I’ve been sloppy lately. I was too glib in ascribing the Vatican’s love-in with Baghdad as a function of the old Jew-hatred. I feel sick when I see Vatican envoys raising arms with Arafat or clasping Tariq Aziz’s hand warmly. But I don’t think that Rome reflects more general anti-Israeli attitudes than the rest of Europe. And “Jew-hatred” was too much, a cheap shot. A really good treatment of the debate can be found at Instapundit, in an often-up-dated posting that rewards re-reading. On an unrelated point, it was silly for me to blame Fox News Channel for the Fox network’s running of “Married in America.” They’re clearly different entities. My broader point is that it’s a little weird to be focussing on a handful of potential gay marriages as an alleged threat to the institution when the broader heterosexual culture treats marriage with far more <a href = contempt than any homosexuals asking for equal access. Fair enough?
10,000 9/11s : Today is the fiftieth anniversary of Stalin’s death. Here’s a superb column in the Independent no less on the scandalous fact that there are still apologists for this monster. They’re the same people who apologize for Saddam Hussein, of course. But Stalinism still lives and still murders: North Korea and Iraq are both Stalinist operations. So is Cuba. Money quote:
Fidel [Castro] runs his country on precisely the same lines as his hero. Amnesty International’s latest reports detail the plight of the “prisoners of conscience” (otherwise known as democrats) and notes than even now, the number of people harassed “directly by the state”, including “political dissidents, independent journalists and other activists”, is increasing. It is worth remembering the name of just one victim of Fidel, plucked from among many: Bernardo Arevalo Padron has been festering in prison since 1997 because he called Fidel Castro “a liar” for failing (as ever) to stick to agreements on relaxing his authoritarian rule. Yet still Tony Benn brags about the standards of the Cuban health-care system which, preposterously, he says are “better than America’s”. (If you are ever taken ill on a flight across the Atlantic, Tony, I suggest you test this by insisting on being flown to Havana rather than New York.) Still John Pilger describes the Cuban revolution as “a crucial model for challenging power”. (For a man obsessed with hidden agendas, he very rarely discloses this agenda of his own.)
Amen. The fact that this column appeared in a paper that is one of Saddam Hussein’s chief apologists is surely a sign of hope.
The Dish 