David Burchell, and the pompous wind emanating from Manichean scribbling ...

(Above: when was I last inspired not to fork out hard cash for The Australian's iPad app? Why strangely enough, it was today).

Sad to say - well it's not really that sad to say, but perhaps sad for readers to experience - David Burchell is full of hot air, or a kind of wind.

I do like the phrase full of wind:

a. Speech or writing empty of meaning; verbiage: His remarks on the subject are nothing but wind.

b. Vain self-importance; pomposity: an expert who was full of wind even before becoming famous.

A typical discursive, pompous, full of wind outing by Burchell might see him start out discussing the Quakers' position on the slave trade, and end up with a ringing endorsement of Israel's recent actions.

You might wonder what the fuck the Quakers and the slave trade have to do with Israel's recent exercise in boating, but that's because you don't understand the pompous art of windbaggery.

To get the full nuance and subtlety, you need to read Flotilla rallies terror cheer squad, in which Burchell shows an infinite capacity for a 'four legs good, two legs bad' morality, while dressing it up in the garb of deep learning. Which is another way of saying that the other side is the one doing all the 'four legs good, two legs bad' blather.

Here's the opener:

The Christian creed makes for arduous politics. If - as German political thinker Carl Schmitt once claimed - politics is the business of organising the world into relations between friends and enemies, what militant would ever truly wish to love their neighbour as themselves? Why would you choose to turn the other cheek, when in politics the appearance of weakness is often as debilitating as the actuality of it?

Could anyone come up with a more obtuse or irrelevant start to a discussion of the current issues between Jews and Muslims in the middle east? Why pish posh tish tosh, that's nothing for a pompous windbag.

How about the follow up, worth quoting at length, for its wondrous wonderful ponderous irrelevancy:

So, when the 18th-century Protestant sects shaped what we recognise as the ethos of the modern political "activist", in practice they were compelled to revise Jesus' teachings. When the Quakers launched the first global campaign against slavery, they shunned all physical contact with the persons and products associated with slave-holding, as if they were unclean: right down to offering their tea without sugar, in a ritual of self-purification that has become ever more familiar to us. When John Wesley, the preacher-activist, inveighed against the slave trade, he contrasted an idyllic picture of the slaves' native West African heathen simplicity with the mortal sin endured by every one of the trade's many millions of Christian beneficiaries.

So much for Jesus giving the money lenders in the temple a hard time.

But if Burchell doesn't actually seem to heave a clue about what Jesus's teachings might have been, and how they've been revised by many, not to worry, where does all this talk of heathen simplicity and mortal sin get us?

Well surely it doesn't get us very far in a discussion of the actual morality of the slave trade, or the mechanisms for ending it, unless of course we happen to think that the current fate of the Palestinians is roughly the same as African blacks in the slave trade, and that ending the trade was somehow wrong because a few Christians idealised their heathen simplicity.

Second thoughts, perhaps the metaphor just has bugger all to offer anyone wanting to contemplate the current mess that is the middle east.

Yet without a care in the world or a desire to make sense, Burchell wades even deeper into a thicket of bog and meaninglessness, such that the Manichees can now be safely invoked:

In practice, the more skilled they became as politicians, the more Christian activists resembled that other ancient people of the book, the Manichees, for whom the principles of good and evil, light and darkness, are alive and present in the world, and manifested in its human inhabitants.

Uh huh. So this must have a remarkable meaning for all the Christian activists on the boats heading to Gaza? Wrong. You see all that blather has been somehow working up to a point of discussing the doings of modern post-Christian activists!

So, when the modern post-Christian activist loves some other as themselves, or takes upon themselves the example of the good Samaritan, they are compelled - according to the principles of their political creed - to find somebody else to hate in equal measure, and upon whom to blame all the sufferings of the world. Did not the Jewish priest and the Levite walk past the injured stranger, before the Samaritan rescued him? Well then, the parable must have a political lesson. If the injured man is our neighbour, then the Samaritan is our friend and the priest and the Levite must become our sworn and mortal enemies.

By golly, and they used to give the Irish a hard time for harbouring a grudge from Cromwell's times. That was only close on four hundred years ago.

It seems now that we need Burchell to impute to current post-Christian (yes post!) activists the thoughts of the ancient Samaritan. Yep, let's keep the grudges running for thousands of years.

It surely is the most elaborate and orotund, sonorous and bombastic verbal wind up for what is to follow, because what is to follow is eminently predictable and simple minded.

Yep, Burchell routinely and by the rote trashes the Palestinians, and the so-called post-Christian peace activists, and offers up blind support and defence of Israel and all that it does.

