James Delingpole James Delingpole

Eastern promises

Iran And The West (BBC2, Saturday); Terry Pratchett: Living With Alzheimer’s (BBC2, Wednesday)

issue 14 February 2009

Iran And The West (BBC2, Saturday); Terry Pratchett: Living With Alzheimer’s (BBC2, Wednesday)

Just in case you needed another reason to loathe and despise the French (I mean, as if Olivier Besancenot wasn’t enough), there was a corker in Norma Percy’s characteristically brilliant new documentary series Iran And The West (BBC2, Saturday).

It concerned the Lebanese hostage crisis of the 1980s when the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia (‘practitioners’ as Jon Snow would no doubt call them) kidnapped dozens of Westerners, among them American journalist Terry Anderson, Archbishop’s envoy Terry Waite, and various Frenchmen and seemed determined to hold them indefinitely.

Our then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was adamant on how to deal with this: there could be no concessions to hostage-takers for it only encouraged further hostage-taking. However, at a joint press conference, her opposite number in France took a more nuanced (i.e.,

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