A study in bigotry: The Guardian’s “review” of Melanie Phillips’ new book
If there’s one thing that you should never forget when writing a review of someone’s book it is this: what you write will reflect just as much on you as on the book you are reviewing. Go over the top in praise of something that’s actually pretty run of the mill and it will make you look shallow. Start slamming something that’s a work of art and you’ll look like a philistine who couldn’t get the measure of a much greater mind. Start ranting and you’ll make an ass of yourself. Get personal and you look like a weirdo.
Enter John Crace, feature writer for the Guardian, who earlier this week reviewed
Melanie Phillips’ new book, The World Turned Upside Down. If you read the review you’ll learn nothing about Melanie’s book. But you will learn a lot about John Crace.
Here’s how he starts out, mockingly using the first person singular as if it were Melanie Phillips talking about her own reasons for writing her book:
“This book arose from a sense of perplexity that almost everyone in the world thought I was clinically mad. Everywhere I looked there were people who believed boarding a humanitarian aid convoy in international waters and murdering nine people was a little bit naughty. So I did what I’ve always done as a columnist for the Daily Mail; go where my bigotry leads.”
As the piece goes on he slips in just enough references to “the Old Testament”, going to “synagogue”, “Judaism” and the like to be absolutely sure that everyone knows Melanie Phillips is a Jew. Apart from that, there’s no real need to add anything more from his piece. It’s all variations on the theme of the first paragraph.
So what’s all this telling us about John Crace? The first thing is that he’s a weak writer. The clanking, leaden prose looks like something a teacher singles out to a creative writing class of 13 year olds to warn them about the dangers of mixing humour with personal animosity. It never works, and it’s foolish to try.
The second thing it tells us comes precisely out of that all too obvious personal animosity: Crace cannot deal with Melanie Phillips’ arguments, so he goes for her personality. But he can’t even do that with any panache. The “Mad Mel” line has got to be one of the most hackneyed lines in Lefty British journalism. To use it is pretty much like going to get your forehead tattooed with the words: “I’m a dimwit with nothing original to say”.
It’s also more than a little bit of a giveaway about his mindset: the charge of insanity against political opponents was one that was used to bang up Soviet dissidents in lunatic asylums. Crace will be much too shallow to have intended his audience to think along such lines. And he certainly won’t see the irony in his unconscious employment of totalitarian tropes against an anti-totalitarian writer. Nonetheless, it does illustrate with awesome clarity the sheer nastiness that lives inside him.
Which brings us to the third observation revealed by John Crace’s ugly little “review”: bigotry — the charge he makes against Melanie Phillips but which rebounds so spectacularly on himself and his views.
Here’s how my Oxford dictionary defines the word bigot: “A person obstinately and unreasonably wedded to a creed, opinion or ritual.” But that’s John Crace! (in fact that’s the Guardian and most of Britain’s liberal Left). Just look at his writing: packed full of lies and distortions (about Israel mainly); lies and distortions obstinately and irrationally held to regardless of evidence and contemptuous of countervailing views; lies and distortions which form part of a ritualised anti-intellectual agenda which has sunk its claws deep inside the new British establishment.
The real problem for John Crace is that he’s an intellectual pygmy taking on a giant. If he played the arguments rather than the person making them, it’d be a bloodbath and at some level he, like most of Melanie’s critics, probably knows it. That’s why he writes in the way that he does. Poor thing can’t help it. But what a state to be in….
Tags: Israel
June 16th, 2010 at 4:31 pm
How pathetic that the Guardian saw fit to publish this drivel
June 16th, 2010 at 4:42 pm
Ad hominem attacks, the last vestiges of those with nothing to say.
June 16th, 2010 at 5:04 pm
The vitriol aimed at ex-leftists is always more intense. They’re not just wrong they have let the side down.
June 16th, 2010 at 5:46 pm
John Crace’s attempts at humour are buttock-clenchingly embarrassing. I’d advise him not to give up his day job.
Robin Shepherd says: What worries me is that I think that is his day job!
June 16th, 2010 at 6:17 pm
That really is a shabby antisemitic review. Notice how Crace of the Guardian, so politically correct in other respects, is not politically correct enough to realise that anti-Semitism is a politically incorrect term: antisemitism is the spelling of choice laid down by the Vidal Sassoon Centre, and generally followed by the sensitive. Notice, too, how Crace in his snide denigration of Judaism, implies by contrast that Muslim belief is entirely consistent with “reason”. The world really is upside down, when those who would normally reject all religious belief as mumbo jumbo incompatible with the Age of Reason and modernity bend over backwards to accommodate and laud the very one which is closest to the Dark Ages and seeks to thrust us all back there.
