Regular readers will know my fondness for the line attributed to Henry Kissinger about the Iran-Iraq War, "It's a pity that only one of them can lose."
Pamela Geller, brothers and sisters. Pamela Geller.
Like Charlie Hebdo before her, and like Salman Rushdie before that, Geller and her supporters have got what they wanted.
It was wrong. Those who did it, did wrong. Those who wanted it were therefore wrong to want it. But they did want it. And they got it.
Charlie Hebdo is now enjoying being treated with a moral, political and literary seriousness that its content simply does not deserve.
Rushdie has long enjoyed fame and fortune far beyond the just desserts of a purveyor of postcolonial literature and magic realism, as straightforwardly popular writers in the Old Tory tradition, such as Roald Dahl and John le Carré, had good cause to resent in the days when the Right still hated Rushdie as much as he has always hated it.
How will Geller and her partisans dine out for decades on these latest events? For, one way or another, they are going to do precisely that.
How will Geller and her partisans dine out for decades on these latest events? For, one way or another, they are going to do precisely that.
Numerous of Princess Charlotte's ancestors have been caricatured. There is no reason why this one (through various lines, though most notably through the part-Moorish Elizabeth of York, whose marriage to Henry VII ended the Wars of the Roses) ought to be any different.
That is not the point.
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