Melanie McDonagh doesn’t want to hear that old dreary stuff about the Catholic church, thanks all the same.

The old gibe, that anti-Catholicism is the antisemitism of the left, looked like being given a new lease of life.

Is that an old jibe? (I don’t get out much.) Well if so it’s a very stupid one. Leftish anti-Catholicism is about real actions and commands by the Catholic church and its clergy. It’s substantive – it’s about something. What is anti-semitism ‘about’? Catholicism has a lot of substance to get to grips with. It has a hierarchy, and a state, and a long history of official actions and institutions (the inquisition, the index, wars, corruption – little things like that). … Read the rest

Allow me to make a banal observation: it can be very hard to know how one is coming across, just as it can be very hard to know what other people mean by how they are coming across. It’s all just very difficult! Which is just as well, in some ways – we don’t want to be totally transparent – we don’t want our every gesture and intonation to be unambiguous and indisputable, like 2+2=4. We want a little flexibility, some shading, some room to maneuver – some doubt.

But in other ways it can be tiresome. We may misunderstand other people, and they may misunderstand us, and that’s not always helpful. I’ve just read the Zoë Heller novel The … Read the rest

It was embarrassing to be an American during the Bush era, but what’s up with those zany people in Italy? Why do they vote for Berlusconi? Don’t they think owning most of the country’s mass media is power enough? And then…he’s such a…

The Italian Prime Minister has called President Obama “tanned” again — but this time he did not miss the opportunity to joke about the First Lady’s skin colour as well. After his return from the G20 summit in Pittsburgh, Mr Berlusconi told a rally of conservative supporters that he was bringing greetings from someone in the United States. “What’s his name? Some tanned guy. Ah, Barack Obama,” he said. He then added: “You won’t believe it,

Look: here is Independent World Report. It’s a new bimonthly reader-supported magazine covering the forgotten and untold stories of the world. It just launched. Subscribe to it if you can!

The editor is Tasneem Khalil. You know Tasneem – he used to report on corruption and police misconduct in Bangladesh, until one midnight he was arrested and his computer was seized and he was beaten up. He’s in Sweden now and he’s started this terrific magazine. I’m proud to say I have an article in the first issue. There’s one on the Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara. There’s a lot.… Read the rest

Once again I’m startled at the casual malice of Andrew Brown. No charge is too unsupported to make, it seems. No inhibition causes him to pause and ask himself, ‘Wait, do I really know any of this? Am I just blackguarding a whole category of people on the basis of nothing in particular? Should I perhaps rephrase things by adding a ‘some’ or a ‘may sometimes’ in places just to be fair?’ – no sense of shame prompts him to stop making things up about a group of people he dislikes. Why is that?

Oh well, the pope does it, Kevin Padian does it, so why should a journalist hesitate?

At any rate, he doesn’t.

It’s obvious