June 16th, 2010 at 7:31 pm
Mel Phillips has nothing to worry about from individuals like this. I’ve followed and contributed to her blog in the Spectator for some while, and while I am not 100% in agreement with all she writes, she demonstrates a brilliant mind through her writing.
I’m not familiar with Crace – having been permanently pre moderated from CiF I rarely visit any more, but my experience of Guardian writers is that they appear to be happy to sell out any principles they may have for the Guardian’s shilling, so what they write inevitably parrots the Guardian World View, a nether world of old fashioned English anti-Semitism, middle class leftwing snobbery and intellectual paucity. The Redgrave acting family were their sort of people, along with numerous other media and luvvy types, plus the huge but diminishing number of useful idiots who believe the Turks on the 6th boat were actually ‘Peace activists’.
A poor review in the Guardian is actually a badge of honour.
June 16th, 2010 at 7:47 pm
Oh your poor poor dears, The Guardian is just so mean and spiteful, isn’t it?
Never mind, just don’t read it, ignore it, neurotically obsessing about The Guardian will not make things any better, unless of course you can afford a good shrink.
June 16th, 2010 at 8:02 pm
The derogation of Zionist claims as ‘Old Testament family tree’ i.e. dusty, dead and ‘merely literary’, or ‘merely literally, as opposed to non-literally, understood’, is a gross misrepresentation, that is hardly different from disparagement of Judaism and Jewish identity as precisely the same by cultural Christians long before any Israel existed.
I think that is simple cultural Christian anti-Judaism/antisemitism.
That it can appear in a ‘respected’ daily is disturbing but, alas, in this day and age, scarcely surprising. It sounds like an GBS or GKC anti-Jewish literary rant. These are a recapitulation of dark times.
June 16th, 2010 at 9:28 pm
The Guardian recorded £38m operating losses last year. Maybe Crace is all they could afford.
June 17th, 2010 at 6:48 am
If the first paragraph of the review makes it’s most important point, then this is a good illustration of the modern left mindset – “everybody” thinks I’m crazy, “everywhere I look there are people who think that..”. What is going on is a mob mentality where no one has to listen to arguments or think for himself. You parrot the party line, showing originality in the form of your snide remarks, if possible, then sit back and wait for the automatic applause.
June 17th, 2010 at 6:49 am
The review is typical of the sneering, ‘ironical’ tone which the Guardianauts employ to remind we lesser mortals of their self-appointed role as the arbiters of acceptable public values.
The rule of the mob in its right-on incarnation.
There is even an oxymoron at the end.
I am a great admirer of Melanie Phillips,even though I don’t share all her views, and shall now buy her book.
June 17th, 2010 at 7:07 am
What else to expect from the Guardian? Obviously they were always going to give Mel’s book a negative fact-free ad hominem review, what else could they do? The very substance of Mel’s critique in her book and in her writings is that many on the Left are in alliance with Muslim radicals, in a war against the Jews, all in the name of human rights and anti-racism. So naturally the Craces of the world will only prove the truth of Melanie’s critique by responding the way they do.
It is par for the course, it is not a case of ‘how could the Guardian publish such drivel?’, rather it is a case of ‘they could only publish such drivel’ since it confirms Melanie’s accurate thesis on a world turned upside down. If the Guardian were to praise Melanie’s book it would actually count against her thesis! – the Left-Muslim extremist aliance in the UK and beyond. The Guardian’s knee-jerk denial and disregard for the facts re Melanie’s new book is thus not only very predictable, but only reinforces Melanie’s points.
June 17th, 2010 at 8:59 am
Well, that was a poor piece of writing indeed.
Has anyone else noticed how Western secularists who attack Christianity and Judaism are so notably silent on Islam? I consider myself secular, however I don’t have a need to constantly attack religion. It is just one of the moral inversions seen in this type of writing.
June 17th, 2010 at 10:03 am
Crace is the living embodiment of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s observation that mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself.
June 17th, 2010 at 10:37 am
the guardian and the bbc, both have no standards,
June 17th, 2010 at 10:59 am
I thought the review was quite funny – have you all lost your sense of humour? After all there were chuckles all around when the ‘We Con the World’ video came out.
June 17th, 2010 at 12:36 pm
Umm, you’re aware that this is satire rather than a review, right?
