Saturday, December 09, 2006

Funding Hedges

There is a snide piece in the Guardian diary by Jon Henley about Oliver Kamm. He writes,

But what with the excellent Iraq Study Group finally publishing its long-awaited encomium to Mr Tony's action-packed Iraqi adventure and all, we would imagine this column's favourite hedge-fund-trading leftist and staunch advocate of the war, Mr Oliver Kamm, will be mighty relieved he's already pledged not to update his important and influential blog for the whole of December. A shame, really; we were rather looking forward to Ollie's condemnation of the report's misguided authors as a pernicious bunch of Chomsky-reading Muslim-huggers.

Notice how he neatly avoids dealing with any of Kamm's carefully made arguments, with which I do not fully agree, instead Henley uses sarcasm and a sideswipe at Kamm's profession as a way of de-legitimising his comments.

Of course the whole point about Kamm's critique of the left is that it has abandoned its long tradition of internationalism, of the kind that sent volunteers to fight fascism in Spain, to become identical with conservative, isolationist appeasers, the very people who make up the Iraq Study Group. I think his case is proved. One-nil to Ollie.

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