No shortage of vitriol in the Sunday Times review of the new memoir by Rageh Omaar, ex-BBC reporter and now a star of Al-Jazeera. Christoper Hart doesn't exactly mince his words. "A crushing disappointment: bland, platitudinous, muddled, lazy, factually unreliable and morally reprehensible."
You do wonder how this error got past the publisher's fact-checkers:
He tells us that the commander of the British forces that captured Baghdad in 1917 was "General Angus Maude". Angus Maude was paymaster-
general under Mrs Thatcher, nicknamed "the Mekon" due to his amusingly shaped head. The officer who captured Baghdad was Lt-General Sir Frederick Stanley Maude, who later died of cholera from drinking unboiled milk
Above all, Hart takes issue with Omaar's worldview:
More seriously, there is the slant and bias...Most shocking of all... is a chapter in which Omaar lumps together Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the celebrated Somalian feminist and anti-Muslim polemicist who was until recently a Dutch MP, and Yasin Hassan Omar, one of the failed July 21 suicide bombers.
While both are driven by identical "bigotry and hate", argues Omaar, Ali is protected by something called the "liberal fascism" of the West. To draw moral equivalence between a woman who has only ever used words to attack what she views as a repressive and outmoded ideology, and a man who set out to kill and maim as many innocent people as he could, is frankly a disgrace.
When I have a spare moment, I'll try to remove the Ann Coulter ad which has been showing up in the sidebar. I always thought she was a buffoon. Now she's surpassed herself with comments on the 9/11 widows" that make Michael Moore sound almost intelligent:
These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by griefparrazies. I have never seen people enjoying their husband’s death so much.
Truly pathetic. As Ed Morrisey observes:
If one ever needed proof that the political spectrum resembles a circle where the extremes meet, this should provide it.
[Via Hugh Hewitt]
MORE: Pajamas Media tell me the ad campaign has been dropped. Good.
A story from China about the downside of the Web revolution:
It began with an impassioned, 5,000-word letter on one of the country’s most popular Internet bulletin boards from a husband denouncing a college student he suspected of having an affair with his wife. Immediately, hundreds joined in the attack. "Let’s use our keyboard and mouse in our hands as weapons," one person wrote, "to chop off the heads of these adulterers, to pay for the sacrifice of the husband."
Within days, the hundreds had grown to thousands, and then tens of thousands, with total strangers forming teams that hunted down the student, hounded him out of his university and caused his family to barricade themselves inside their home. It was just the latest example of a growing phenomenon the Chinese call Internet hunting, in which morality lessons are administered by online throngs...
Via John Naughton, who also links to a provocative essay by computer scientist and virtual reality expert Jaron Lanier on the dangers of the "hive mind". In other words, a reminder to all of us wiki-enthusiasts that there can be such a thing as too much democracy:
What we are witnessing today is the alarming rise of the fallacy of the infallible collective. Numerous
elite organizations have been swept off their feet by the idea. They are inspired by the rise of the Wikipedia, by the wealth of Google, and by the rush of entrepreneurs to be the most Meta...
I've participated in a number of elite, well-paid wikis and Meta-surveys lately and have had a chance to observe the results. I have even been part of a wiki about wikis. What I've seen is a loss of insight and subtlety, a disregard for the nuances of considered opinions...
What afflicts big institutions also afflicts pop culture. For instance, it has become notoriously difficult to introduce a new pop star in the music business...The exception is "American Idol". As with the Wikipedia, there's nothing wrong with it. The problem is its centrality.
More people appear to vote in this pop competition than in presidential elections, and one reason why is the instant convenience of information technology. The collective can vote by phone or by texting, and some vote more than once. The collective is flattered and it responds. The winners are likable, almost by definition.
John Lennon wouldn't have won. He wouldn't have made it to the finals. Or if he had, he would have ended up a different sort of person and artist. The same could be said about Jimi Hendrix, Elvis, Joni Mitchell, Duke Ellington, David Byrne, Grandmaster Flash, Bob Dylan (please!), and almost anyone else who has been vastly influential in creating pop music.
Mea culpa. I'm one of those people who used to think of him as nothing more than an irritating self-publicist:
Peter Tatchell can no longer meet with journalists in his home for fear of physical attack. Requesting an interview, I could have been one of his myriad political enemies out to entice him into a trap.
It has happened before; a group feigning to be a black student television crew recently lured Tatchell into welcoming them into his office space only to assault him over his campaign against the Jamaican dance hall "murder music" which calls for gays to be maimed and killed. Had security guards not been in the building at the time, Tatchell says, he could have been seriously injured. There is something wrong with the state of liberal politics when many on the left are upbraiding the avowed socialist Peter Tatchell as a right-winger. But that is just the place where Tatchell, whom the reactionary populist Daily Mail once labeled a "homosexual terrorist," finds himself today.
