David Aaronovitch - Times Online - WBLG

In defence of hymn-singing atheists

At my daughter's Christmas concert on Monday night, none of the Tamil parents knew the words to the carols, so the Jews had to sing twice as loud. The next morning I read Libby Purves's elegant reproach to the great atheist Richard Dawkins on his admission that he too enjoys belting out Away in a Manger. “How honest is it to sing?” she demanded of Professor Dawkins. “How insulting to those who mean every word of it?”

This made me uneasy about the carolling Jews. True, they absolutely don't rubbish God, but Jews explicitly deny the possibility of Jesus being the Messiah, and therefore presumably ought to worry about causing offence to true believers when singing this, as they did: “Late in time behold Him come/ Offspring of a Virgin's womb/ Veiled in flesh the Godhead see/Hail the incarnate Deity.” You'll recognise there Charles Wesley's own interesting preoccupation with carnality, as well as one of the most famous not quite rhyming couplets in schoolboy history.

Fortunately both Jews and Hindu Tamils were — for reasons of time, I imagine — spared the verse from Once in Royal David's City, where the young Jesus's imagined relationship with his Virgin mother is extolled, continuing: “Christian children all must be/Mild, obedient, good as he.”

The author of the carol was a Victorian Ulsterwoman, C.F. Alexander, the wife of the Bishop of Derry and Raphoe, and Mrs Alexander was not averse to supplementing the scriptures when she felt the Spirit demanded it. In the version of Once in Royal David's City that we did sing on Monday, the final verse ended thus: “When like stars His children crowned/All in white shall wait around.” Now, it's been years since I took biblical instruction, but I am not aware of any authority for the exact colour of the clothes to be worn in Heaven by those eternally “waiting around”. Like any songwriter Mrs Alexander had just made it up.

It seems a bit harsh, therefore, to make belief any kind of test for joining in the song. Worse, I would say that anyone who “means every word of it”, given the provenance of many words, has problems much bigger than whether a Professor R. Dawkins denies God.

And it also raises a question over Libby's suggestion that Prof D might be more honest if he stuck to “a verse or two of Frosty the Snowman”. This an interesting parallel, since this, too, is a tale of resurrection, in which Frosty finally, “Had to hurry on his way/But he waved goodbye saying/‘Don't you cry, I'll be back again some day'.” And songwriters Jack Nelson and Steve Rollins had no less supernatural backing for their words than did Mrs Alexander, so one perhaps ought to add that Professor Dawkins may only sing their song if confident that he isn't in the company of those who believe that Frosty the Snowman is real.

Be liberal, but not with the facts

Yesterday, the day on which the former Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer of Thoroton effectively killed the Government's 42-day detention plan, was also the 43rd day that Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito spent in custody in Italy in connection with the Meredith Kercher case.

I mention Knox and Sollecito, neither of whom have been charged, because their situation casts some light on the way the debate on detention has been conducted in Britain. Readers may remember that Liberty recently released a report “carried out by lawyers and academics in 15 countries” claiming that Britain had, in effect, the most draconian detention laws in the Western world. Using the hyperbole routinely deployed on these occasions, Liberty claimed that its report “exploded self-serving assertions about extended detention in inquisitorial Europe”, and made “embarrassing reading for all of us in the land that gave Magna Carta to the world”.

Although Liberty's intervention received the usual respectful attention from the liberal press, it was still pointed out in some places that countries with different judicial systems - as in the case of Italy - seemed to permit detention before charge for much longer periods than even the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police was minded to call for. Ah, said Liberty, you don't understand, such objections had “confused pre-charge detention with detention pending trial”. A helpful graphic in one paper repeated the Liberty figure for Italy for pre-charge detention as “four days”.

You may notice here what would seem - to the person on the Clapham omnibus - to be a semantic sleight of hand. In Italy you can be held for month after month without formal charge as long as you are understood to be “pre-trial”, during which time sufficient evidence may be found to convict you or, if not, you may be released. And Italy is lauded as being more liberal than Britain for systematically holding suspects for far longer than our Government is seeking to do on an exceptional basis.

