Clive Davis

OTHER PEOPLE'S IDEA OF FREE SPEECH

Dinesh D'Souza  is a little glib when it comes to the question of racial speech codes: there are good historical reasons why black Americans are more sensitive than other groups). But the parallel he draws between the Don Imus furore and the Muhammad cartoons is worth considering:

The Middle Eastern media is treating the Imus story--and how our little scandals travel worldwide!--with a certain degree of relish. And I think I know why.... When the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten printed the cartoons portraying the prophet Muhammad as a terrorist, many in the West viewed this solely through the lens of free speech. The media coverage suggested a confirmation of Huntington's "clash of civilizations" thesis. We believe in free speech and they don't...

Clearly the embassy-burnings and rabid protests of the Islamic radicals showed that there is a faction in the Muslim world that completely rejects open debate. But the traditional Muslims fell silent. They did not join with the radicals, but neither did they defend the cartoons. And indeed some commented that the way in which the West was treating the controversy was unfair and hypocritical.

The Imus controversy vindicates the argument of these traditional Muslims. How often during the Imus brouhaha have you heard the words "free speech"? Hardly....No wonder the Muslims are chuckling. They see that when our sacred cows are gored, we scream bloody murder and demand accountability and heads on a platter. By contrast when someone elses's sacred cows are gored, we proclaim ourselves loftily on the side of free speech and demand that they "get over it."

How true. Double-standards know no boundary.

THE ALICE WALKER GUIDE TO SAVING THE PLANET

The Color Purple seer, back on the soap-box, batty as ever:

She calls for a moratorium on childbirth for the sake of the environment ('not one more child should be born on this planet until certain conditions are met ... the most important of these is that several missing pounds of plutonium are found") and celebrates oral sex. [Do we really, er, need a "but" there? Ed.] there are also sections that seem to derive from the far, far, left-field. The reference to her pet dog's star sign and the "how-to" guide to wearing symbolic threads on your wrist in honour of the Earth can be both infuriating and distracting.

FOOTSTEPS IN THE SNOW

A new study of Captain Scott is reviewed in the NY Times. "Perhaps the most balanced biography yet," says Jonathan Dore, who also writes for the Arctic Book Review. He’s not so keen on explorer Ranulph Fiennes’s 2004 book on Scott, a work "ultimately based on the idea that his own experience as a polar explorer made him almost the only person who could write authoritatively on the subject." I read that book recently, and enjoyed it immensely. Dore knows a thousand times more about the subject than I do, yet that wasn’t how Fiennes came across to me. I thought he was simply intent on making the point that fighting your way to the poles, and almost dying in the process, gives you an insight into the practicalities that you can’t get from researching in a library.

A lot of his energy was devoted to countering Ronald Huntford’s critique of the Englishman in Scott and Amundsen (also known as The Last Place on Earth). According to Fiennes, Huntford's debunking view made an even bigger splash thanks to a TV dramatisation by Trevor Griffiths who, being a good Marxist. was attracted to the story's parallel with the "imperialist" Falklands war.

A small example of Peter Whittle’s thesis in action?

GLIMPSES BEHIND THE VEIL

So lawyers should be allowed to hide their faces in court? Bizarre...

Muslim-American author Asra Nomani says western publishers seem determined to make Muslim women cover up on the front of books:

They're imposing the veil on women. I barely escaped the same fate myself...Publishing houses, art directors, and photo agencies are increasingly using stock photos of (supposedly) Muslim babes with piercing kohl-lined eyes framed by the pitch-black niqab...

Another moderate voice, British businessman, Sir Gulam Noon, enters the fray in the Independent:

We have lost sight of what's important. Perhaps we should also take a steer from the requirement that women who perform the part of the Hajj which takes them to the Ka'bah (the holiest site in Islam) are explicitly required to remove their veil. Veil wearing is not a universal injunction in Islam, although I strongly defend a woman's right to wear a head covering as a mark of her faith.

Note that he also wants the UK authorities to be "more heavy-handed" with extremists:

Such groups do not speak for the decent, hard-working majority in the Muslim community who just want to get on with their lives without threat of terrorist violence or association with it. Failing to root out extremism and silence fanatical preachers has served only to diminish the authority of the law and the liberty of law-abiding citizens.

Kudos to Pickled Politics for drawing attention to Channel 4 journalist Samira Ahmed's complaint that some media organisations avoid running stories about fundamentalists because they're scared of appearing culturally insensitive:

A vicious misogyny is often a crucial part of the alienating ideology promoted in these groups. I also believe in fighting the great temptation of news editors, to give more airtime to the radicals, (it's guaranteed infotainment) rather than the much harder job of getting to know communities and finding more representative voices.