June 17th, 2010 at 1:33 pm
‘I thought the review was quite funny ‘
Yes, a lot of sophisticated literary types thought Shaw’s and Chesterton’s anti-Judaism and antisemitism terribly funny too.
Not Judah Magnes, though.
June 17th, 2010 at 3:13 pm
Crace’s piece isn’t a review nor is it supposed to pass as one. It’s satire. It’s part of a series where he satirises popular books.
This article is both reactionary and entirely moot.
June 17th, 2010 at 3:32 pm
Erm…it’s not a review and not intended to be a review. It’s a “digested read” – a synopsis in the first person. A regular feature in the Guardian every week.
So do grow up the lot of you. What ridiculous and vicious comments some of you make
June 17th, 2010 at 3:56 pm
“I thought the review was quite funny”
As you are actively working for the destruction of the Jewish state that is really not very surprising.
Source: Zionism without a Jewish State
http://tinyurl.com/3x9nb9t
June 17th, 2010 at 4:25 pm
Another point regarding the mob mentality – Crace obviously thinks that the idea that all of his friends and associates think she’s crazy will cut Melanie Phillips to the quick. If he thought she would love to hear it, which is probably the case, he would have to rethink his entire approach.
June 17th, 2010 at 6:00 pm
‘Erm…it’s not a review and not intended to be a review.’
What are you talking about?
The subject of the piece is the book, whose title and price headline it. Of course it is intended to be a review, to represent it reasonably accurately, even if grotesquely. Satire isn’t satire unless it has a grounding in reality.
However it is precisely the degree the review does accurately represent the book, and not its author’s personal view of Phillips, that is contested.
June 17th, 2010 at 6:50 pm
Andrew:
Has anyone noticed?
This phenomenon has been noticed in very interesting quarters (the Kurdish diaspora in the US):
Why Kurdistan needs to take note of Paul Berman’s latest book, the flight of the intellectuals
KurdishMedia.com – By Dr Sabah A. Salih16/06/2010 00:00:00
http://www.kurdmedia.com/article.aspx?id=16360
here’s a choice sampling:
Using their own words and a rich body of scholarship, Berman shows that in fact these Islamists and the Islamism they champion are not moderate or mainstream or authentic at all. This is not a point that political culture in Kurdistan is unaware of. But the culture is not sufficiently informed about Berman’s larger point: How a great many Western intellectuals, having lost faith in their culture’s values of secularism and human rights, have decided that Enlightenment is no better than Islamism, and that therefore the likes of Qaradawi and Ramadan deserve to be taken as seriously as say Voltaire—not only that but that they need to be supported and their enemies, especially Muslim dissidents, attacked as misguided self-hating individuals that mistakenly believe Western culture to be superior to Islamist culture.
This is an important point for the people of Kurdistan to be aware of, important because the Western enablers of Islamism refuse to distinguish between Islamism and the faith; what’s more, they portray Islamism as mainstream rather than as the fringe it has always been and they portray all opposition to Islamism as an attack on Islam. As a consequence, today there is more willingness to criticize Islamism in Kurdistan and in Arab and Muslim countries than in the West. These days, if you happen to be a Muslim dissident living in the West, chances are you will be viewed by the mainstream media and the intellectual establishment as a traitor: traitor to your religion, traitor to your culture, and traitor to your past. And if you speak your mind freely and bravely, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali frequently does, you will be called a bomb thrower, a fanatic, a Muslim hater.
Berman’s larger point matters for another reason: Projects like regime change in Iraq and the struggle of the Kurds for cultural and political rights get largely defined these days by Islamists and their Western intellectual backers; these have much easier access to the media and public spaces than anyone from Kurdistan or liberated Iraq. You may recall how tirelessly the two groups worked in tandem to protect and legitimize Saddam’s brutal occupation of Iraq and prevent its liberation. Even today when an Islamist like Tariq Ramadan, a man with no ties whatsoever to Iraq, declares in London and New York that the removal of tyranny in Baghdad was illegal, he gets rousing applause, as if the geopolitical makeup of the world has been simply a legalistic affair rather than the product of conquest, political machinations, luck, among various other things. By contrast, those who have legitimate ties to Iraq and Kurdistan but do not subscribe to this lazy piece of nonsense and have a counter story to tell, find themselves ignored. The implication of Berman’s book for Kurdistan is that its story in the West cannot be told because the intellectual market these days favors Islamism over secularism, the dogma of multiculturalism over honest discussion.