Shadowy donors — or generous? (Jewish Chronicle)

One of the curiosities of the Abrahams affair was the suggestion that it all had to do, somehow, with Jewish power, through (naturally) the less obviously Protocol-ish medium of support for Israel. There was the Telegraph front page showing Mr Abrahams in intriguing proximity to the Israeli ambassador while the story wondered where his money had come from. And there was my old colleague from my Independent days, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, constructing a shadowy edifice from the convergence of Abrahams, Labour Friends of Israel and Gordon Brown’s chief fundraiser, Jon Mendelsohn.

Ms A-B anticipated that her bravery in raising unpalatable truths would lead to her being traduced by the obvious people, and I would certainly not want to disappoint her. Especially since my mind turned not on the differences between Mr Abrahams and Yasmin, but their rather obvious similarities. Suppose that the idea of the Jewish/Zionist power play was in fact a cover — albeit unconscious — for an even more uncomfortable reality?

It seems to me to be rather obvious — though I don’t know the man — that Mr Abrahams is someone who uses his money and contacts as others might use platform shoes, as a means of elevation in the eyes of a dangerously indifferent world. And why not? Isn’t that also one reason why I write and robins sing?

How to be a mad dictator

Gordon Brown was right not to go to Lisbon at the weekend, but even so, there was something marvellous about seeing Robert Mugabe being Merkelled in the flesh by the German Chancellor. There, impassive, he was forced to sit while Frau Angela told him, in front of 70 African and European leaders, what a shower he was. Whether it improves anything or not, is another matter, but it felt good.

Four weeks earlier there had been a rather similar moment during the Ibero-American summit in Chile. Hugo Chavez, the populist President of Venezuela, had been laying about him with his characteristic lack of restraint. Jose Aznar, the former Prime Minister of Spain, was, according to President Ch�vez, a fascist, and, he added, “fascists are not human. A snake is more human”. When the current Spanish PM - an opponent of Mr Aznar's - objected to this abuse, Chavez continued to shout. It was at this point that the King of Spain, Juan Carlos, leant forward and told Chavez to shut his big, fat, sloppy gob. My Spanish is poor, but it was something like that. JC's admonition has become a popular ringtone around the world.

This symmetry appealed to me because, though Chavez's Venezuela is not yet anything like Mugabe's Zimbabwe, I cannot help thinking that Mugabe is Chavez's possible future, and that the 83-year-old former liberation fighter is the former general's Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.

Mugabe, like Chavez, took power after elections that were widely agreed to have been fairly conducted. Over time his governing philosophy came to consist of an economic nationalism underpinning a state socialist system, mobilised by exploiting resentment towards a privileged minority (the whites), treacherous elites (journalists) and interfering foreign powers (Britain).

The Zidane moment of madness

For Christmas I would like a special writer's present. This would be the uninhibited capacity to be able to write sentences about stench and stink and sleaze and about how politics is enmired in corruption, or else about how government is terminally incompetent and useless — and to get this stuff into boisterous print, before the treacherous and debilitating thought occurs to me (as it invariably does), that perhaps there is something more to it all than venal politicos and unemployable public servants. Scruple diminishes the effect of all too many a column.

Criticism — reproach, even — comes easily enough; satisfying condemnation, however, I tend to reserve for actions, statements or falsehoods I couldn't readily have made myself. I somehow just can't slaughter someone just for messing up, because I also mess up, and in circumstances far simpler than those faced by prime ministers or generals. Was Wendy Alexander, Labour's Scottish leader, attempting deliberately to subvert the law for the sake of £950 from a chap in the Channel Islands? I doubt it.

Sometimes, however, there is a kind of messing up that goes beyond my understanding. And you think: “How on God's green Earth can that have happened?” Two of the Government's recent debacles fit into this uncomprehended category: the case of the lost discs and the affair of the general secretary. Let us take them in reverse order.