Harry's Place

You’ve probably seen this story:

Comedian Tim Minchin has lashed out at ITV after his performance was cut from Jonathan Ross’s Christmas special.
Writing on his website, Minchin said he had been asked to compose a song for the show and wrote a “silly, harmless” lyric comparing Jesus to Woody Allen.
He claims the song – which he [...]

If you want reassurance that Richard Seymour and his fellow SWPers will never come close to achieving power in anything resembling a democracy, read his latest post at Lenin’s Tomb venting his contempt-verging-on-hatred for, um, British soldiers serving in Afghanistan and their wives.
The Military Wives Choir is concentrated evil. It is vicious, stupid and [...]

As an opponent of academic boycotts, I was interested to have this story drawn to my attention. Briefly, an Israeli postgraduate student, Smadar Bakovic, felt she had been given a low dissertation mark by her supervisor, a pro-Palestinian campaigner, Professor Nicola Pratt, who signed the ‘Israel must lose’ letter to the Guardian, as well as [...]

Sounding a lot like a Republican candidate for president, Hugo Chavez called President Obama “a ‘clown’ and an ‘embarrassment’ who has turned the United States into a ‘disaster’” after Obama criticized Venezuela’s ties with Iran and Cuba.
Chávez’s comments came in the wake of Obama’s Monday written interview with the Caracas paper El Universal, where the [...]

This is a cross post from Marc’s Words
After reading a couple of very interesting articles in the Jerusalem Report the scale of the problems facing Israeli citizens from their own MK’s is very worrying indeed.
It is easy to protect your country from foreign enemies, it’s the domestic ones that make life really tough though. It’s [...]

Jeffrey Goldberg offers a more intelligent observation than Carlos Latuff could ever hope to do on Abdel Moneim Kato, the Egyptian general who said anti-government protesters “deserve to be thrown into Hitler’s ovens.”
I’ve spent quite a bit of time in Cairo arguing with Holocaust deniers (arguing doesn’t work, by the way), so I was pleasantly [...]

Rosie Bell (who comments here as KB Player) has produced an excellent fisking of George Galloway’s wretched attack on the late Christopher Hitchens.
I just want to respond, for the record, to a few additional points in Galloway’s nasty screed.
Galloway writes that Hitchens was “the man who once praised Saddam Hussein in adoration…”
This is probably a [...]

This is a cross post by Joel Braunold from Haaretz

I struggle to remember to last time I read a news item from Israel featuring an orthodox person and felt pride. With the segregated bus saga and the awful incidents of price-tagging, the Judaism that I know and love is being abused. I know for a fact that [...]

Index on Censorship has just posted this story about Palestinian (but London based) artist Larissa Sansour.  It is claimed that she was originally shortlisted for the Lacoste Elysée Prize, but that she was withdrawn because her submitted work was too pro-Palestinian.  Sansour asserts that she was asked to approve a statement saying that she had [...]

Guest post by Cipriano
Luis Suárez, Liverpool FC’s Uruguayan striker, has been sentenced to an eight-match ban for racist abuse. He was found guilty of using the word ‘negrito’ in addressing Manchester United’s Patrice Evra, a black player.
I’m not in any way making excuses for racist abuse, particularly in Britain where it has been frequently proved [...]