Into the valley of baboons, By Kath Noble

It would seem that disagreeing with Izeth Hussain is an offence punishable by deportation. As he pointed out in his charming letter of June 22nd entitled ‘Go home, Kath’, I devoted one paragraph of my last article to his comments on the Human Rights Council vote.

My suggestion that he might offer to hold David Miliband’s bag while he gave Sri Lanka a good slap wasn’t based on some general impression that Izeth Hussain is a great fan. I was pointing out that the effort to hold a Special Session wasn’t based on good intentions and that it wasn’t reasonable of David Miliband to expect genocide, as Izeth Hussain claimed in his piece. If the Sri Lankan delegation had worked from such a generous assumption, they might well have lost.

While there may be people who believe that criticising anything said by a Muslim is tantamount to Islamophobia, I hope that they are not many in number. As for being consumed by demented rage and hatred, or whatever it was that Izeth Hussain’s imagination dreamt up, nothing could be further from the truth. In his rather more circumspect letter of June 24th entitled ‘Megaphone diplomacy’, for the measured tone of which I should probably thank Demos, he suggests that I might just be silly. The same could be true of him, of course. Let the readers judge for themselves.

If Izeth Hussain would like to press on with his campaign for my removal from the country, I should point out that the Immigration Department has recently set up a hotline for people to report undesirable foreigners. If he can’t locate the number, perhaps it would be almost as convenient to send a white van.