, as personified by the arch-conservative Paul Johnson. Once described, ironically if my 11-year-old understanding was up to the job, as a journalist of "shining human qualities" by Stephen Fry, Johnson represents the closest thing we have to that American cliché, the Christian conservative.

Hayek wrote, in the appendices to his book The Constitution of Liberty, an essay entitled Why I Am Not A Conservative, in which he described himself as a traditional (ie British) liberal, an Old Whig as it were. Nonetheless, it is in modern Britain most likely to be Conservatives (or at least conservatives) who subscribe to his economic theories (or libertarians like me, a state not so far removed from Hayek's own trad. liberalism). We can therefore assume that of Paul Johnson, and indeed it is the case. The Left, of course, is routinely left aghast at the beliefs of a man like Johnson: the concept of divinity is anathema to them.

The paradox, of course, is in the dichotomy between the economic and theological views held by both the Left and the Right. How can a Leftist believe on the one hand that society functions best when guided by the benign, omniscient hand of the state, yet on the other hand believe, according to Johnson, that "everything in nature is random, pointless, proceeding from nothing ... and that there is no more moral significance in a living creature ... than in a pinch of dust"? Conversely, how can a man like Johnson believe in the random, amoral machinations of the market yet reject the same ideas in the natural world in favour of creationism? For surely there is nothing dreamt of in our philosophy so wholly constructivist as the idea of a creator, and there is nothing that so closely resembles the free market as the idea of natural selection?

Hoist by their own petard?

According to Edward Fitzgerald, QC, acting for the defence in the trial of Abu Hamza, the "Crown's case against the former imam of Finsbury Park Mosque was 'simplistic in the extreme'." His rationale for this assertion, it seems, was that the statements he made, for which he was on trial for soliciting to murder under the Offences Against The Person Act 1861 (and not, incidentally, under the allegedly vital legislation currently being blithely voted into law), were "drawn directly from Islam's holy book". Mr. Fitzgerald went on to point out that "all the great monotheistc religions had scriptures that contained 'the language of blood and retribution'."

Mr. Hamza was found guilty of the six charges of soliciting to murder, as well as three charges related to the use of threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour with the intention of stirring up racial hatred, and a couple of other charges. (Just as a brief aside: racial hatred? It seems indubitable that Mr. Hamza's words and actions were entirely religiously motivated. Yet a prosecution has been brought successfully under laws pertaining to racial hatred. Hmmm. Who'da thunk it?) To me it seems to follow, entirely logically, that the verses of the Qu'ran that Mr. Fitzgerald went to such pains to quote in open court - that is, 2.216 and 9.111 - constitute, if spoken aloud in a public place, soliciting to murder.

Mr. Fitzgerald was of course correct to point out that the Qu'ran is not the only holy text with bloodthirsty passages, and there can be no doubt that if one were to stand in a likely spot quoting certain verses from Leviticus or Exodus or - why not? - Revelation, one could be arrested with all despatch, and probably tried and imprisoned a good deal faster and with a good deal less media hand-wringing than Mr. Hamza, even without a cache of arms and bomb-manuals back at the crib. I am not attempting here to separate the Qu'ran from the Bible or even the Tanakh or the Talmud, or to paint it as especially troublesome (although its more delusional adherents are certainly another matter). As creation myths go I'm sure they're all equally charming in places, and equally bellicose in others (although I reiterate my previous remarks about the extensive remit, not limited to matters of faith, that the Qu'ran grants itself). My concern is simply this: there is, I am sure, some legal mechanism, which may or may not fall under the definition of precedent, by which the finding guilty of Mr. Hamza, after his remarks were explicitly attibuted to the Qu'ran, by his own barrister, no less, now implicates the Qu'ran itself under the same laws. If a man can be imprisoned for soliciting to murder having stated clearly that he was quoting directly from a certain document, what legal status does that confer upon the document?

Freedom is slavery

That's it, then.

I emailed my MP the other day. He's Labour, and a craven line-toer to boot.

"One does not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered," wrote Lyndon Johnson.

This is an approach that this government has signally failed to take with a great deal of its legislation, not the least example of which is the current ID cards farrago. It has blundered on and dismissively waved off every objection to this legislation, fatuously convinced that nothing can go wrong; that for once the monolithic state computer system will work even remotely as it's supposed to; that for once criminal opportunists will, with civic-minded fairness, pass up the gaping opportunity presented for fraud by an incompetently administered database such as the one proposed will inevitably be.

