Letter to the Guardian

I wrote to the Guardian the other day about their belated sacking of a trainee journalist who belongs to an openly anti-Semitic Islamist organization. As I might have anticipated, the paper evidently doesn't want the subject aired on its Letters page, but never mind - have blog, will publish...

'Dear Editor,

'Your briefing on Dilpazier Aslam (22 July) is commendably honest, but what it boils down to is this: he could have continued indefinitely using the Guardian as a platform for the views of an organization regarded by the Home Office as anti-Semitic and banned in three major European countries, if only he had managed to conceal his membership from the blogosphere. Please stop blaming the bloggers for doing your job for you, and concentrate on sorting out the crisis of management which this sorry affair plainly reveals.

'Yours faithfully,

'Cyrus'

For a highly entertaining account of the background to this, see Scott Burgess's blog. He it was who unearthed Mr Aslam's extra-curricular activities, and the Grauniad is not pleased with him. Having made a reasonably dignified clean breast of its errors, it proceeded to blow the credibility it had salvaged by publishing - anonymously - a vituperative and ludicrously misleading personal attack on him.

The Guardian is read by lots of liberal Christians. I trust it has had lots of angry letters from liberal Christians.