The romance of the murderer

'I hate the fact that we are all under pressure to repent. I have long dissociated myself from the RAF, as early as when when I was in England. However, we are stigmatised for our lives. For many people it is just black or white - there is nothing in between. Those who died in Stammheim were people who committed inhuman acts not because they were criminals, evil or monstrous, but because they could not endure the unfairness and oppression of this world.'

You kill because you are fascists, we kill because we care. The definitive voice of romantic leftism: Astrid Proll, 61, still doesn't get it.

The RAF aka Baader-Meinhof made this unfair and oppressive world a little more unfair and oppressive. That's all. There's still time for Ms Proll to read Albert Camus' The Rebel.

Pedants' Corner

A red-faced Torygraph has made a swift correction, but if my eyes weren't deceiving me, when I first read their report on the Subway sandwich bar chain it contained this:-

'One industry expert says: "In a lot of city centres it has replaced the donor kebab shop as a place where people go to get food and hang out after the pub."'

I always did wonder what went into those kebabs.

Stop the Bomb

A German friend has sent me a link to Stop the Bomb, a site which hosts a petition calling on the German government to impose trade sanctions as a means of exerting real pressure on the Iranian regime to drop its nuclear weapons programme.


The initiative has the support of politicians across the spectrum from Christian Democrats to Left Party members, plus sundry academics. Names with a resonance outside Germany include Matthias Küntzel (see my links section), Benny Morris and Nobel Literature Prize winner Elfrida Jelinek (something of a surprise to me - I evidently need to revise my perceptions of her politics).


You don't have to be German to sign! Germany is Iran's leading European trade partner, and that should concern everyone.


Oh, and by the way. Yes, of course Israel has the Bomb. What it doesn't have is leaders who talk openly about wiping nearby countries off the map (and, no, that wasn't a 'mistranslation'). Or who host conferences for genocide-denying racists. I haven't been celebrating Obama's triumph, but I'll start partying retrospectively if and when he convinces me that he has the measure of the seriousness of the Iranian threat.