Andrew Bolt, Munther Fahmi

When I mentioned in an aside the other week that husband and I had been to Melbourne’s high court to see Andrew Bolt get a hiding, I hadn’t realised what a massive media storm I’d been watching from the fringes of. For some amusingly vitriolic (yet in places thoughtful) comment on the subject, see here and here. Given my personal experience of Mr Bolt’s slack approach to the facts, I found his claim to be ‘meticulous’ in his research particularly entertaining. For British readers baffled by all the Bolt references, think Gary Bushell with a shave and a suit.
A world away but also on the subject of racist paranoia, here is Jonathan Cook’s typically elegant piece on the Israeli authorities’ efforts to deport a native (Palestinian) Jerusalemite. Munther Fahmi is getting a fair amount of attention because he is the proprietor of the bookshop at the famous American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem, but his experience mirrors that of thousands of lesser-known Jerusalem Palestinians whose daily lives are wrecked and culture eroded by Israel’s Judaisation policies on illegally-annexed land.