I draw your attention to sections 2.4, 2.5, 2.6 and 2.7 of this report:

http://www.eurim.org.uk/activities/pi/060112pireport.pdf

Good intentions do not on their own make good law, and this law will be in the highest degree odious. I urge you to vote against it.

I received the most vapid possible reply, including a mis-spelling of the name with which I'd signed my email:

Thank for your e mail. I understand you view but disagree with the assessment of benefit/diadvantages and I will be supporting the Bill when it returns, sorry to disappoint you,

No, I couldn't believe you can get elected to the House of Commons with that standard of written English either. Still, he just got made Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the ridiculous ODPM (where his relative linguistic skills are probably in great demand), so you can't blame his sense of preservation for being more attuned to his cushy gig than his country's freedoms. Stands to reason, really.

Run, Saira!

Last night's This Week, a programme the BBC does its best to keep hidden away from prying viewers (there is no website, for example, uniquely among BBC current affairs programming) in case any of them should observe that, for 45 minutes a week, BBC editorial policy doesn't reign supreme, handed its Take of the Week slot over to Saira Khan, the self-described "British Asian Muslim" businesswoman who was runner up on The Apprentice last year and of whom, consequently, I had never heard. With passion, vigour, incision and robust insight, she articulated the case for moderate Muslims (those figures conspicuous by their absence that I referred to in my last post) to make known their disgust and their horror at the iniquities being perpetuated in the name of their faith. Naturally, it being This Week, seventeen people were watching; inevitably, Kahn having had the nerve to show up on TV, without feeling intimidated or browbeaten into covering her face or hair, and to expose the insecurity, the hypocrisy and the thuggery at the heart of Islamic fundamentalism, she will soon be the subject of a fatwa issued by some cavebound blockhead like Anjem Choudary, inexplicably given a platform many times larger than his poisonous, insular, misogynist vitriol warranted on Newsnight on Monday. We need many more like her, on better-promoted programmes, particularly if in the name of lurid sensationalism the press are going to continue to ignore what ranks among the sagest advice ever offered by Margaret Thatcher: deny terrorists the "oxygen of publicity" and their message will suffocate.

Institutionalised sense of humour failure

It's hard to know where to begin.

I'm aware that this is my third post in a row that could be construed, by an idiot admittedly, as anti-Islamic. But I'm at the mercy of the news cycle. The other day Parliament decided the transparent purchase of Muslim votes with unjust laws that favour them unnecessarily was a step too far even for that finely-honed extremist-pandering, vote-buying machine, the Labour party. I applauded that decision not because I am anti-Islamic but because I am against the wholesale purchase of votes - anyone's votes - with bad law. Shortly thereafter a demented "statesman" announced that, "Allah willing", George W. Bush would stand trial in an Iranian peoples' court. I observed that this was lunacy not because I am anti-Islamic but because it is patently absurd: because Ahmadinejad is a delusional lunatic, and not because he chose to invoke his deity whom many perfectly civilised, peaceful people worship their entire lives in nothing but joy.

Unfortunately, none of those civilised, peaceful people is much in evidence at the moment.

Charles Moore makes a very good point today. In the middle of pondering where, exactly, all those Danish flags came from that were getting burned in Palestine this week - a very good question when one consideres that those cartoons were originally published in October, and it wasn't until now, subsequent to the circulation by Danish imams among their counterparts in Muslim countries of a package containing the twleve cartoons plus an extra three of uncertain provenance and far greater offensiveness, that there has been any kind of international outcry - he pointed out, in a throwaway, parenthetical remark, that in burning the Danish flag, "they offered a mortal insult to the most sacred symbol of my own religion, Christianity, since the Danish flag has a cross on it, but let that pass."

"Let that pass." Moore's Catholicism has the ferocity of a convert's (which he was ten years or so ago, I believe) and yet he is capable of taking an inferred but deadly insult in perfectly good part. The parallel is instructive, for the insult to Islam or to Mohammed that the flag-burners et al have perceived in these cartoons is also an inferred one - and one inferred far less accurately than that of Moore's burned cross. My personal favourite, as an admirer of the satirical cartoonist's art, is the one with the queue of suicide bombers at the gates of paradise, and the caption, "Stop, stop! We've run out of virgins!". Leaving aside the implied criticism of the casual, brutal misogyny of Islam's insistence on virginity, which characterises women not as individuals to be loved (or not) for themselves but as goods that are soiled or damaged if they have been "used" previously, the only objects of ridicule in this cartoon are the unimaginably stupid suicide bomber who believes that he will be rewarded for mass murder of the innocent and the inexpressibly sinister and coldly manipulative clerics who pervert the minds of impressionable students of Islam by telling them that in the first place.

