Well, all of this may or may not have gotten some of us somewhere. I
think I remain in place, hanging by a thread, spinning loftily and
eccentrically.

Whether or not one thing follows from another, is a sequitur or a non
sequitur, is always going to depend on supporting structures of
syllogism and inference. So, from "complete and obvious non sequitur", I
subtract "and obvious". It was obvious to me, because nothing about the
way I see the Middle East authorises me to make the inferences you need
to make for that particular linking of phrases to come off. I do feel
that the linkage is forced, that the inferences that would support it
are being smuggled in without being explained, and that there is
something nasty (= Hizb-ut-Tahrir-type of nasty) at the back of it. It
doesn't say "why Saddam and not Sharon?" to me; it says "do Sharon, not
Saddam", which is not the same thing.

I want to keep "false totality", because there is some totalizing going
on, some summing-up that I believe is a false accounting. For the sake
of clarity, I beg leave to repeat: for at least three separate and
pretty much equally ill-intentioned factions, the identification of
"Israeli" with "Jew" and the simplification of political struggles along
racial and religious lines, is a basic premise that informs their
allegiances, determines the path of their analyses, and probably
influences their taste in slogans as well. I reject it; I want nothing
to do with it; my caricature of their position as "yay to the Arabs, boo
to the Jews" (or vice versa) was precisely that - a caricature of
*their* position. I don't need lectures from Lawrence or anyone about
the difference between racial-supremacists in Israel and either Israelis
in general or Jews in general, or about the subterranean racism that
informs the verbal "slip" that says "Jew" when it means "Israeli" (or
"Israeli" when it means "Zionist"; or "Zionist" when it means
"racial-supremacist Zionist"): I am perfectly well aware of that racism,
and am trying to ridicule and undermine it, not support it.

<sarcasm>Hint: passages of text placed between inverted commas - e.g.
"let's hear it for the good guys - yay! let's hear it for the bad guys -
boo!" - may be the quoted, or imagined, speech of persons other than the
principal narrator. If your browser does not support the rendering of
inverted commas, you may wish to upgrade; Mozilla 1.0 is free, stable,
and runs on most reputable operating systems.</sarcasm>

Ken Livingstone, in honour of whose election to Mayor of London my own
son received his second name (Livingstone, not Ken), declared yesterday
that the US's proposed intervention in Iraq was entirely "about oil",
and that there could be nobody in the country "stupid" enough not to see
that this was the case. In abashed shamefacedness, I lift my hand: *I'm*
stupid enough to think that it's about quite a number of things, oil
potentially being one of them. Again, a false summing-up, and if Ken is
intelligent enough to know that this is so (and I believe he is, else
it's name change by deed poll for the nipper) then he must be committing
this betisement, which he probably considers a bare-faced white lie for
the greater good, deliberately. Here, again, I admit to impatience.

Having attempted both a sarcastic caricature of the meaning of "no to
racism; yes to jobs and services", and a relatively serious if still
sarcastic stab at getting its gist, and been told off both times, I am
forced to concede that I haven't the faintest idea *what* it means. If I
try again I'll only get it wrong again. My wife said she thought it
meant "racism is the reason why some of us are refused jobs and denied
access to the services we need; this is a bad thing", which I suppose is
a plausible reading (and even a reasonable proposition). She also
thought the no-to-war-in-Iraq-yes-to-free-Palestine slogan was a non
sequitur, incidentally, so maybe they're putting something in the water
supply round here that stops otherwise commonsensical people from being
able to discern direct correlations in international politics; the
thought worries me, as perhaps there are very many of them and I've been
missing them all?

Dominic