My friend Marcus Chown has an excellent popular science book by the name of We Need to Talk about Kelvin. But this isn't the Kelvin I had in mind. I mean Kelvin MacKenzie, former editor of the Sun 'newspaper'.This particular Kelvin was on last night's BBC Question Time to balance out Matthew Parris (nasty journo/nice journo) - don't you just love BBC balance?
At one point they were discussing the Israeli attack on the aid convoy on the high seas. Our Kelvin pointed out that if he were on a British street and someone attacked him with an iron bar, then if he had a gun, he would shoot the attacker, just as the Israeli soldiers did. They were entirely in the right, he suggested.
I can't understand why no one pointed out that his analogy was flawed. Try this. If he were sitting in his open topped car and a gunman from another country dropped down into the car from a helicopter, then he would have defended himself with an iron bar if he had one. That seems a lot closer to the truth.
I'm not anti-Israel. I support their right to defend themselves. But attacking a boat on the high seas - in international waters - just in case it has weapons on board is not acceptable behaviour.
I'm sympathetic to Mathew Parris who said that as he's now over 60 he's no longer worried what people think of him. He then said he's bored with the whole Palestine/Israel argument, and that if the media left them to themselves for a while more progress might be made. He didn't say it but Schrodinger's Cat sprang into mind and I wondered what consequences would follow if we didn't open the box for a while - perhaps the cat might just die from boredom!
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