Do not expect this comment of mine to stay up long over on Telegraph Blogs:
Published and unpublishable comments over on my blog, anonymous or pseudonymous but clearly written either from within the media bubble or from the Middle East (where I have a lot of readers), routinely blame that [my departure from Telegraph Blogs] on Mossad, which is universally said to be in total control of "The Daily Telavivagraph".
This site's editor is particularly reviled by the Middle East's ancient indigenous Christians, in many cases avid readers of mine as well as invaluable sources, whose especial loathing is of his successful presentation of himself as the voice of orthodox Catholicism in Britain while cheering on their genocide from Palestine to Iraq, and potentially in Iran as well.
That presentation is also much loathed in certain circles over here, I find, though mostly for a different reason.
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Hip, Hip, Hooray!
ReplyDeleteIt is bad enough that every attempt to get a Catholic voice across in Britain has to get past the BBC's special relationship with the Tablet.
But even those occasional contributors explicitly billed as "conservative" or whatever instead of correctly as Catholic, defined by the Magisterium, have to be filtered through Damian Thompson.
So there can be no British voice for the Holy See's critique of capitalism or the war agenda. Liberal Catholics might also oppose those, but not for reasons that are orthodox, and therefore coherent and stable.
Nor can there be any criticism of the social constituency for which he turned a major Catholic newspaper into a lifestyle magazine.
The list of silenced Catholics voices is a long one, but you are pretty near the top of it.
I wish he would sue you and then you could out him in court. Unfortunately that is why he never will.
ReplyDeleteThe Mossad thing would at least explain how he keeps his job at the sinking helm of Telegraph Blogs, but not how that self-parodic site keeps from being torn to ribbons in every issue of Private Eye.
ReplyDeleteWhen does the next big opportunity come up to write for the Herald? Nothing could better prove that the sorry days as a cruising directory were over than engaging the services of David Lindsay. Would Mabel resign from the board? We can but hope and pray.
At last. I thought this day would never come. That man's stranglehold on Catholic commentary is an international scandal. It is time for organised action to destroy him.
ReplyDeleteAn international scandal is exactly right. We recognize Mr. Lindsay as the most important British commentator on the side of the Christian Middle East. Maybe the only one, since the British opponents of the neoconservative war agenda are mostly on the secular left and even the paleocon Peter Hitchens is very pro-Zionist. If Britain had real Catholic media, Mr. Lindsay would be one of those media's biggest stars, alerting an important constituency to our plight. We all know who is the London bureau chief responsible for this not being so: Damian Thompson. The blood of our children is on Damian Thompson's hands.
ReplyDeleteAnd the blood of 69 Norwegians, mostly teenagers. Anders Breivik's inspiration was Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch.
ReplyDeleteSpencer has been fulsomely interviewed in Thompson's Catholic Herald and highly praised on Telegraph Blogs by Thompson himself - http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/36
83651/On_religion_and_peace/
Thompson is a mass murderer.
What would you do if Damian Thompson commited suicide, or if some London Arab cell assassinated him?
ReplyDeletePray for the repose of his soul.
ReplyDeleteIf one of your undeniable lines to the Christian Middle East made you aware that something like the Phalange or the SSNP was going to pay Thompson a visit, you would do nothing to save him, would you? All this over an unpaid position.
ReplyDeleteThat's a hypothetical question.
ReplyDeletePeople now get onto Any Questions purely as Telegraph bloggers without anything distinctive to say. There are Telegraph bloggers who could have been your tutees last term, if they are not still undergraduates. Surgery or no surgery, your major forthcoming book would have been published a year ago if you had still had your Telegraph blog. If I were you, I'd be bitter, too.
ReplyDeleteI hope that at least one review says that, actually. Especially with regard to Chapter 10, which tackles head on the lies spread in advance of the Pope’s State Visit to Britain, and the character of the liars who spread them.
ReplyDeleteThe ridiculous theory that a mere predilection for homosexual acts is somehow a basis for individual and collective identity comparable to class, or to ethnicity, or to the sex that is written into every cell of the body; that persons rather than only acts are homosexual or heterosexual, those words being nouns as well as adjectives: that theory is barely, if yet, 40 years old, and was invented in, by and for pederastic subcultures. The anti-natal movement is a direct attack on women, on non-white people, on the poor, on the working class, and on the electoral base of the Left.