June 17th, 2010 at 8:05 pm
A quick look through the rest of Craces’s “reviews” of other writers shows that mockery and denigration are commonly the only ingredients served up in all of them. Applying the old saw to writers, those who can do, those who can’t, compose features in the Guardian.
June 17th, 2010 at 9:45 pm
Are you people mad? This was a spoof of Melanie Phillips’ eminently spoofable prose style. It is ‘beyond pathetic’, in her own words, that some people can be so stupid as to believe it was a straight-up review.
June 17th, 2010 at 11:06 pm
The antidote to the poison in the Guardian , here’s Jose Maria Aznar in the Times today:
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/article2559280.ece
June 17th, 2010 at 11:14 pm
DA75;
Crace’s series might be named “Digested Read” but each of his pieces, replete with ridiculous and vicious comments, suggest he is suffering from indigestion.
June 18th, 2010 at 6:32 am
@ Nemo Loris
A spoof or lampoon it may well been tried to be, but an ad hominem it certainly was, and essentially written to turn readers away from reading the book in an Orwellian kind of way. It calls for readers to disregard another point of view to Crace’s without the reader acquiring ANY information about the book to be able to make up his/her mind whether to buy and read it or not. In short all he says: it’s rubbish and what do you expect from the likes of Melanie Phillips, a Jew, an Old Testament nutcase.
That’s not on in this climate and one has the right to turn HIM (Crace a figure of today’s political correctness) on his head. There were plenty like him in the 1930s.
@DA75: *a digested read” ? Thanks. I didn’t know that. Now it all makes clear sense. What idiots we all are.
June 18th, 2010 at 7:07 am
A trenchant sequel to George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language. Melanie Phillips courageously flushes out today’s equivalents of Orwell’s targets-those who with indignant self- righteousness suppress free debate and liberty itself.”
-R. James Woolsey, former Director of Central Intelligence(1993-1995)
Say no more.
June 18th, 2010 at 11:24 am
Lynne T’s comment and quotes are very relevant and important.
Even mass-publications like Newsweek are not free of this disgusting desease when a journalist from that low-quality paper of “international newsmagazine” wrote briefly that Magdi Allam, editor of the most important Italian quality daily newspaper Corriere della Sera is a “self-hating Muslim” for renouncing Islamism, and eventually Islam itself, when he converted to Catholicism and he supports Israel. I think Newsweek is a digsting low-quality trash, and for this no respectable person should take a word of this paper seriously any more.
June 18th, 2010 at 11:27 am
“In short all he says: it’s rubbish and what do you expect from the likes of Melanie Phillips, a Jew, an Old Testament nutcase.”
As Mark Steyn writes:
“The new anti-Semitism is a Euro-Islamic fusion so universal, so irrational and so fevered that it’s foolish to assume any limits.”
http://tinyurl.com/35q4hp4
June 18th, 2010 at 11:42 am
Acknowledgements to Bryan White, strawberryhill and DA75 for pointing out that these are ‘digested reads’, ie. attempted spoofs and not reviews in the normal sense. Yes, I was one of those idiots who at first glance thought it was just a monumentally crap sarcastic review.
I’ve looked at a couple of the other ‘reads’ and indeed there are commendable traces of humour to be found. But Robin’s point about how they reveal Crace’s worldview is still valid.
The ‘digested read’ of Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens mocks Hitchens’ supposed intellectual conceit and talks of the war in Iraq thus …
“I should also like to say that after the war had been won, I made my own journey to Iraq and found evidence that Saddam had WMD, and I will never forget the humbling letter I received from a mother of a soldier killed in Iraq thanking me for being as significant as WB Yeats.”
For Crace and the Left, it seems as if Saddam Hussein never had WMD programmes. Clearly calutrons are accumulated for the purpose of garden decoration and testing biological toxins on political prisoners until they die is just over-enthusiasm on the part of the authorities. Crace clearly shares the view that tyrannies are legitimate and should be left in place, no matter how many hundreds of thousands of their own people and other nations they kill. The idea of sacrificing a single soldier in the fight against a tyranny is simply too horrifying. Hitler would have had a field day.
The pre-digested read of Tony Blair’s anticipated memoir ‘The Journey’ is predictably full of contempt for Blair and Bush and contains this nice little line about the Jews …
“Blessed are the money-lenders,” I said to Archangel Mandy, “For they shall inherit the House of Lords.”
