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Sir: A shop assistant who is offhand is readily described as ‘rude’; the person who puts his feet on a train seat attracts the word ‘lout’; similarly, a threatening, vomiting drunk in the street earns the label of ‘yob’ or ‘thug’, depending on the degree of viciousness.
Yet, as Rani Singh records (Diary, 6 December), the largely BBC-trained journalists at Al Jazeera English TV had a problem deciding what to call those who took anti-social behaviour to its bestial depths, methodically massacring the innocents of Mumbai. It should be emphasised that their victims were not caught up on the sidelines of some military engagement, but pumped with bullets and shredded by shrapnel simply because they happened to be people.
You can’t get more antisocial than depriving perfectly innocent strangers of life and limb, devastating whole families in an orgy of blood-letting as coffees were sipped, trains queued for and friends chatted. But, as Rani Singh noted, after much debate over whether to use the term ‘militant’ or ‘terrorist’, the fearless hacks at Al Jazeera opted for ‘attacker’.
Time for Al Jazeera and similar-minded outfits, including the BBC, to recalibrate their moral compasses. The alternative is to succumb to a moral relativism that will neuter, confuse and ultimately paralyse the planet.
Maurice Jones
Waterfoot, Lancashire
Prop forward
Sir: Like Mr Saunders (Letters, 6 December) I was irritated to see the obvious misdescription of what looks like a Yak-52 as a ‘Spitfire’ in the article on Nick and Giles English. It was a particularly sad mistake in the context of the article but hardly worth a letter, in my view.
However, if he must be pedantic, he should get his facts right. Almost all early Spitfires sported two-bladed propellers; later marks also used propellers with up to five (Mk 21) or even six blades.
Michael Lewis
High Barnet, Hertfordshire
We need those Sarahs
Sir: The remarkable and admirable Sarah (‘After Baby P: the crisis in child care’, 6 December) not only analysed and acted in the best interest of her own integrity and situation, she also diagnosed its wider significance. Namely, that management systems are now designed for audit and not delivery. This is an endemic problem, a collusion between auditors and the audited and has spawned a bureaucratic industry of immense proportions. It will, sadly, take a lot more Sarahs to bring it down.
John Elford
Liverpool
Mill in France
Sir: In his review of The British in France Raymond Carr (Books, 29 November) states that J.S. Mill never settled in France. This is not true. He lived in France in the years before his death. His body is buried in Avignon. The Dutch historian Cor Hermans has recently written the book Een Engelsman in Frankrijk about Mill’s time in France.
Patrick van IJzendoorn
London SE10
Name that tune
Sir: In his praise of Sondheim, Gerald Kaufman (‘A brand new Sondheim musical’, 6 December) narrows the field by comparing him with other composer-lyricists and then widens it with his conclusion that Sondheim’s work is ‘worth x times as much as anything else by anybody else’. I find with Sondheim that his words are witty but his music is forgettable when compared with, say, Rodgers and Hammerstein or Lloyd Webber. I wonder how many of your readers reaching this point in this letter could pause and actually name and hum the music of any of his songs apart from ‘Send in the Clowns’.
Kaufman also seemed to be impressed that Road Show is ‘almost through-composed’. Lloyd Webber has been doing this in full for the past three decades.
John Littlewood
Farnham, Surrey
Over the Moonie
Sir: Like Matthew Parris (Another Voice, 22 November) I discovered, travelling to Australia, that time does not change according to zone, season, alcohol, whistling, thumb-twiddling or any other influence that we might impose on it. On a flight to Los Angeles from Sydney, the happy young woman beside me said she’d been married recently and asked if I’d like to see her wedding pictures. She handed me a stack of photos as thick as a phone book, which showed about 1,000 couples standing in matrimonial rapture before the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, asked if I’d heard of the Unification Church and embarked on a spiel that showed quite clearly her intentions over the next 13 hours. Unable to change time in my seat beside a zealous Moonie, I chose the only alternative: I changed seats.
Bruce McDougall
Via email
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