Egypt

From the first day of the troubles in Egypt, western media, spokespeople and the general mood were for the street and against the Mubarak regime.

You could not open the radio or TV without hearing someone talking of how exciting this was and how it reminded him or her of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Reporters forgetting that they are meant to report the news and not salute them, couldn’t hide their glee. None more so than the Independent’s Robert Fisk who climbed onto a tank that had been taken over by an anti government crowd at Tahrir square in Cairo.

Is Mubarak more corrupt than Berlusconi or Putin? Is Putin’s Russia more democratic than Mubarak’s Egypt? Do Egyptians who want to leave get shot at the country’s borders as they used to in Soviet bloc countries?

Does Egypt fund hate preaching mullahs, as does Saudi Arabia? Do they fund terror, as do Iran and Syria? Do they allow extremist Islamic training camps and religious schools to flourish, as does Pakistan?

Why is the West so happy to support a revolution in the most stable and peaceful country in the Middle East? Why compare this uprising to the fall of the Berlin Wall?

PS: In 2009 the US courts had 52 people killed under US justice compared to 5 who were given the death penalty in Egypt.

Plumber: Parts II - V

Plumber – Part II

Michael the plumber came back from his skiing holiday and finally came to see my hot water boiler. He would email me a price quotation over the weekend, he said.

He didn’t.

I emailed him on Monday. No response. I rang him on Tuesday and he promised to have an email out tonight.

Plumber – Part III

I did not get an email and rang again on Wednesday. Spoke to the plumber’s mother who explained that she was very busy as their accountant was leaving for a holiday in Mauritius… She promised to email the quotation right away.

She did.

Plumber – Part IV

Chasing the plumber was a mistake. The family evidently expects me to personally fund the plumber’s skiing vacation; perhaps even chip in for the accountant's trip to Mauritius. The quotation I was sent allowed for some £900 for a day’s work (not including materials). The notes that came with the quotation added that I would also have to pay for the parking of his car and that he expected half the money upfront. No mention was made of what he expected on his sandwiches or whether I would have to pay for the dry cleaning of his soiled overalls.

I turned him down.

Plumber - Part V

Can anyone recommend a reliable and reasonable plumber (registered to do gas work) in London?

The Pope and Berlusconi

I find myself in the curious position of empathising with the Catholic Church.

In reference to the latest disclosures about Berlusconi and the young girls he is alleged to have paid to have sex with, Cardinal Bagnasco, the head of the Italian Bishops Conference said, “Whoever accepts a public position must understand the sobriety, personal discipline, sense of measure and honour that come with it.” The Vatican’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Bertone, added that the Roman Catholic Church urged greater “morality” and “legality” in public life.

Should the fact that its own priests and bishops have screwed, raped and abused the vulnerable prevent the Church from preaching to others about their behaviour? True, those Catholic priests rather forgot all about “sobriety, personal discipline, sense of measure and honour” that apparently come with public office. But preaching about morals is the gist of the Church’s business and the Church would have to close shop if prevented from preaching to others. And what then?

I wonder what Latin for Chutzpah is?

On Not Finding a Plumber

Four or five months ago, I asked a plumber to give me a quote for a new hot water cylinder. He gave me a ballpark figure and promised to get in touch with a detailed offer. After a week, I rang to remind him. He was surprised that I had not received his letter and then remembered that he had forgotten to send it. He promised to send the quote the same day. Nothing came. A few weeks later, I asked another plumber to have a look. Same story.

The third plumber who had done work for my neighbours was very friendly and seemed quite knowledgeable and interested in the job. Whenever I rang to remind him, he was truly apologetic and promised to send me the offer within a day. After the fourth time, I stopped reminding him.

It is not a small job and I would have thought that in the recession we are meant to be in plumbers would be happy to get the work.

Now I am on to the fourth plumber. Michael was recommended by my landlord. I chased him on the phone for about a week. Finally, last Tuesday, I managed to speak to him. He was unable to come before Friday but he would come on Friday to look at the job. He promised to ring later that day to arrange the time for Friday. He didn’t. Nor did he ring on Wednesday or on Thursday. Finally, I managed to speak to him on Friday and I was told that he would not be able to come that day. Moreover, as he was leaving for a skiing vacation, he suggested that I get in touch with him after his return.