The popular fantasises about Pius XII and the Holocaust, and about the Inquisition, are precisely that: fantasies. The real target is the Catholic Church’s comprehensive and coherent witness to metaphysical realism, to the doctrinal essentials of historic Christianity, to the sanctity of life, to Biblical standards of sexual morality, to social justice, to environmental responsibility, and to peace, including the right of Lebanese Catholics to live free from bombardment, and the right of Catholics in the western part of the Palestinian State created in 1948 to live in that State rather than under military occupation and martial law.
If asked, I shall cheerfully say it myself: “You could have read that, and several other things such as the material about the Catholics and other Christians in the Middle East, a year ago, if it had not been for Damian Thompson. Ask yourselves what his agenda might have been.”
His publicly stated reason for sacking you was your pointing out that large numbers of Conservative MPs where in the pockets of Israel, amounting to a treasonable party within a party. That has since been confirmed by the resignation of Liam Fox.
ReplyDeleteI think you should sue him for defamatorily calling you insane, and also for loss of reputation and future earnings as per Ex-Durham and missing it at 20:01.
Not only would you get justice personally, but the things that would come out in court would make it possible for us to create proper Catholic journalism in place of him.
I second that, @20:14. Shall we get up a fighting fund?
ReplyDeleteYour treatment has been absolutely shocking on the part of the man who would have us believe that he was the Holy Father's best mate and his right-hand man in Britain.
What has been said earlier is quite true. Delingpole turns up regularly on The Daily Politics and Channel 4 News, which also features Hodges quite a bit. Telegraph Blogs is a big deal, you would have got plenty of Fleet St. and broadcasting work and your book would have been out a year ago.
And you were right all along. Sacked for being right, by the arbiter of Catholic orthodoxy who is in fact a perfect example of everything denounced by this Pope and the last one. A supporter of global capitalism and the extermination of public services, an extremely liberal lifestyle if you know what I mean, an enthusiast for pre-emptive wars.
If it were up to him, the Holy See would be moved to New York and made subject to the Project for the New American Century and the American Enterprise Institute. That way, we would get Pope Damian I. Except that he thinks he already is.
Looks like you are the trad journalist the Bishops could really deal with, anti-neoliberal, anti-neocon, no friend of Mabel's.
ReplyDeleteI think that you are a spiteful bully. So far on this thread you have either posted or allowed up comments accusing Damian Thompson of being responsible for violence against Christians in Arab countries, accusing him of being responsible for the Norwegian murders, saying that he is only in his job in the service of a foreign spy agency, expressing indifference if he were to kill himself or be killed, practically saying that you would not report a terrorist plot against him, blaming him for delaying your book by a year, blaming him for keeping what you deem acceptable Catholic journalists out of the media, making endless snide references to his homosexuality, and threatening to use it against him if he ever sought redress from you. All that he ever did to you was remove you from an unpaid position. He is obviously very well rid of you.
ReplyDeleteWith this post, this thread and yesterday's on football, we are getting an insight into the mind of an intensely bitter man and the people for whom he is a rallying point. Nasty. Very, very nasty.
ReplyDeleteYes, that sums him up. But chillingly effective with it.
ReplyDeleteDo a bit of digging and you will find out about the entire family run out of town over the course of a decade because one of them once took an almost worthless political prize that Lindsay had expected as his birthright. Or the student journalists who failed to show sufficient respect to the Godfather and were visited by the police on one extremely serious trumped up charge and the social services on another, both on the same morning when Lindsay had conveniently gone into hospital for the week.
A man who feels that the world has treated him so badly, he is entitled to treat it as badly as he likes in return. Yet look at the power he has, to run a whole (middle-class) family out of town in Lanchester, to set the full forces of the state onto insolent students in the university. Bitter and twisted, there is no denying that. But it is not very clear why.
You shouldn't believe everything you hear from someone's enemies. Have you considered that they might be the bitter and twisted ones?
ReplyDeletePeople who have thought that they could command me to cease existing have always been enormously annoyed to discover that they could not, and will doubtless be so many more times in the future. It is one of the great recurring themes of my life.
ReplyDeleteThis thread is now closed.