Damage Limitation

The wonder of the internet and the blogosphere and our freedom to express ourselves thereon, gave me the immense privilege of a brief email and comment correspondence with the wise and shrewd Deborah Lispstadt early last year. She is famously humiliated David Irving in court when he sued her for libel, and strangely - in view of last night's debate - I think it may have been me who first brought Nick Griffin to her attention when I sent her this link.

Here for what it is worth is my tuppence worth on the disgraceful scenes.

• The Oxford Union does have the right to invite people with odious views to address it.
• The rest of us have the right to object, organise and protest, but we don't have the right to sabotage the event, and physically intimidate or even attack those who choose to attend.

In general I am in favour of free speech and unfettered speculation, but who would have thought that quantum physics would be the discipline that proved it was dangerous?

Have we hastened the demise of the universe by looking at it? That's the startling question posed by a pair of physicists, who suggest that we may have accidentally nudged the universe closer to its death by observing dark energy, which is thought to be speeding up cosmic expansion.
Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and colleague James Dent suggest that by making this observation in 1998 we may have caused the universe to revert to a state similar to early in its history, when it was more likely to end. "Incredible as it seems, our detection of the dark energy may have reduced the life-expectancy of the universe," says Krauss.

Cool.

Billophobic

I emerged from my house just before 8 am on Good Friday - on my way for a swim before hitting the road with my five year old on an Easter Holiday trip to see family in Wales - to find that some scum sucking sons of bitches had thrown paint over my car and the cars belonging to about half a dozen of my neighbours on a rampage through our street.

My first thought was that I should report the incident to the Police so I called the local station and was put on hold for ten minutes. I hung up and dialled the emergency 999 number. This was answered crisply but I was told that I had to call my local station to report the incident.

I tried the local station again and waited again for ten minutes before giving up. Bear in mind that during the twenty plus aborted minutes of this attempt to report the incident I was fretting about house paint drying on and ruining the finish of my car.

I spent the next two hours or so cleaning my car. After I had finished the obvious surfaces, I had to open the doors and the boot and rinse the paint that had leaked into and through the seals and over the internal paintwork and mounts. This second cleaning produced a new set of drips over the rest of the body. I was not best pleased.

A cameraderie developed between us neighbours as we wiped and sluiced and it became clear that pretty much all of us had given up in trying to report matter to the Police. One guy made me laugh by saying that if the gendarmes had deigned to turn up they would probably have arrested him for washing his car in the street during a hosepipe ban.

I didn't want to let the matter drop though, so after I had cleaned myself up I went to http://www.online.police.uk/english/default.asp to report the matter online.

This system - to my utter bewilderment - asked me to decide if my report should be classified under any of the following categories:

Hate Crime Any hate incident, which constitutes a criminal offence, perceived by the victim or any other person, as being motivated by prejudice or hate.
Hate Incident Any incident, which may or may not constitute a criminal offence, which is perceived by the victim or any other person, as being motivated by prejudice or hate.
Racist Incident Any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person.
Homophobic Incident Any incident which is perceived to be homophobic by the victim or any other person.
Transphobic Incident Any incident which is perceived to be transphobic by the victim or any other person.
Faith Related Incident Any incident which is perceived to be based upon prejudice towards or hatred of the faith of the victim or so perceived by the victim or any other person.
Sectarian Incident Any incident which is perceived to be sectarian by the victim or any other person.
Disablist Incident Any incident which is perceived to be based upon prejudice towards or hatred of the victim because of their disability or so perceived by the victim or any other person.

I don't know where to start on how perverse this is. An incident need not be a crime remember, so what is to stop the list being extended again and again and again?

Firstly, can I draw your attention to the ludicrous codicil "or so perceived by the victim or any other person" which extends - potentially infinitely - the coverage of every incident covered by every verse of this ludicrous catechism?

Secondly, why do I have to jump through all the hoops of this taxonomy just to report hooligans pouring paint on my car? I neither know nor care if they think that my car is gay or heretical.

Thirdly, I have never even heard of transphobic, but if I Google it the majority of hits I get from the whole world are from UK Police sources. This speaks eloquently about priorities.

When I got to Wales I remarked to my Dad that this unholy partnership of administrative incompetence and bien pensant contempt for anyone outside the new establishment's current list of pet groups of victims is what drives people to vote the the BNP.

Hey presto, what should emerge yesterday? Research carried out for the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust has suggested that up to 25% of people have thought about voting for the far-right party.

I have decided to coin a new word Billophobic for the those of us who are frightened of the UK Government's tidal wave of legislation targeting opinions with which they disagree, and the cynical use of the Police to publicise, legitimise, and enforce these policies at the expense of doing their real job.

Expect Billophobic incidents.

Let him fade into obscurity

I've been meaning to write for a while about what I think is the absurdity and the danger of the nauseating David Irving sitting in an Austrian jail after being arrested in November last year over two speeches he made in 1989, during which he allegedly claimed there had been no gas chambers at Auschwitz.

But hold, there is no need for me to feel I ought inadequately to sally forth because Deborah Lipstadt (the American Jewish academic who dramatically crushed Irving in the British courts when he sued her for libel after she published as book that described him as "one of the most prominent and dangerous Holocaust deniers") has given an interview to the BBC in which she expresses opinions exactly congruent with mine.

"I would not want to see him spend more time in jail."

"I am uncomfortable with imprisoning people for speech. Let him go and let him fade from everyone's radar screens."

"Generally, I don't think Holocaust denial should be a crime, I am a free speech person, I am against censorship."

