Author/critic. Keep grown-ups out of art and edgelords out of politics. Opinions my own, unless they appal you, in which case, I nicked them.
Jul 6, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
2015: in the wake of terrorist massacres in Paris, including the targeting of a Jewish supermarket, BBC reporter Tim Willcox tells a French Jewish woman at a solidarity rally, "Many critics of Israel’s policy [say] the Palestinians suffer hugely at Jewish hands as well."
1/4
2021: Days after apologising for years of “unacceptable” handling of complaints re anti-Israel bias in its Arabic output, the BBC is censured by Ofcom for falsely alleging the use of an anti-Muslim slur by Jewish children on a bus violently attacked by antisemites in London.
2/4
Feb 12, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I used to think that intervening in Syria was a bad idea because it would only make things worse.
As I've learned more about Syria, I've come to understand the West's refusal to intervene significantly there is the great moral failure of our age - & a strategic disaster. /1
Why did I think that? Because of Iraq. Which I opposed -rightly, I still think. So what? I guessed right. I'm not special.
Why don't I think it any more? Because the evidence, along with the bodies, has piled up. It shames us that we have not come to the aid of the Syrians. /2
Oct 18, 2018 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
Well, here's a thing that just happened - a small and undramatic thing - that has brought home to me just how much life has changed for me in recent years.
I stepped out into the hall just now to get yesterday's post. I live in a house divided into flats; we leave each other's post by the appropriate door or on the stairs when we pick up our own, and somebody had kindly left mine for me.
Jul 23, 2018 • 19 tweets • 5 min read
THREAD.
Billy Bragg responded to my circulating a dodgy deleted Tweet of his (see quote Tweet.) Here in turn is my response to him.
I have seen the context. And it still amazes me that any politically and historically literate and articulate person could phrase such a question the way you did. (And dog-whistle questions are always rhetorical, so that qualification is irrelevant).
