Donald Jenkins

The only thing that worries Western governments is the prospect of an Islamic bomb. These hyprocrites are oblivious of the fact that they deliberately toppled a friendly Iranian ruler who had repeatedly ruled out acquiring nuclear weapons because he foresaw the huge risk it would represent for the world’s most unstable region. And yet my fear is that, depite Twitter, YouTube and, especially, despite Le Monde, Mr Obama and his kind will have their way: just like previous protest movements by urban youth whose lives and prospects are being ruined by the oppressive theocracy ruling iran, Khameini, Amadinejad and their associated thugs will survive, secure in the knowledge that by manipulating the peasants whom they have rendered totally docile by reversing the Shah’s campaign against illiteracy and indoctrinating them, for thirty years, with nothing but Coranic propaganda will support them, that the population, like that of Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945, will be cowered into docility by the unspeakable brutality of the regime, that they will be able to continue to rig elections and, above all, that the West, still reeling from the damage it inflicted on itself in its inopportune attack on Iran’s historic enemy Irak, will do nothing. The media-greedy liberal lefties will move on to the next subject that Twitter makes fashionable, listen to what Mr Obama has to say on the subject, and the abominable sufferings of one of the world’s most civilised peoples will continue.

It looks like I was the first person to have activated a newly-acquired iPhone 3G S. The people at Orange called me yesterday to ask whether I wanted to collect mine at midnight, as they were opening their Champs-Elysées store specially for the occasion, making them the first retail outlet in the world to sell the new phones as Paris is six hours ahead of Standard Eastern Time.

Ultimately, the cause of the fiasco surrounding the French-government’s ill-fated attempt to enact a three-strikes-and-you’re out law known as HADOPIis not a legal issue, despite the gravity of the infringement of civil liberties that it would have instituted, but the unwillingness, or perhaps the inability, of the French political elite to take a serious interest in cultural policy. And behind the economic reality that the model HADOPI seeks to prop up is dead, is the hard fact that youth, creativity, talent and fashion have moved on and that the French political establishment has been left behind and has clearly still not understood what is happening to it.