For The Byron Echo, November, 2005

In response to things that The Jewish News, Paul Gardner and Julie Nathan said of my latest column ('anti-Jewish rant', 'disingenuous distortion of facts', 'vicious diatribe against Israel') I solemnly, proudly and fearfully put out the following statement.

My favourite film director is Woody Allen, my favourite American novelist Philip Roth, my favourite stage performance Topol in Fiddler on the Roof, a show I've seen eleven times and lately paid $630 for friends and relatives to see. I've written in praise of Sondheim, Gershwin, Rodgers, Hammerstein, Hart, Mozart, Bellow, Heller, Mailer, Malamud, Stoppard, Pinter, Berkoff, Chaplin, Neil Simon, Paul Simon, Peter Sellers, Dustin Hoffman, Bernstein, Einstein, Rabin, Moses and Irving Berlin. My grandmother was Jewish. My twenty-three pages in Goodbye Babylon on travelling in Israel, co-written with Mike Rann, was well received by Jews everywhere. Does this make me anti-Semitic? No. Does it mean I always approve the assassination policies of Ariel Sharon? Of course not. Do you?

I realise now that I left Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Felix Mendelsohnn, Sigmund Freud, Leon Trotsky, Arnold Wesker, Billy Wilder, William Wyler, Paddy Chayevsky, John Frankenheimer, Abby Mann, David Malouf, Gore Vidal, Dudley Moore, Dan Jacobsen, Sidney Lumet, Arthur Miller, Danny Kaye, Kirk Douglas, H. Robert Oppenheimer, Zero Mostel, George Burns, Jack Benny, Josephus, Disraeli, Fred Raphael, Mordecai Richler, Irving Thalberg, Austen Tayshus and Jesus of Nazareth off the list of Jews I have already praised in print, and I hope my readers will take these grave omissions not as further evidence of my anti-Semitism but as late, sad proof of my fading memory and also sturdy witness of the majesty of Jewish achievement, greater than that of any other tribal group worldwide.

I still believe, however, that it's wrong to bulldoze at midnight the house of a widow whose husband you have blown up that afternoon, crushing to death his little son beneath its rubble and paying no insurance for the damage incurred, asserting they deserve to be treated in this way, and I know of no other 'democracy' in which this happens. I believe it's unfair and unjust to do this, actually, and cruel. How about you?

Torture in Iraq

The current Iraqi government's use of torture chambers in Iraq and the US's far-flung torture chambers round Europe and the European Union's laws against torture of any kind could lead to some court cases soon, and further trouble for the (yes) Christofascist Bush government, now tottering, shrieking and beseeching the Sky-god for solace in the wake of the arrest of Scooter Libby for lying in his teeth to investigators about Valerie Plame, Joe Wilson's yellowcake findings and Saddam's mythical WMDs.

'The suggestion that's been made by some US senators,' Dick Cheney said last Thursday, 'that the President of the United States, or any member of this administration, purposely misled the American people on pre-war intelligence is one of the most dishonest and reprehensible charges ever aired in this city.'

The operative word here is 'purposely'. All other charges he shyly, in fact, admits: that the US leadership, despite wiser counsel to wait a bit, precipitously led its people into war for a reason that was false, a war that has killed, thus far, at least forty thousand women and children and crippled, scarred and mutilated quite a few more. But the word 'purposely', he subtly signals, lets them out, as in the distinction between murder and manslaughter; as if the manslaughter of tens of thousands of blameless humans did not matter too much; it was an honest mistake.

He may not be able to seem so ignorant and blame-proof in these coming weeks of WP, 'a yellowish substance with a pungent smell similar to garlic' which 'erupts spontaneously into fire when exposed to oxygen, releasing dense white smoke' and burning human flesh down to the bone like napalm. It was used a lot in Fallujah it seems, in 'shake and bake' missions but 'only against insurgents', swears the US army journal Field Artillery.

The idea that 'insurgents' may have lived in houses in Fallujah with their wives and children and those houses, phosphorescently ablaze, might have burned to the bone adjacent infants and women, seems beyond this trade journal's hard-boiled comprehension. 'Bad guys', after all, lack flesh and blood. They are not born of woman. They do not marry, have children, or mortgages, or suffer anxiety over their parents' health, or barbarians blowing up their neighbourhood. 'Bad guys' deserve to die, and if their children die beside them, well, that's unintended and regrettable. But, hell, we cannot be blamed for what we did not intend. Culpable incompetence is not a crime in America any more or even a misdemeanour, even if it slaughters the blameless in tens of thousands, for Americans, if they mean well, can do no wrong.

How psychopathic is this? How like the jihads of the 'bad guys' they so detest does it sound thus to say that killing civilians is part of the stuff that happens, unintendedly and regrettably, and because unintended, forgivably? Osama bin Laden did not intend the Twin Towers to come down, only four or five floors to burn, he is therefore innocent, or largely innocent, as charged. You cannot be charged with what you did not intend; discuss. Redemption: it's the American way. Are we the bad guys now? Seditiously, I now with a gulp declare, we are. All right, constable, I'm coming.