Oliver Kamm

"Undercover Mosque"

The BBC reports:

West Midlands Police and the Crown Prosecution Service are to apologise for accusing the makers of a Channel 4 documentary of distortion. The broadcaster says the apology and the promise of £100,000 will be made at the High Court on Thursday.

It follows comments made about a Dispatches programme, Undercover Mosque, which tackled claims of Islamic extremism in the West Midlands. A police spokeswoman confirmed an apology would be read out in court.

A press release issued by the police and the CPS in August 2007 claimed the Dispatches programme, broadcast in January of that year, misrepresented the views of Muslim preachers and clerics with misleading editing. One preacher was shown saying a homosexual should be thrown off a mountain, another that women were born deficient. Police also reported Channel 4 to television watchdog Ofcom for "heavily editing" the words of Islamic imams.

But in November, Ofcom rejected the police and CPS claims, and Channel 4 said it was going to sue the CPS and police for libel. Kevin Sutcliffe, deputy head of current affairs at Channel 4, said the apology was a vindication of the programme team in exposing extreme views.

The intervention of the West Midlands Police and the CPS was, among other things, a gross intrusion into the liberty of the broadcasting media. Credit goes to the Liberal Democrat spokesman Don Foster for pointing out last November, succinctly and correctly: "Public figures should have thought twice before instantly damning Channel 4 for conducting what turns out to be a scrupulous piece of journalistic investigation into a matter of significant public interest."

Incidentally, among the public figures to have weighed in was Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Britain, who wrote last August that the "CPS/police statement will, I think more justifiably, reinforce the distrust with which many Muslims regard sections of our media".

I assume without argument that Bunglawala will now wish to make clear that it was not Channel 4 who were at fault, and that no reliance whatever may be placed on the false and inflammatory CPS/police statement.

Public intellectuals

Prospect magazine and Foreign Policy magazine are conducting a poll for the world's top public intellectual. The long list of 100 candidates is here (A-K) and here (L-Z). You can cast your vote here; and there is an accompanying article by Christopher Hitchens here.

The magazines ran this exercise once before, in 2005. The winner was Noam Chomsky. Prospect's brief biography of Chomsky notes: "Winner of the 2005 global intellectuals poll, soon afterwards he defended himself against his critics in Prospect." I hope the article linked to will be scrutinised by voters in this year's poll, for reasons that my more longstanding readers may recall.

Chomsky's defence against his critics was a reply to an article by me. To accompany the results of the poll, Prospect had published a pro-Chomsky piece (by Robin Blackburn) and a critical piece by me. You can read them here. One of the points I had made against Chomsky concerned his unscholarly and often dishonest handling of source material. Wondrously, in replying to this charge, Chomsky did exactly and in full public view what I'd accused him of doing. He lied about a published source - in this case, one that he'd written.

I summarised the story in this post a few months ago. To this day, I have no idea what Chomsky imagined he was doing. Perhaps he thought I wouldn't have his book in front of me, or that no one would check it, or that he was so important that Prospect would allow him the last word on the matter. In any event, it surprised me. It's one thing to know that Chomsky has been trading for decades on an unwarranted reputation for informed and scrupulous political analysis. It's another to see him come out with a whopping fib directly to me, and in response to an accusation of dishonesty.

Incidentally, you have an option, when voting, to suggest an additional candidate who is not included on the long list. I wished for the inclusion of Conor Cruise O'Brien on that list, but he has not made it. I'm thus pleased to see O'Brien is mentioned by Christopher in his commentary as one whom the magazines might reasonably have included. Let me recommend you consider adding the name of the great Irish historian, statesman and polymath.

Grasping the big picture

The biographer of the late Lord Deedes - politician, newspaperman, Unicef ambassador and model for Evelyn Waugh's character William Boot in the magnificent novel Scoop - is answering questions from readers of the Daily Telegraph on Tuesday. One of the questions posted today is: "Did Lord Deedes attend Bilderberg meetings whilst editor of the DT?"