Alexis de Tocqueville said, "Mahommed professed to derive from Heaven, and he has inserted in the Koran, not only a body of religious doctrines, but political maxims, civil and criminal laws, and theories of science. The gospel, on the contrary, only speaks of the general relations of men to God and to each other - beyond which it inculcates and imposes no point of faith." In other words, while Christianity is a faith that may become a powerful and fulfilling part of one's life, Islam insists on running one's life, holding sway over the mind and dominion over the body. It is therefore inevitable that reactions to plain and simple satire would be so grossly, so pathetically out of proportion as they have been. Tocqueville went on, "This alone, besides a thousand other reasons, would suffice to prove that the former of these religions will never long predominate in a cultivated and democratic age, whilst the latter is destined to retain its sway at these as at all other periods." If this is how Islam meets Western liberalism, that can only, unfortunately, be an encouraging thought.

And may God strike me down were it to be other-- Aaaagh!!

"In the near future, Allah willing, we will put you to trial in courts established by the peoples."

I was struck by the illogic of this remark from the deeply unhinged Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in response to George W. Bush's State of the Union address of Tuesday night. In it, Bush described Iran as "a nation now held hostage by a small clerical elite that is isolating and repressing its people", went on to point out that the Iranian regime sponsors terrorism throughout the Middle East and concluded with a veiled incitement to uprising of the Iranian people. In response, Ahmadinejad dismissed the US Administration as "people whose arms are submerged up to the elbows in the blood of other nations" and went on to prophesy Bush's imminent trial.

OK, first of all, the metaphor could have been stronger. I mean, "up to the elbows" really isn't much blood at all. Surely the Islamic gift for sanguinary imagery can do better than a washing-up bowl of blood? Secondly, given that Ahmadinejad was addressing crowds in a town where the Russians are building Iran a nuclear "power station", the contrast couldn't be clearer: if it comes down to either being up to the elbows in the blood of other nations that systematically yet indiscrimintely murdered their own people, or being up to the elbows in the blood of my own people, then I know whose bloody forearms I'd rather have.

Anyway, to the point. "Allah willing", Bush will soon be put on trial by the Iranian people. Yes, and Allah willing, I will soon be swinging naked on a trapeze with Eliza Dushku on one side and that girl from Waterstone's on the other. The sheer, staggering unlikelihood of Bush ever standing trial before an Iranian peoples' court must surely betray the foolishness of invoking the deity in such remarks. It is presumably the belief of the drooling Ahmadinejad that Allah does indeed will it that Bush stand trial before an Iranian peoples' court. And when, twenty, thirty, forty years from now, Bush dies a rich, free (although not necessarily guilt-free) man, as he inevitably will, what will be Ahmadinejad's conclusions? Will he conclude that evidently Allah did not will it that Bush stand trial before an Iranian peoples' court? Will he take it as a refutation from on high of his rabid fundamentalism? I doubt it, sadly.

Too busy being indicted for tax fraud?

A narrow victory for the freedom to express opinions. Worryingly, these votes were only on amendments, it seems; the Bill itself will still become law, although hopefully in as meaningless and unenforcable a way as the farcical hunting ban (another law designed purely to garner votes from disproportionately vocal minorities).

Muslims "need protection" according to ministers, just like Jews and Sikhs, who are already protected by race hate laws. The differences between race and religion have been rehearsed in the context of this Bill ad nauseam and need no further discussion here. It should be obvious to anyone capable of grasping the concept of free will that race cannot be chosen and religion, while sometimes indoctrinated from birth, is still essentially a choice: and anything that can be chosen by one can be rejected by another; and if one is free to proclaim his choice as good and righteous, the other should equally be free to declaim it as malevolent or meretricious or anything he feels it to be.

Races just are: they are literally an accident of birth. As such they should legitimately be protected from prejudice, for there can be no grounds for it. But the ideas that form a religion have no greater claim to protection than those that form a scientific theory - and a fundamental part of science is the opening of one's ideas to the community for criticism. Note that criticism, in this sense, doesn't necessarily mean negative feedback. But ideas are there to be discussed, to be thrown back and forth and sometimes to change. An idea, like Islam, that has survived for 13 centuries clearly has something a lot of people find attractive. The "protection" that ministers feel they need to give it is surely right there in the strength of the ideas. There's an essential contradiciton in the notion that deprecating an idea offends those who hold it most dear. If they're so easily piqued, the idea can't be as strong as they thought it was.