(This was posted by Shiraz Maher, at the blog of Standpoint.)
Oh dear, it really hasn’t been a good week for the Guardian.
On Monday Comment is Free invited Gerry Adams to pontificate about – would you believe it – the killing of civilians. Yes, really. Since when did theGuardian recognise Gerry Adams as the moral arbiter on informers and leaks?
On Tuesday they published an outrageous piece which – even by their standards – plumbs new depths. Norman Geras noted the ‘miserable evasion’ of Priyamvada Gopal who trivialises the ordeal suffered by Aisha, the Afghan woman featured on the front cover of Time magazine. After fleeing an abusive marriage the Taliban tracked her down and ordered that her ears and nose were cut off as punishment. It is a haunting image; the mania of millenarianism.
Gopal does not see it that way. Instead, she is ‘concerned by the continued insistence that the complexities of war, occupation and reality itself can be reduced to bedtime stories’. Without a hint of irony, her piece is titled ‘burqas and bikinis’.