Exactly. This is what we want to know.

Kingmaker

The great Stephen Leacock wrote in Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, 1912:

"I have had some small connection with politics and public life. A few years ago I went all round the British Empire delivering addresses on Imperial organization. When I state that these lectures were followed almost immediately by the Union of South Africa, the Banana Riots in Trinidad, and the Turco-Italian war, I think the reader can form some idea of their importance."

I know what he meant. In July 2005 I called for the resignation of John Kampfner as editor of the New Statesman. Not three years have passed, and Kampfner has acted on that demand.

Libel cases again

A reader has sent me this item from the Liverpool Daily Post about a local political spat:

"WIRRAL West Tory candidate Esther McVey has agreed to pay her Labour rival £6,500 in damages and costs after a year-long libel case by him. Mr Hesford sued Ms McVey after she wrote on her blog that the MP was planning to take part in what was described as a cricket “junket” to Australia and New Zealand. He said he believed the case would make “people start to wonder” about his opponent.

"The legal battle over the cricket tour has rumbled on for more than a year since Ms McVey first posted the offending article on her political blog. But before the case was heard by the High Court in Chester yesterday, the two opponents agreed the settlement. Ms McVey has agreed to pay £1,000 in damages and £5,500 in legal costs."

I make no comment on the issues between these protagonists. It's just an interesting case, as I believe it's the closest there has yet been to a legal judgement against a UK blog for libel. (Ms McVey is quoted in the article as saying "there was no court hearing and there was no court victory", but this is pedantry. If you've paid damages and your opponent's costs, then clearly you've lost. Ms McVey ought to have settled this immediately rather than fight it.) From unsought though intensely satisfying experience in these matters, I'd offer these observations about libel claims against blogs.

First, there will come a successful claim for libel against a UK blog, and if you're a blogger it's as well to cast your arguments with this in mind. The law of course applies to blogs as it does to traditional media.

Secondly, if you are a blogger and you face a threat of legal action, it is essential that you be able to support your claims about matters of fact (as opposed to matters of opinion, which would come under a defence of fair comment). If you're not able to do so, then it's prudent to acknowledge this and apologise.

Thirdly, however, if you are able to support your claims, then (with one minor exception to do with spent convictions under the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act) your defence of "justification" is complete. My own serial interlocutors - there have been five of them since I started blogging - complaining of supposedly libellous but entirely factual remarks (or expressions of fair comment) have been uniformly laughable, but there is no reason to be intimidated into silence merely because a more serious one finds the material inconvenient.

Fourthly, if you receive this sort of correspondence and are minded to fight it, in my experience it's worth not trying to do this on your own. Getting the best legal advice you can is in the end a huge economy. I'm fortunate to be represented by top libel lawyers on either side of the Atlantic, to whom I invariably refer aggrieved correspondents who complain of supposed libellous remarks. This is almost always enough to terminate the correspondence, and at no cost to me.

Man of the Year

Time magazine ludicrously and destructively named the assassin Vladimir Putin as its "Person of the Year". The Sunday Telegraph, on the other hand, gives what by any objective standards is the right answer, for the right reason. General David Petraeus "has given another last chance to a country that had long since ceased to expect one. And for that, Gen Petraeus is Person of the Year."

To speak of that achievement is not to prettify the quality of life in Iraq in 2007. But what General Petraeus has accomplished is remarkable. I have had the good fortune to meet him and listen to his assessment of Iraq's security needs. He is a thinking soldier who understood immediately that nothing could be accomplished without adequate manpower. He has secured important successes against the enemies of nascent constitutional authority in Iraq. In particular, he has achieved the crucial success of turning Iraqi Sunnis in Anbar province and elsewhere against al-Qaeda.