Thanks John. Hilarious. What an intellectual giant you are.
June 18th, 2010 at 1:47 pm
Perhaps a good test would be to ask John Crace to review one of Tariq Ramadan’s latest works : would the same digested read spoofery apply, or might there be a more reverential tone?Would it attract the same first person format?
This is meant to be an open question, with no presumed conclusion in mind.
June 18th, 2010 at 5:39 pm
I think Crace is a bit of a one-trick pony, frankly; Craig Brown does this sort of thing far more intelligently and sensitively.
But, still, I think that people here are forming quite erroneous (and rather offensive and extremist) conclusions that say rather more about their own prejudices than they do anything he has written.
Just briefly – the Hitchens piece need not imply support for leaving tyrants in place: it does point up the frankly dishonest way that the Blair government based its case for war, above all, on WMD that were indeed proved to be non-existent. (I say this as someone who supported the war on humanitarian grounds, but not the case that the British Government presented its case, as though Saddam Hussain was a threat to Britain, British interests, or indeed any foreign state).
And the claim that “Blessed be the money-lenders” refers to Jews (as opposed to certain individuals who lent money or supplied funding to the Labour Party or to prestige projects of the Labour government, some but by no means all of whom were Jewish but whose Jewishness is entirely irrelevant to the matter at hand – which is the corruption of the Blair clique and their persistent seeking out of rich individuals of questionable morality, who were later rewarded with peerages or honours of state..the Hinduja brothers spring immeidately to mind)….is so far-fetched and really rather shameful and offensive. I presume only someone unfamiliar with the workings and general dishonestly and indecency of the Labour government of Blair (“Cash for honours” anyone?) would make such a claim. Making frivolous impliciations of anti-semitism really is a disgrace of a high order.
And Wendy – have a look through all his pieces in the series and see for yourself. They are all, without exception, in the first person and satirical. Straw man, I believe this sort of argument is known as.
June 19th, 2010 at 9:24 am
You’ve convinced me that the real Batman is Robin, keeping seeking the truth…
June 19th, 2010 at 11:01 am
I work in the media, live in Hampstead and vote Labour. Therefore everyone I know, work with or live close to buys the Guardian (just ask my newsagent).
Depressingly, the one thing I’ve noticed over the years is how Guardian readers seem particularly prone to swallowing whole everything they read there and worse, actually allowing the newspaper to present them with off-the-shelf positions on matters such as Israel for which they otherwise might have a more enquiring mind. Therefore, I come across completely ‘neutral’ or otherwise disinterested people who seem to have acquired a special disdain, or even hatred, for Israel quite literally based on what they read in the papers. Crucially, although most people posting here are intelligent enough to be fully aware of when anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism merge, the people to which I refer are not. Neither, of course will they have any interest in searching out or reading this blog. We’re talking to ourselves.
A couple of examples come to mind that for me just highlight the closed mindset of the Guardian and its faithful followers. My dad used to occasionally sit on the top deck of the 24 bus near Michael Foot, then the most left-wing of Labour leaders. Often over dinner Dad would tut-tut about how baffling it was that the only newspaper Foot would apparently be seen reading on his journey to Westminster was the Daily Telegraph. Similarly, and at around the same time, a BBC documentary about Lindsay Anderson, another left-wing ‘firebrand’, had the reporter commenting to Anderson on all the old Telegraphs lying around in his flat. Surely this isn’t the newspaper for someone of your political views? Anderson rounded on him angrily: “I don’t read a newspaper to tell me my views!” he shouted.
In the 1970s Paul Johnson wrote a famous article for the New Statesman called “The Rise of the Know-Nothing Left.” This same know-nothing left is alive and well today and both writing and reading the Guardian. Lately in its pages we’ve been seeing the limits of an unconscious anti-Semitism pushed out further and further. The trouble is, and for the reasons I’ve given, however extreme these articles and op-ed pieces may become they will always be widely acceptable, permissible and even respected if they appear in the Guardian. A such the Guardian has become as dangerous as any fascist rag but instead with a circulation to be envied.
June 19th, 2010 at 12:31 pm
Ah, all of you, come on! You all think you are ‘right’. Melanie Phillips thinks she’s right. Jone Crane thinks he’s right. And so do all of you who write here. Including myself. This is part of our human dilemma – we love a good squabble and rant, while claiming that we just want to live in peace. But where should we start, if not by examining our own tone of voice and agendas. Melanie Phillips is being humoured by the left – but then again she’s not the nicest person in expressing her own vitriol either. If talking about religion, which Phillips like to do so much, maybe a closer examination of, at least, the Christian message would do well: Love thy neighbour as yourself. (But do we really love ourselves? That’s another question). The actual message of the religion is, I think, far more important than the ‘structure’ it’s created where the original words seem to get lost. Or maybe we should all just try and relax into buddhism. Oh – you do think I’m being unrealistic, don’t you?