READING ANN COULTER

That trademark prose style is too much for Christopher Hitchens:

Try sipping this single sentence and then rolling it around your tongue and palate for a while:

"If Hitler hadn't turned against their beloved Stalin, liberals would have stuck by him, too."

Well, I am being paid to parse and ponder that statement and I don't understand it, either. Does it intend to say that liberals loved Hitler but drew the line at his invasion of the Soviet Union? Should it, rather, be interpreted as meaning that liberals were in love with Stalin but jumped ship when he was attacked by Hitler? It is remarkable to find so much intellectual and syntactical chaos in an assertion that contains no more than fifteen words.

Sadly, Hitchens' review - in The Liberal magazine - isn't on-line. But then, you probably already know what he thinks of her.

Shall I be fair? Coulter was trained as a lawyer, and she does have an understanding of the rules of evidence... If it matters, I am with her on the tepid climate of moral and political relativism which, while it wants all children to do equally well at exam time, also regards the United States as no worse than the Taliban and thus, by an unspoken logic, as no better. But a polemic against this mentality cannot really be written by a McCarthyite.

RUSHDIE - TAKING SIDES

Salman Rushdie, interviewed by Johann Hari:

It horrifies Rushdie that so many people in his natural political home - the left - don't get it. They seem to imagine that when people call for a novelist to be beheaded for blasphemy, they are really calling for a return to the 1967 borders, or an independent Kashmir, or an end to the occupation of Iraq. As he says this, I blurt out a repellent question: was there a small part of him on September 11 that felt almost relieved - that thought: " Now they'll understand"? He pauses, a long pause, the only one in this interview. Have I offended him? But he answers with the same contemplative calm as before. "It wasn't, actually. What an awful thing to think. But... but I remember after 9/11 that a lot of people did finally get it, and I remember thinking - it's a shame that 3,000 people had to die for something pretty obvious to get through people's heads."

MARTIN AMIS'S BOTTOM DRAWER

Skimming the weekend news reports about Amis's views on Muslims in Britain, I missed this part:

He... admitted that he had abandoned a novella called "The Unknown Known", a satire of Islam, because "it was incredibly offensive, just too serious to write satire about"....

Note, though, that he's not in an apocalyptic frame of mind:

Amis, 57, returned to Britain last month after 2½ years in Uruguay, where part of his wife’s family lives. He said that he had been struck by how successful British society appeared when viewed through fresh eyes. "It looks like a multicultural society that’s working apart from a few miserable bastards."

Amen to that.

THAT "KILL GEORGE" DRAMA

As I had to go out last night and forgot to programme the VCR, I managed to miss the much-argued-about Death of a President. If the Telegraph critic James Walton [not on-line yet] is to be believed, I saved myself a boring couple of hours:

Faced with American press outrage, the makers claimed their daring premise was being judged out of context – which might have been a plausible defence except for one inconvenient fact. Once you’d seen it in context, you realised that tastelessness was the least of the film’s problems.… "Death of a President" often felt like little more than a series of anti-American prejudices strung together by people who’ve got so tired of attacking what America does that they’ve decided to start attacking what they think it might do.

ON NOT BELONGING

Novelist Jonathan Franzen surveys the landscape in no-man’s-land:

That's the story of my life. I'm insufficiently elitist for the self-important, and I'm insufficiently populist for the Oprah-philes. I'm not bad enough to be bad and I'm not good enough to be good. I wasn't east enough to be east, I wasn't west enough to be west. That really is the story of my life. And when I was young, it all made sense because the middle seemed like a good place to be... Politically in particular, but culturally as well, you have to choose sides in the United States. It's a rabidly divided country, and it makes me miserable because both sides are wrong. Don't they know it?

MR ANGRY

Bryan Appleyard is the latest victim of the wrath of Pinter:

Harold and I used to have an amiable enough acquaintanceship until a recent encounter at a party. I had interviewed him and my piece was, for the most part, glowing, though I made the obvious point that his politics were not quite grown-up. This is not because of his actual opinions, but because of the way he holds them - as unarguable truths to which anybody who does not assent is evil and deserving of violent assault. We spoke warmly until he remembered my aside and then said savagely, '"I ought to kick you in the balls." I considered encouraging him on the basis, once the agony had abated, I could get a piece or even a post out of it.

There was a time, as I've already noted, when HP was just as happy to see the Arab states get a "good thrashing". Times change, the temper doesn't...