Mad Mel strikes again

I've been on tenterhooks for the latest from Melanie Phillips on the Middle East collapse into war, and she hasn't disappointed.

I love it. This is but the first sentence.

July 20, 2006
The war against Israel

It was said by Holocaust survivors that what provoked in them the most intense despair, to the point where some attempted suicide, was not the infernal depredations to which they had been subject by their Nazi exterminators but the subsequent indifference and rank disbelief of a world which refused to face up to the enormity of what had happened and, in varying ways, sought to deny it.

And so it goes on, ad nauseum. She's always great value for a grounding on morals, ethics and history, to remind one of the forces of evil and dissimulation out there.

Last week, it was support for Bush's vetoing of stem-cell research, on the grounds that reproductive technology challenges the natural order of things. It's apparently extremely important that we human beings don't mess with 'natural' states, on the grounds that this disrespects G*d's plan. The fact that humans have been a successful species precisely because of their ability to transform and manipulate their environment is tangential.