The significance is immense. I supported military intervention in Iraq, and have never altered that view. When I wrote this piece in support of US-UK policy, however, the prospects of success were bleak. The Iraq intervention was not a blunder, or a mistake, or - still less - a crime. But for several reasons - the belatedness of the operation; the culpable incompetence of the Bush administration; the inhumanity of Iraq's Islamist and Baathist enemies - it came close to catastrophic failure. General Petraeus has given us and Iraqis the opportunity of establishing something better: not the fully-fledged federal democracy that we hoped for after the fall of Saddam Hussein, but a decentralised and pluralist Iraq where constitutional authority has something more nearly approaching a monopoly of the means of force.

I'm particularly glad the Telegraph has formally acknowledged this point, because the British press (at least those parts of it that I read regularly) has been generally slow in adapting to developments from Iraq. I'm sorry to say that The Guardian has been notably at fault. This piece by Suzanne Goldenberg, before General Petraeus's Congessional testimony in September, is a nice instance of a failure to separate political prejudice from news copy, and was unworthy of the newspaper. General Petraeus's unexceptionable observations about the failure of the Maliki government at national level to advance conciliation were unrelated to the success or otherwise of the "surge". I hope Ms Goldenberg is now suitably embarrassed by her arch interpolation that "the testimony from Gen Petraeus and Mr Crocker follows on from a string of unremittingly bleak assessments on the persistent dysfunction of Mr Maliki's government and the continuing sectarian violence". The assessment she was alluding to was that of the Government Accountability Office - which General Petraeus had no difficulty in pointing out had cut its analysis short in order to meet Congressional reporting requirements. The period immediately after that survey's conclusion had been particularly successful for Coalition forces and therefore - as those are of course troops operating under a UN mandate - for the international community.

Had Tony Blair and General Petraeus been, respectively, the leading political and military figures in the Coalition's Iraq campaign from the outset, much more might have been achieved. As matters stand, there is a serious prospect that Iraq will not only be free of Baathist tyranny but will also be the scene of a decisive defeat for theocratic and atavistic forces that stand for everything we progressives oppose. General Petraeus has brought Iraq and Western foreign policy to this point and yielded this opportunity.

Comment is Spleen

The comments threads on The Guardian's "Comment is Free" site are a strange and wonderful place, as I've noted from time to time. But I'm pleased to enlighten one contributor to the thread underneath my piece for today's paper on Iran's nuclear programme. He or she is called Amery, which is singular because that's also the name of the most notorious British traitor in WW2 - John Amery, who was hanged after the war. (I'm always opposed to capital punishment, but in this case it was particularly unjust because Amery was mentally ill.) Amery writes: "Does Mr. Kamm get paid to write this hate-filled, warmongering drivel?"

The answer, I'm delighted to say, is yes; and most grateful I am too.

Another contributor to the comments thread is kind if inaccurate enough, however, to declare me as famous as Christopher Hitchens. The reader is called Eccles, who I seem to recall was a character in The Goon Show. In any event, Eccles writes:

Lets cut to the chase.

This article is a blatent piece of propaganda designed to eliict widespread support for a terrorist act from an individual with a track record in supporting the use of terrorism to achieve political and economic aims. In that respect it is both reasonable and logical to reach the conclusion that the author and those who support and concur with him are supporters of terrorism for political and economic aims.

The article and the arguments it employs exhibits the sort of double standards and hypocrisy one has become used to from armchair generals like this author, amongst others who are equally well known for this kind of propaganda activity - Aeronovitch; Hitchins; Cohen et al.

It is also clear from the arguments employed by this author and some of those who concur with his position on this thread that he (and they) would deny anyone they disapprove of the right to self defence - giving that right only to those they (and those they act as useful idiots for) approve of.

In that regard it is also reasonable and logical to lay the charge that those who argue such a position are bullys and cowards.

Spuriosity shop

This is an old one, but you can never hound the practitioners of idle factoids enough. The Telegraph carried this letter on Saturday:

Sir - How right Boris Johnson is (Comment, November 29) in appealing for all fair-minded Muslims to speak out against the extremists of their faith: but don't hold your breath.

Didn't Edmund Burke say: "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing"?