He does so on the principal of Manichean logic, which is to establish that the enemies of Israel are satanic:

Two generations of militants taught themselves that intoxicating Manichean logic, according to which the blacker one paints one's spiritual enemy, the more sheer awfulness one can tolerate in one's friends. And all the while one can feel oneself to be as pure and unsullied as a Cistercian monk.

Oh wait, I think I got that wrong. Burchell is making the point that the enemies of Israel are simple minded folk given to simple minded rhetoric, unlike his own simple minded rhetoric whereby he coats the enemies of Israel in deeply black paint.

No wonder so many people seemed oddly heartened by last week's sorry debacle on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. This is, after all, not just the self-created humiliation of Israel: it is, in a beautiful mirror-image, the triumphal moment of the Hamas Solidarity Movement. Except that no single person among that sea of beatified faces appears to have the moral courage to utter those simple, if rather horrible words: Viva Hamas! Victory to the throat-slitters! Go the child-bombers!

Which of course invites the response, go the shooters on the high seas, go the state pirates, go the humanitarian crisis in Gaza?

In short, a pompous windbag like Burchell is part of the ongoing problem, since the best he can do is adopt a kind of with us or agin us, join the team on the high road or hit the low road Jack approach.

To do this, you have to imagine yourself in some weird bizarro world of moral absurdity:

Of all of the signs of the moral decomposition of the progressive intelligentsia in my lifetime, none is more depressing or more shameful than the furtive, dishonest embrace of Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood's terrorist arm, by thousands of otherwise intelligent, thoughtful people; people who probably imagine themselves as friends of civilisation and basic human decency. It was observable, first, in those supposed friends of the Palestinian people who began to speak with pity - and then soon enough with admiration - of Palestinian suicide-bombers, even as they heard fervent mothers speak of strapping their teenage sons into suicide-vests.

Actually of all the signs of the moral decomposition of commentariat commentators, none is more shameful than the lumping together of the progressive intelligentsia in their lifetime, and dumping them into a support of terrorism, and then soon enough claiming that they speak with one voice in admiration of Palestinian suicide bombers.

It's the most shameful and obfuscating form of verbal terrorism, and it wins no points in discussing Israel's current dilemmas.

But I guess when you're in for a full hog wrestling routine, you should go the full hog, and make sure everyone is linked to Ken Livingstone and via Hamas to al-Qa'ida and before you know it, no doubt you're cheering as the planes surge into the twin towers:

Then - moving sideways, rather like the political progress of a crab - it revealed itself in the mock outrage by which Ken Livingstone and many others of his ilk denounced the "demonisation of Hamas": as though Hamas had ever previously been considered a defensible political force. It then shuffled further sideways in ever-more-fastidious distinctions between support for Hamas and support for al-Qa'ida: as if the ugliness of al-Qa'ida could serve to excuse the ugliness of Hamas, or make it less the occasion for orgies of undignified moral squirming. Finally, it was consummated in last week's grand aquatic ritual-marriage between a vast miscellany of Western activists and intellectuals of varying levels of seriousness, and a complex of pseudo-charitable organisations, all of whom are more or less explicit partners of Hamas, and some of whom make no particular secret of acting as the organisation's overseas financiers.

But what does this kind of blather offer Israel or its supporters, and how does it help in a real world understanding of the implications of the recent boat murders?

Very little. For that you have to head over to Jeremy Pressman's Israel losing its fearsome military reputation.

Shorn of the pettifogging humbuggery and arcane references and mindless black painting indulgences of Burchell, Pressman has some actual and interesting points to make, in words that lack Victorian and Christian lacework imagery, and consequently are readable and comprehensible:

Israel had other options that would preserve its security. It could have modified the Gaza blockade, either through the crossings it controls or working with Egypt on the crossing at Rafah. It could have allowed the ships to reach Gaza, as Israel has done sometimes in the past. Who around the world knew that Israel had let ships in before? Almost no one, because not falling into the public relations trap meant neither Israel's security nor image suffered at those times.

The irony is that the Israeli government and many of its so-called defenders here and around the world are vigorously defending an action that undermines Israeli security on the very issues that they profess to be so concerned about. Oddly, these pro-Israeli forces are promoting Israeli insecurity.

Put it another way. Burchell and his mindless support of the increasingly right wing and isolated current Israeli government are part of the problem, as is the stumble bum tendency of the Netanyahu government. And the real world implications following on the current bit of stumble bum ineptness is not good to contemplate. As Pressman notes:

A world in which Turkey is hell-bent on confronting Israel will not be pleasant.

You don't have to be in bed with, or a fellow traveller with Hamas or al-Qa'ida, to wonder how the current course being steered by Israel will result in safe harbour. And you don't have to indulge in metaphysical morality tales and pompous puffery to arrive at useful insights into the current situation in the middle east.

Thank the lord there are actual sensible commentators out there.

And then you have the commentariat at The Australian. Think. Again.