Airstrip One

The Great Dictator

"I'm not keen on Emmanuel Goldstein's attempts to dictate the editorial directions of other blogs" claims Iain Murray. Dictate! I've never been accused of that before, even of shabbily attempting this. Of course, I'm sure that Iain would not view all dictation attempts as being equally foul.

Daddy Warblogs also took exception to this, claiming that I somehow stated that the Likud vote was responsible for years of Arab hatred of Israel. Err, no. I claimed bias, not time travel. After he gets over this (news ticker boy?) the analysis is actually quite readible.

Peter Briffa, manages to throw all his toys out of the pram. He pens a "satire" which probably sounded better when he got back from the pub than it does now, and didn't see fit to link to the offending piece for the benefit of his somewhat bewildered readers (he also took the site out of his permanent links). Not that this stopped him recommending the piece by e-mail to other bloggers mentioned.

So what was the point of this piece that generated such hysterical reactions from three intelligent men? Well it was not an attempt at dictation, the shorthand is not good enough. The point was that I was expecting some reaction on the Likud vote from some of the right wing bloggers so I looked at one and found nothing, then the next and nothing, even Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Reynolds. Now that's interesting, and to be honest more interesting than a couple of "Sharon's a moderate" comments. Not on an individual web log (I would be holding myself to a ridiculously high standard), but on nine current affairs web logs with a history of trenchant commenting on the Middle East, it just looks strange. To me at least.

So, no, its not evil to ignore the Likud vote - it's just biased. Bias motivates most web loggers (I didn't start this web log to put things across impartially). However as I said before ignoring instances of Israeli political stupidity will not make it go away. It is a mirror image of the mistakes that the left made with the ANC, and yes the Palestinians.

Take a chill pill.