Friday forecasts!

I am looking forward to some stupendously ignorant commentary on the Dubai default this weekend ...

Decency means never having to say "we're sorry we unquestioningly recycled some wingut talking points".

Oh dear. Once more, the Decent Left (tendence communitarian-Islamophobic) hands on some talking points to the political mainstream without carrying out its quality assurance. Entertainingly, the original source for this is Andrew Gilligan, about whose checking issues one might have thought the Decents were more aware than anyone.

Nick Cohen is meanwhile discovering the network, with a scattergun approach of seemingly condemning people for their connections to people who are connected to other people in a circular daisy-chain of awfulness, the prime offender being someone whose main crime according to Harry's Place is that he's sued the BBC for calling him an extremist and won.

This clown show repeats itself every few months and we don't even always cover it when it rolls through town. Good to see that Michael Gove has dropped another one on his own toes, though; presumably the Conservative Central Office equivalent of Malcolm Tucker will even now be firmly recommending to him that he stick to blazers and Latin, and leave the Greatest Intellectual Struggle Of Our Time to the grown-ups.

Aaro on denialism

Perfectly sane and sensible and the only churlish thing I can think of to say is that he describes here exactly the approach he took to civilian casualty estimates in Iraq.

Conversations on the doorstep #342

Nick Cohen:

More seriously, a revival of the left's affair with Islamism can only help the BNP by convincing the white working class that their rulers hypocritically denounce racial conspiracy theories, misogyny and homophobia when they come from the followers of Nick Griffin, but not when they come from the friends of Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

... and the council lets them jump the housing queue, and they get planning permission when we don't, I had that Nick Cohen in the back of my cab once ....

'A minor Islamic theme'

On Martin Amis's new novel, over here. It sounds terrible.

Objectively Pro-Fascist

There's a good (and long) post on Obsidian Wings by Eric Martin: This Constitution Kills Fascists, which, in turn, links to a good (and long) article by Johann Hari Renouncing Islam.

But once they had made that leap to identify with the Umma – the global Muslim community – they got angrier the more abusive our foreign policy came. Every one of them said the Bush administration's response to 9/11 – from Guantanamo to Iraq – made jihadism seem more like an accurate description of the world. Hadiya Masieh, a tiny female former HT organiser, tells me: "You'd see Bush on the television building torture camps and bombing Muslims and you think – anything is justified to stop this. What are we meant to do, just stand still and let him cut our throats?"

But the converse was – they stressed – also true. When they saw ordinary Westerners trying to uphold human rights, their jihadism began to stutter. Almost all of them said that they doubted their Islamism when they saw a million non-Muslims march in London to oppose the Iraq War: "How could we demonise people who obviously opposed aggression against Muslims?" asks Hadiya.

So whose actions made the West safer? A big hello to Harry's Place.

Decency turned up to 11 ...

We've noted in the past that the Decent Left's opposition to "realism" in international relations (because cough, mumble, Douglas Hurd) often shades into a rejection of reality, but I don't think I've ever seen it quite as stark as this Times editorial.

What do the people of Zimbabwe need? If you answered "more sanctions, no electric power, a collapse of the government and Robert Mugabe solely in charge", well done.

Subtle, Dave

A sooliloquy on apologies, which doesn't mention the word "Kaminski" once, I wonder why.