(Benny Hill? Comic, dead a few years now, not exactly cutting edge then.) And I've always felt rather sorry for them, because, being actors, they're obviously bursting to have a go; but now, sometimes, they do get to give the odd little speech.It's probably my imagination, but the increase of the visual aids seems to have lessened the queue of expert talking heads. This gives me a chance to talk to you about one of my favourite bugbears, which is the curious use by these people of some strange sort of historic present tense, as in, "Cromwell is upset.. Charles is weak.. Nelson doesn't care, he takes his ships... Now, this is exactly what Richelieu wants."I don't know why this annoys me so much, but it does. A condescension, the implication that we can only understand in terms of the present, that sort of thing Don't worry, I can bang on for hours like this Probably wiser to take the stairs.c.nevin independent co.uk. "Air campaign"? "Coalition forces"? "War on terror"? How much longer must we go on enduring these lies? There is no "campaign" – merely an air bombardment of the poorest and most broken country in the world by the world's richest and most sophisticated nation. No MiGs have taken to the skies to do battle with the American B-52s or F-18s. The only ammunition soaring into the air over Kabul comes from Russian anti-aircraft guns manufactured around 1943.Coalition? Hands up who's seen the Luftwaffe in the skies over Kandahar, or the Italian air force or the French air force over Herat Or even the Pakistani air force.
The Americans are bombing Afghanistan with a few British missiles thrown in "Coalition" indeed. Then there's the "war on terror". When are we moving on to bomb the Jaffna peninsula? Or Chechnya – which we have already left in Vladimir Putin's bloody hands? I even seem to recall a massive terrorist car bomb that exploded in Beirut in 1985 – targeting Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the spiritual inspiration to the Hezbollah, who now appears to be back on Washington's hit list – and which missed Nasrallah but slaughtered 85 innocent Lebanese civilians. Years later, Carl Bernstein revealed in his book, Veil, that the CIA was behind the bomb after the Saudis agreed to fund the operation. So will the US President George Bush be hunting down the CIA murderers involved? The hell he will.So why on earth are all my chums on CNN and Sky and the BBC rabbiting on about the "air campaign", "coalition forces" and the "war on terror"? Do they think their viewers believe this twaddle?Certainly Muslims don't.
In fact, you don't have to spend long in Pakistan to realise that the Pakistani press gives an infinitely more truthful and balanced account of the "war" – publishing work by local intellectuals, historians and opposition writers along with Taliban comments and pro-government statements as well as syndicated Western analyses – than The New York Times; and all this, remember, in a military dictatorship.You only have to spend a few weeks in the Middle East and the subcontinent to realise why Tony Blair's interviews on al-Jazeera and Larry King Live don't amount to a hill of beans. The Beirut daily As-Safir ran a widely-praised editorial asking why an Arab who wanted to express the anger and humiliation of millions of other Arabs was forced to do so from a cave in a non-Arab country. The implication, of course, was that this – rather than the crimes against humanity on 11 September – was the reason for America's determination to liquidate Osama bin Laden. Far more persuasive has been a series of articles in the Pakistani press on the outrageous treatment of Muslims arrested in the United States in the aftermath of the September atrocities.One such article should suffice. Headlined "Hate crime victim's diary", in The News of Lahore, it outlined the suffering of Hasnain Javed, who was arrested in Alabama on 19 September with an expired visa.