"I don't find these laws efficacious. I think they turn Holocaust denial into forbidden fruit, and make it more attractive to people who want to toy with the system or challenge the system. "

"We don't have laws against other kinds of spoken craziness. If you're a medical quack and you hurt someone, there's a law against that.
"But if you're a medical quack and you stand on the street corner preaching that you have an elixir that cures cancer and saves lives, no one throws you in jail."

"Germany and Austria are not so far past the Third Reich. So I can understand that the swastika symbol, Mein Kampf, Holocaust denial, being a neo-Nazi and all the rest have a certain potency there that they would not have in the United States.
"And Austria is a democracy. If the citizens of Austria were against these laws, they could change them. Austria and Germany are different, but I would not support those laws being instituted elsewhere."

"I am not interested in debating with Holocaust deniers," she says. "You wouldn't ask a scientist to debate with someone who thinks the Earth is flat. They are not historians, they are liars. Debating them would be nonsensical.
"But we also should not allow them to become martyrs. Nothing is served by having David Irving in a jail cell, except that he has become an international news issue. "

"Let him go home and let him continue talking to six people in a basement. "

"Let him fade into obscurity where he belongs."

I'm not sure that I agree about Austria and Germany but I can see it is a point worth discussing, in general though she lines up all the ducks and then knocks them over. Bang, bang, bang, brilliant.

I was also pleased and surprised to find that she has a blog at http://lipstadt.blogspot.com/

Hateful Things

From Reflections on the Revolution in France, by Edmund Burke (drawn to my attention in Red's Bookshelf):

We do not draw the moral lessons we might from history. On the contrary, without care it may be used to vitiate our minds and to destroy our happiness. In history a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials fo future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind. It may, in the perversion, serve for a magazine, furnishing offensive and defensive weapons for parties in church and state, and supplying the means of keeping alive, or reviving dissensions and animosities, and adding fuel to civic fury. History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetites, which shake the public with the same
- troublous storms that toss
The private state, and render life unsweet.

These vices are the causes of those storms. Religion, morals, laws, prerogatives, privileges, liberties, rights of men, are the pretexts. The pretexts are always found in some specious appearance of a real good. You would not secure men from tyranny and sedition, by rooting out of the mind the principles to which these fraudulent pretexts apply? If you did, you would root out every thing that is valuable in the human breast. As these are the pretexts, so the ordinary actors and instruments in great public evils are kings, judges, and captains. You would not cure the evil by resolving, that there should be no more monarchs, nor ministers of state, nor of the gospel; no interpreters of law; no general officers; no public councils. You might change the names. The things in some shape must remain. A certain quantum of power must always exist in the community, in some hands, and under some appellation. Wise men will apply their remedies to vices, not to names; to the causes of evil which are permanent, not to the occasional organs by which they act, and the transitory modes in which they appear. Otherwise you will be wise historically, a fool in practice.

Seldom have two ages the same fashion in their pretexts and the same modes of mischief. Wickedness is a little more inventive. Whilst you are discussing fashion, the fashion is gone by. The very same vice assumes a new body. The spirit transmigrates; and, far from losing its principle of life by the change of its appearance, it is renovated in its new organs wtih the fresh vigour of a juvenile activity. It walks abroad; it continues its ravages; whilst you are gibbeting the carcass, or demolishing the tomb. You are terrifying yourself with ghosts and apparitions, whilst your house is the haunt of robbers. It is thus with all those, who, attending only to the shell and husk of history, think they are waging war with intolerance, pride, and cruelty, whilst, under colour of abhorring the ill principles of antiquated parties, they are authorizing and feeding the same odious vices in different factions, and perhaps in worse.

Read that last paragraph and especially the last sentence again. Now consider the a BBC report from yesterday afternoon Boys 'used for human sacrifice'.

Children are being trafficked into the UK from Africa and used for human sacrifices, a onfidential report for the Metropolitan Police suggests.

Children are being beaten and even murdered after being labelled as witches by pastors, the report leaked to BBC Radio 4's Today programme said.

That's not all.

It said that people who are desperate seek out churches to cast spells for them.

"Members of the workshop said for spells to be powerful it required a sacrifice of a male child unblemished by circumcision," the report said.

Contributors said boys were being trafficked into the UK for this purpose, but did not give details because they said they feared they would be "dead meat" if they told any more.

There were also claims that youngsters were being smuggled into the UK as domestic slaves and for men with HIV who believed if they had sex with a child they would be cleansed.

Fortunately, the punditocracy is on hand to cut through all this verbiage to the heart of the matter.

Dr William Les Henry, a lecturer in sociology at Goldsmith's College, said there was an element of racism about the report.

For as we all know the Police are institutionally racist, but at least the report:

acknowledged the sensitivity of the issue as the abuse was a product of individuals' faith and beliefs.

Well that's alright then. Thank goodness the government is moving at breakneck speed to introduce legislation that will demand that we are legally bound to be circumspect in any criticism of such faith else we incite religious hatred.

All the sensitivity training in the world is not worth one weal, cigarette burn, or bruise on the black skin of a brutalised boy. One of the things that I loathe most about the notion of hate crime law is that it is so bloody prissy; its real purpose is to help its drafters and supporters feel good about themselves. If they need to feel guilty about something, they should feel guilty about the hideous inversion where the mindset it has brought forth is responsible for the abandonment of children to unimaginably degraded fates beyond the hope of any deliverance in this world.

PS I just looked up Dr William Les Henry on a search engine. There is a profile of him here. "He�s a far cry from academic stereotypes" apparently. I'll bet he is.