Fatwahd

"It's hard to work up genuine sympathy for a failure of niceties towards people who would never consider upholding such niceties in return - to stick up for the human rights of people who despise the idea of human rights. And yet the growing evidence of ugly behaviour is distressing in the extreme, not because of the injury to the detainees, but because of the injury to ourselves, to our identity as free and moral people living "under law", to our sense of what we stand for and who we are; and that identity is, or should be, something that conservatives and liberals should both be determined to defend."

Those were the words of Salman Rushdie in the Guardian back on June 25th. These outrageous views on human rights and Gitmo (Guantánamo Bay) could be reworked into a justification for Live8 with embarrassing ease: "Not because pointless African people are starving, but because watching them starve is an affront injury to ourselves, to our identity as free and moral people, to our sense of what we stand for and who we are; and that identity is..."