UK Government Stamps On The Christmas Message

I didn't see Mahmoud Ahmadinejad delivering his alternative Christmas Message on Channel Four, but I have read the text (here). It seems to me to be a thoroughly reasonable, and dare I say Christian, message to us all - certainly more valuable than any of the Queen's annual video diaries. Channel Four are to be congratulated on their imagination and sound sense of what Christmas is about.

So why has the British government criticised them? Oh wait: "President Ahmadinejad has during his time in office made a series of appalling anti-Semitic statements," a spokeswoman said. maybe so (though the most frequently-quoted one, about wanting to "wipe Israel off the map", is a well-known urban myth). And Tony Blair during his time in office was directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Muslim civilians in Iraq, Bosnia and Afghanistan. Not just "appalling statements", appalling dead children. May we expect the government to ban British television channels from ever again inflicting his smug visage on us?

When it comes to Christmas, Ahmadinejad gets it and Gordon Brown and his toadies, it seems, do not.