DIARY
CHARLES GLASS
It is an honour to follow Stan Gebler Davies on this page. I fear my own outlook is as gloomy as his, though perhaps with less justification. Like him, I have been trying to get to Kinsale, where I had hoped to enjoy the Irish countryside and take my sons fishing over Easter. Like him, I have been prevented by illness from leaving bed. My own illness is not apocalyptic, and I should recover soon. I have been suffer- ing from the measles, and it has takena heavier toll on my constitution than it did on that of my younger son, Edward, who sailed through the disease with barely a complaint. The news is so bad: the South Africans are hanging more people than in any year since the creation of the Union; the Israelis are shooting, beating, deport- ing, and destroying the homes of more Palestinians; in this country, the success of Thatcherism has been so great that more prisons, including temporary camps on the moors, are going up; even Amnesty Inter- national wants to investigate Britain's `death squads', but the Government resists all attempts by the governed to discover how they are governed; Shi'ites are murdering innocent Kuwaitis aboard a hijacked aircraft in Cyprus; America's Islamic allies in Afghanistan, who are armed also by its Islamic opponents in Teheran, have followed the example of its African allies in Angola and shot down a civil airliner; the Soviets appear unable to do anything to end the lamentable division of Soviet Armenia; and Alan Paton has died. What is there to get out of bed for?
It had been my intention to rise from my undogmatic slumber in order to vote in the California presidential primary election for the first time since 1972. Although it would no doubt pain my forebears, who have been Republicans since John C. Fremont, a fellow Californian, was their first candi- date for president in 1856, I had planned to vote in the Democratic Party primary. I had just sent in my forms for absentee voter registration, when I read in the Independent that Jesse Jackson announced that he would not, if elected president, meet the PLO chairman, Yasser Arafat. I thought that Jackson would have the cour- age, as Lord Carrington did in inviting Robert Mugabe to Lancaster House, to insist that the Palestinian half of the Israeli-Palestinian war discuss arrange- ments for peace. I knew Jackson was an opportunist, like all politicians, but I was hoping against hope that he might rise to the occasion of his dynamic rhetoric on behalf of the poor, the oppressed and the drug-addicted to keep some of his promises to them at least until he reached the White House. Here I am, for the first time a regis- tered Democrat, with no one to vote for. It would be difficult for me to vote for either Jackson or Mike Dukakis, because of evenings I spent with them years ago. In 1974, when Jackson was briefly working for ABC television's new morning news programme, the show's presenter, Peter Jennings, invited Jesse and me for dinner at his place in Washington. Bored, Jen- nings slipped off to bed before the port. I spent the next hour plumbing Jesse's ignor- ance on foreign affairs. He had a sharp intellect and was opinionated, but he was uninformed about the world beyond America's borders — almost a qualifica- tion for higher office in America. I was still prepared to vote for him, preferring to forget our evening together, until he began backtracking on peace in the Middle East. My evening at a Mexican restaurant in Boston in 1982 with Mike Dukakis and a group of his supporters at the next table however meant that I could never, under any circumstances, vote for him. Dukakis was at the time out of public office, hoping to stage a comeback against Ed King, the Republican who had unseated him as governor at the previous election. King was such a bad governor that Ed Meese could probably have beaten him. This did not stop Dukakis from grovelling, in the most debased manner, to the assembled realtors, used car salesmen and business- politicos who were hoping for their own reasons to put their man into the gov- ernor's house. I know politicians must be obsequious to the most awful people, but once you have seen a man do it, you can never feel the same about him. That just leaves the Republicans, with former CIA (Contra-Iran-Arms) chief George Bush and his rich friends, at least those not already in prison, all too ready to continue running the country. Only a timely indict- ment of Spiro Agnew's successor can save the country.
Every Christmas, the television com- panies compile what is jocularly known as a 'gag reel' of notable flops, out-takes and social faux pas for the pleasure of those within the industry. Sadly, I must note that this year's reel will undoubtedly include an unfortunate and entirely innocent moment with Auberon Waugh. Waugh, it seems, was called out in the middle of the night last weekend for an interview with Austra- lian television. A technician at Worldwide Television News, which handled satellite arrangements for the Australians, led Mr Waugh into the small W1 studio and laid the microphone over the back of a chair. The tech told the distinguished Spectator columnist and Literary Review editor he could relax for half an hour or so until the satellite came up. How was the smiling Waugh to know, seated with the mic- rophone at his backside and the video camera rolling, that the late-night relief of a moment's unguarded flatulence would be recorded for next Christmas's puerile amusement of thousands of television folk?
That terrorology is a growth industry, particularly subservient to state aims, has been all too evident since the beginning of the Kuwait Airways Flight 422 hijacking. In addition to the usual suspects pontificat- ing about terrorism as practised by Iran and its Shi'ite allies in Lebanon, there has been the representative of an organisation calling itself the Institute for the Study of Terrorism. I called the IST to find out more about it. A pleasant-sounding young woman named Madeleine Westrop re- vealed the Institute was founded in June 1986. Its chairman is the Shah's old friend, Lord Chalfont, and its director is Jillian Becker. Jillian Becker was, in the words of Miss Westrop, 'a writer on international affairs with an international reputation'. Her reputation rests partly on an abysmal book called The PLO: Rise and Fall of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which not only whitewashed Israel for the Sabra and Shatila massacres, but discussed how `the PLO used terror to ensure obedience' in the West Bank and Gaza — a point of view whose absurdity has been laid to rest with more than 100 Palestinian civilians since anti-occupation demonstrations be- gan last December. The Israeli terrorolog- ist Benjamin Netanyahu has called terror- ism 'deliberate and systematic murder and maiming designed to inspire fear'. The Kuwait Airways 422 hijacking certainly fits the description, as do the US bombing of Libya, the regular Israeli bombings of Lebanon, Israeli repression in its occupied territories and the behaviour of the Con- tras in Nicaragua. Not surprisingly, the Institute rose to the occasion to condemn the hijacking of aeroplanes by Arab terror- ists but has not condemned the 'deliberate and systematic murder and maiming' of Lebanese, Nicaraguans, Palestinians and Libyans.
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