With Conscience Wide As Hell

In what way is Achilles woke? And most of the French have never heard of the Battle of Agincourt. It is famous in the English-speaking world because of Shakespeare's Henry V, which was written 184 years after the event and for reasons of its own. Being a history play does not make a play history. What the French know about the Hundred Years' War is that they won it. The King of England is not also King of France.

Nor was that their final victory to date. Do look up Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, after whom is named the Lafayette Square on which stands Saint John's Church, attended by Donald Trump on his Inauguration morn in accordance with custom and practice, since it is perhaps a minute away from the White House and even contains a designated Presidential pew with a brass plaque.

In 2020, Trump had protestors teargassed so that they would not spoil his bizarre photo op outside Saint John's, where he stood holding a Bible. This incurred the strong disapproval of the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, then as now Dr Mariann Edgar Budde. She and Trump have had beef for years. Yes, she ambushed him last week. But he walked straight into it.

Yet Dr Budde has a blind spot. There is someone whom she never criticises, and indeed whose lurid propaganda she has been known to regurgitate, as anyone in support of #MeToo, #IBelieveHer and #BelieveAllWomen does have to do. One such critic of hers is the American journalist Ali Abunimah, who has this evening been deported from Switzerland after two days in custody. Over, then, to Dr Budde to condemn the treatment of Abunimah, and thus to begin to condemn all sorts of things. Now that Trump, rather than Joe Biden, is funding and arming those things, then condemnation of them is allowed.