Truth.

What a pity Pres. Amadinejad puts himself forward as spokesman for the Palestinians! He did just what Israeli propagandists wanted. If he had been intelligent, he would have started by talking about the Chinese colonization of Tibet and the Indonesian colonization of West New Guinea and then have moved on to point out that the Zionist colonization of Palestine is exactly the same thing, and he would have thrown in a reference to the Turkish colonization of Western Armenia and the European colonization of the Americas, Australia etc., though it is too late to do anything about that. He would then have been speaking for all colonized peoples.

In fact what he said about Israel is mostly true. It is a colony set up by Europeans, its definition of full citizenship is based on ethnic ancestry (the same definition of Jewishness as was used by Hitler), it was established by driving out most of its indigenous population - 3/4 of a million; it has occupied the rest of Palestine for more than 40 years and is illegally creating more and more settlements there; it has invaded Egypt twice and Lebanon three times and it is occupying part of Syria; it is blockading Gaza and recently attacked it brutally; it was allowed to develop nuclear weapons with impunity... But the fear of being accused of anti-Semitism still seems to be effective in preventing any serious criticism by the West. Anti-Zionist Jews are the only people doing a good job of exposing the wrongs.

Still, when can we expect truth from politicians?! Last night on Channel Four there was a documentary on the banking collapse. They included half a dozen clips of Gordon Brown making speeches in praise of the City and saying how good it was that the financial sector was leading British growth. It has been amusing the past week hearing these fantastic leaders claiming to see "green shoots" of recovery - exactly the same language that we heard in the early 1990s when the Conservatives were in the depths of a recession they had created.