Brian Foster, Shrivenham, Oxfordshire

The answer to the question is no, Edmund Burke did not, and I'm surprised the Telegraph let it through.

One pearl of great price

Talk of the devil. I wrote yesterday at a length that will have tested your patience - but there is a lot to say on the subject - of the idiosyncrasies of the hapless pro-Milosevic blogger Neil Clark. Mr Clark is a fanatic and an ignoramus, but (as you will now be aware) more distinctive even than the extent to which he exemplifies those qualities, he's a vulgar fraud.

It is, however, difficult to regard him with disquiet when he writes blog posts on the "Comment is Free" site maintaining, with reference to criticism that he has received from bloggers for his political opinions: "Anyone who deviated from the official party line - as laid down by a self-appointed uber elite of British bloggers - faced a cyberspace lynch mob, more in keeping with Nazi Germany than a country which is supposed to pride itself on its support for free speech." (Note that - as if to demonstrate by suggestion that he, at least, is uncontaminated by Nazi-like influences - the wily Mr Clark invents a word that doesn't exist in German. It should be ueber or über .)

In these circumstances, I ought perhaps to explain to my readers how "Comment is Free" works. I occasionally contribute to the site, but only (excepting one article, which I suggested to the editors) when I've been invited to do so - and I've been glad to contribute to its debates. CiF is not The Guardian, though all comment pieces that appear in The Guardian are published on CiF. Not all CiF articles are commissioned. Some contributors have posting rights; others do not.

I am certain that Mr Clark's account of how he has suffered in the manner of political dissidents in Nazi Germany was not commissioned, and thus will not receive the nominal payment that accompanies commissioned pieces. I'm also certain that the same was true of his article gleefully anticipating (read the piece and see if I have not characterised it correctly) the murder of Iraqi interpreters who have assisted British forces operating under a UN mandate. In short, do not mistake Mr Clark's animadversions for an editorial contribution to, still less an editorial stance by, The Guardian newspaper. Or to put it another way, don't take it out on CiF's editors that this sort of delusional grandiloquence has space and requires moderation. It's just the way it works, and the only real victim of Mr Clark's self-published contributions on CiF is Mr Clark.

I must get on to other subjects now, permanently; and I promise that I will.

Media law

This is merely a footnote and guide to further information (all right, a plug) concerning the issues raised in the post below. That post gives an account of an unfortunately farcical incident in the abuse of the English legal system. When my correspondent Neil Clark started writing to me to threaten legal action in order to cover up his incompetence and misrepresentation of source material, I formed a definite impression of his abilities, and was not disabused of it by anything to come. Some habitually dishonest people are fluent and convincing, but Mr Clark is a danger to himself.

Though he does not perceive and would not appreciate this, I have gone to some lengths to protect him from the consequences of his behaviour. These include most particularly the financial consequences of his abuse of the legal process. They include also a wider knowledge of his lying to and in a newspaper (which I kept back from The Guardian till now) and his practice of faking laudatory comments about himself on third party websites while pretending to be a girl (which I specifically asked my friend Stephen Pollard not to disclose on his blog, as I felt Mr Clark had suffered a surfeit of ridicule). It takes rare stupidity to behave the way Mr Clark has done, and he was not in the league of formidable opponents.

Not everyone who issues threats of libel action will be of this type; in fact I doubt that anyone would be. In the current climate, for bloggers or media professionals, it is time well invested to read an expert account of the current state of law as it affects the media, and especially libel law as it affects the Web. There is, as chance would have it, a new book that I have found especially helpful and (seriously) a joy to read. It is called Media Law, by Peter Carey and others. The authors are all partners of Charles Russell LLP; the extensive chapter on defamation was written by the lawyer who represented me against Mr Clark, and to whom I invariably now refer any other cranks who write to me claiming that I've libelled them. In parts (e.g., when discussing the libel case colloquially known as "Wayne Rooney and the Auld Slapper") it is marked by dry wit that I would not think typical of legal texts.