David Aaronovitch - Times Online - WBLG

A referendum? Sorry, they’re not our cup of tea

Say you have a good friend, practically family, whom you’ve known for some time and whose advice you value. Of course there are differences in emphasis. He likes angling where you prefer soccer and he occasionally forgets – where you remember – that parking wardens also have a job to do. Then one lunchtime, over a glass of tap water, he reveals that he is a long-time member of Britons Against Fluoridation and regards the addition of any chemical to his water supply as an attempt by shadowy powers to interfere with his brain. Though disconcerted, you have two options – to nod or to argue. Columnists argue.

I’ve been writing on these pages for just over two years now, and that period has been relatively free of Euro controversy. This has suited me, because Europe (in the way the word “Europe” has come to be used in media discourse) has never excited me that much. After a few years of being vaguely and doctrinally anti-common market, I eventually saw the benefit of what they call “pooling sovereignty”, but since then the stormy enthusiasms of the Philes and the Phobes for their federal states or their magically separate nation states have seemed abstract and distant.

The Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor by William Langewiesche

HERE’S ONE TO SPOIL your weekend. Within the next few years some country somewhere is likely to use nuclear weapons against its enemy. This is the conclusion – made without apocalyptic language – reached in William Langewiesche’s long essay on nuclear proliferation.

A spare, almost austere writer – as some of the best American journalists are – Langewiesche can make the complex area of nuclear policy comprehensible to the layest of laypersons, from his description of how 220,000 were killed in the two bomb blasts over Japan in 1945, to his summary of 60 years of big-power attempts at keeping the nuclear club as small as possible.

He has set out to answer two questions: first whether terrorists are likely to get the bomb, and secondly whether countries we don’t like will get the bomb. After he has travelled to Russia and the Middle East, his answer on the first is mildly reassuring, to the second most certainly not. To make a device you need a certain amount of highly enriched uranium, which is hard to steal and very hard to make. Once you have the enrichment for civilian purposes, however, you can then carry straight on and make a bomb. Only international inspection can tell whether or not this is happening.

The virtues of blackmail, misery and cheating

Bring me my bow of burning gold, bring me my arrows of desire. And I’ll bring you the hide of Patricia McKeever, the internet Torquemada of Scottish Catholic gaydom. Ms McKeever, of Catholic Truth is, as reported in The Times yesterday , a one-person outing operation, determined to uncover closeted cassock-lifters, to drag them shrieking and naked from their metaphorical priests’ holes and thereby to cleanse the Church. Ms McKeever has restored me to myself, reminding me – at an age when I expend my passions carefully – of just what it is in the public sphere that makes me most angry.

It’s the gap – the abyss – between the stated reason for the actions of the world’s McKeevers and their real (if hidden) motives that so appals. Why does Ms M send letters and e-mails to priests and seminarians whom she suspects of going to gay clubs? Why does she demand of an Edinburgh clergyman to know whether he is a homosexual? Ostensibly to “raise awareness of the problem . . . ultimately to ensure the safety of others in the Church. Not just the physical safety of children, important though that is, but also the spiritual safety of people and congregations entrusted to the care of a homosexual priest or bishop.”

What’s the secret to raising bright children?

Last summer I went to the prize-giving at a school in the country. Very few of the absurdly tall and elegant teenagers receiving heavy books and shiny plaques were being cited for just one quality. Some had, it seemed, run for their counties, played the oboe to concert level, achieved field marshal rank in the school cadets and saved several African villages from drought. And they were so polite.

That their ascent up the ladder of achievement had started early was obvious from watching their happy parents, as they sipped wine on the lawn afterwards. The parents had, many of them, done most of the things that they could and been all the things that they had to be, in order to reach this point on this warm day, their children poised balletically for flight into the adult world.

But what were these things? Yesterday the University of London’s Centre for Longitudinal Studies (based at the Institute of Education) published its outline findings into the attainment of a cohort of 15,500 children born between 2000 and 2002. The study found that by the time that the kids were three years old the offspring of graduate parents were ten months ahead of children from relatively unqualified parents in vocabulary, and a year ahead in their comprehension of sizes, shapes, colours, letters and numbers. And while this may be an expected advantage, it is still a hell of a gap to have opened up at such a young age.

Six days of success. Then 40 years of bitter harvest

I was somewhere between Airfix and puberty when, 40 years ago today, the Six Day War began with preemptive Israeli strikes on Egyptian airbases. Then, it was exciting, the culmination of a period of heightening threats from President Nasser, with newspapers carrying diagrams of how many tanks, men and aircraft each combatant had. As a juvenile collector of information on planes I tended to take the Arab side as they flew interesting MiGs and Ilyushins as compared with the boring French Mirages of the Israelis. As for the implications of the extraordinary Israeli triumph, I had even less understanding of the consequences of catastrophic victory than did the Israeli leaders themselves, and that, it turns out, is saying something.

Four decades later I was watching a documentary about the West Bank – conquered in that brief war – with my 14-year-old daughter. Narrated by someone not hostile to the Jewish state, it was nonetheless a catalogue of arrests, imprisonment, harassment, land and water grabs, Berlin walls and checkpoints. A girl with moral sense, she was amazed by the fundamentalism and foul behaviour of some of the settlers, and bemused by their American accents. Why were they there? Who had let them take the land? How could there be peace with them around?

The Six Day War was, as Israelis have always claimed, a defensive conflict, as was the 1973 Yom Kippur war. Had Israel lost either badly or quickly, the chances are that it would have ceased to exist long before Great Power intervention could have saved the country or its people. As with the response to the attacks by Hezbollah last summer, it seems to me that Israel was entitled to take the action it did. We in the UK would have done the same.

‘Zionist lobby’ paranoia is growing (Jewish Chronicle)

A fortnight or so ago I received an email from a film-maker. A leading public figure had suggested that I might help him publicise his television programme about the Middle East, which was due to be shown on a major channel. Though the film had a good slot, the problem was, he explained, “that despite our best efforts, no one wants to hear about this”. Then he added: “It seems the pro-Zionist lobby in the UK is as strong as ever.”

Getting coverage for serious documentaries is — from my experience — a hit-and-miss affair. In fact, usually it is just a miss affair. Often this is because the channel’s publicists themselves, with a list of that week’s offerings, prefer the sensational over the sober, or the new issue over the old, no matter how important. This is certainly true of reviewers. But in this case, this very serious man, who had made a very serious film, was clear that the culprit was the pro-Zionist lobby.