June 19th, 2010 at 6:01 pm
I read that “review” and could not make head nor tail of it. i vaguely got the idea only after going back to Melanie Phillips’ page and checking out what the book was about.
I’m too tired to be witty (probably so was Crace, judging by what passes for his facial expression) so I’ll just borrow someone else’s term and call him a douchebag. But then that’s the Guardian (ha!) for you. Nothing I’ve read there relating to Jews or Israel has ever been anything but antiSemitic filth. Why expect anything better?
Whether you agree or disagree with Melanie P, at least you can understand what the hell she’s talking about! It’s called CLARITY, Crace! Try it sometime.
One virtue of his “review” – it does not persuade me to waste my time reading anything by him in the future. More time for Sex and the City reruns!
June 19th, 2010 at 6:09 pm
OK, quick note to those noting the Crace review was a “satire”. Yes, it was intended to be a satire, ended up being nore of a poor parody. however, even satire has to be funny, and though you can see he’s trying to be funny, it’s based mainly on recognition “humour” which doesn’t quite work, because those of us who read Phillips know that she is a serious writer with meticulous skills that she evidences every day in her work.
Man’s nothing but a wannabe.
June 19th, 2010 at 8:23 pm
Jonathan Posner: I think you’re wrong to generalise like this. I live in Hampstead. Write. Don’t vote Labour and buy the Telegraph. My newsagent sells lots of newspapers. I don’t think that the Guardian sells that many copies either. Haven’t they made a loss over the last year of about £38 million? However I agree with you regarding their obsession re Israel. It makes no sense and I refuse to read anything that they publish online – especially as the comments published are, in many instances, quite psychotic!
June 20th, 2010 at 7:29 am
Acknowledgements to DA 75 , Jonathan Posner and Sara for making such very good points, all of which have made me think about my previous comments.
Having read some more of the Digested Reads, I agree that they are of a standard format and some are funny ,but I still think that my suggestion that John Crace perhaps do a similar review on one of Tariq Ramadan’s works has some validity.
This would be a test of the impartiality of the satire surely ?
June 20th, 2010 at 12:01 pm
And one last thought : I’ve read the Crace piece 3 times, to allow myself time to think about,rather than merely react to, its content.
I have to say that it has a decidedly nasty flavour and is not remotely funny, in comparison to some of his other offerings.
Melanie Phillips is a brilliant and original writer with the courage of her convictions and I would say to her :’Live long and prosper’.
July 2nd, 2010 at 10:54 pm
Why acknowledge the fact this wasn’t a review by inserting the word in inverted comma’s and then attack it as such?
It’s part of an ongoing satirical series called Digested Reads.
“Here’s how he starts out, mockingly using the first person singular as if it were Melanie Phillips talking about her own reasons for writing her book:”
This is entirely inkeeping with the whole series and anyone that had conducted more than a minutes worth research would have realised this.
Furthermore, despite the tired old comeback many commenters here are trumpeting, it does not have to be funny to qualify as a satire, it can merely be an attempt at humour. I found it funny, I wouldn’t expect everyone in the world to, but I am not trying to reclassify things based on my own perceptions. but perhaps that though best demonstrates the differences between Crace’s readership and yours.
July 3rd, 2010 at 12:55 am
” …in fact that [bigotry]’s the Guardian and most of Britain’s liberal Left.”
Hugely intelligent and useful bleat, that.
July 3rd, 2010 at 12:04 pm
Jonathan Karmi wrote:
“The pre-digested read of Tony Blair’s anticipated memoir ‘The Journey’ is predictably full of contempt for Blair and Bush and contains this nice little line about the Jews … “Blessed are the money-lenders,” I said to Archangel Mandy, “For they shall inherit the House of Lords.” Thanks John. Hilarious. What an intellectual giant you are.”
Jews?! What’s that got to do with Jews?! That’s a joke about the Loans for Peerages scandal.
I think you show your own prejudice by posting such nonsense.
July 10th, 2010 at 7:35 am
i thought you folks didn’t believe stuff you read in The Guardian