I took a dislike to Cristina Odone years ago, some time when B&W was very young. She hadn’t commissioned a hatchet profile on me as she did to Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, she’d merely said something narrow-mindedly faithy, perhaps even overtly Catholic, which got up my nose. (Why ‘even’? Because she doesn’t always admit [to put it mildly] that that’s where her narrow-minded views are coming from, and I suspect that she prefers to leave that out of the picture when she can get away with it.) I can’t remember what it was, or when, but no matter, her unpleasantness now gives us more than enough to scowl over.

Ed Balls began his witch-hunt against faith schools last spring, unleashing informants

Bernard-Henri Lévy spells out the perverse and tragic effect of three great ideas.

[W]e are here facing a sort of perverse effect of three great modern ideas. A sort of paradoxical and counter-effect of three great ideas, which are: anti-racism, anti-colonialism, and the fight against imperialism, three great ideas—among the best which have been produced in the 20th century…[Y]ou have a huge part of the population in America and in Europe, who believe, as a sort of Pavlovian reflex, that these sort of murders, these sort of genocides, can only be committed by ugly, stupid, white men…[W]hen a country of the third world which was colonized (as was Sudan), commits such bloodbaths, commits such crimes, to stop this, to try

If four courts tell you No, then try a fifth. Don’t worry about boring people or being a nuisance or making a fool of yourself.

Danish Muslims are planning to take Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten daily to Europe’s highest human rights court over the publication of satirical drawings of Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessing be upon him)…The move comes a day after a Danish court rejected a suit by seven Muslim groups against newspaper editors for publishing the offensive cartoons…”It is a known fact that acts of terror have been carried out in the name of Islam and it is not illegal to make satire out of this relationship,” the court said.

Well that’s the problem, isn’t it: it is not … Read the rest