Facebook’s not-so-secret police

I was greatly tempted by Sam Leith’s suggestion in a column on The Spectator’s website this week that we should all shut up about Israel and Palestine because we don’t know what we’re talking about. Certainly the crisis there has made London dinner parties almost unendurable – and it is true that as soon as anyone brings up Sykes-Picot, which they always do, I begin to choke on my baba ganoush and start demanding that the host open another bottle of Fairtrade Palestinian pinot noir. But then I thought that if in future I wrote about only those things of which I have a perfect understanding, pace Wittgenstein, I’d be well and truly buggered as a columnist.

Old Ludwig didn’t think about that, did he? A lack of expertise has never stopped me weighing in with a jiffy bag of bile on every subject under the sun and I don’t see why Jews and Arabs should be exempt.