Culture and Politics – III

There is a wonderful Thomas Lawrence exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Go, if you haven’t been. It ends on 23 January.

Various owners, including the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, the Tate, as well as the Queen lent paintings to the Portrait Gallery for this exhibition.

I was surprised to see that the only paintings that had a © sign attached and shown in the catalogue are those owned by the Queen. None of the other owners felt the need to secure their copyright over the art they own.

According to the Queen’s own website the art is “held in trust by The Queen for the Nation.” In a country in which most museums are free, the Queen charges a hefty £9 for visits to the Queen’s Gallery. Most of “her” art is never seen by the public.

Should not all this wonderful art be placed in freely accessible public museums instead of being locked up without access at Windsor, Buckingham Palace and other Royal residences?

Culture and Politics - II

In Freiburg, to celebrate Epiphany, my friend Corinna invited to a cultural soiree: Life and Music at the Pringsheim Residence was the subject of German writer Inge Jens’ lecture. A piano trio played Pringsheim’s music.

Pringsheim, whose residence in Munich was nothing but palatial, emanated from a very wealthy Jewish family. Until 1933, invitations to events at the home of mathematics professor and arts connoisseur Alfred Pringsheim (1850-1941) were highly sought after in the city’s high society. Nowadays, he is known mainly as Thomas Mann’s father-in-law.

Jens depicted the tragedy of this assimilated bourgeois German Jew who like many other educated German Jews had absorbed and integrated into German culture. With Pringsheim, this climaxed in his worship of Richard Wagner. So fascinated was he by Wagner that he not only supported him financially but also composed his own convincingly beautiful piano arrangements for some of Wagner’s music.

Leaving all this was not easy and the Pringsheims left it to the last moment. They did manage to get out of Germany in October 1939. The distressed old man, who by then had lived through six years under Nazi rule, was 89 and perhaps too weak to consider the tragedy and irony of having a joint idol with Adolf Hitler – who had caused his misery and degradation.

Culture and Politics – I

Spending Christmas in Venice had the added bonus of being able to enjoy the city at it emptiest. The narrow streets were almost spacious and looking at paintings rather than at other visitors at the Accademia was an unusual treat.

I don’t know what financial arrangements enabled French billionaire, Francois Pinault, to get his hands on the iconic Punta della Dogana, having already got hold of Palazzo Grassi on the other side of the Grand Canal. Rather large posters with a photomap create the impression that this whole part of Venice is Pinault-land. Moreover, Pinault seems to think that he owns the artists as well as their work. His posters inform us that the two museums jointly exhibit “Artists from the Francois Pinault Collection”.

Pinault charges a €15 entrance fee. This is more than twice the Accademia’s €6.50. If we allow the rich to create such self-aggrandising projects should they not be made to open them to the public free of charge?

Heathrow

After three days of Heathrow closure, I rang Putin to ask him how Moscow airports manage to stay open despite Russian winters.

Putin started with a few not very friendly remarks about baby cameron. "You see, this is not a job for Cameron," he said, “we used to have similar problems in Moscow until one year, I sent the army to clear the snow at the airports. Ah, yes, also important, I told army to bury the directors of the airports under the snow.”

I asked him what happened to them “If you lie under more than two thousand tons of snow not much happens anymore.” Those directors were sorted, he explained, and since then, the new directors know better than to work “the English way.”

Drastic as always but he may be right. Unfortunately, all we will get are lots of explanations and no action. They will blame it on the weather, wrong kind of snow, unfriendly wind etc. No one will pay the price. No one will lose their job for screwing things up.

BAA, the owners of Heathrow, should lose their contract. If Cameron, doesn’t sort it – so should he.

Rabbis vs. Rabies

Many years ago, my mother told me the joke about a man who wrote to a medical help column and asked, “what is rabbis and what can you do against it”, to which the response was “rabbis are a kind of Jewish priests and there is nothing you can do against them.”

Last week several dozen rabbis on the public payroll as municipal rabbis in Israel issued a religious ruling barring Jews from selling or renting homes to non-Jews.

It’s not a joke. A poll has revealed that 55% of Israel’s Jewish population support the rabbis’ position.

Dinner with(out) Julian Assange

Several days ago, at dinner with friends in London, I was asked what I thought Julian Assange of Wikileaks motivation was.

To me, his motivation is not the issue. There are several players in this story:

22-year-old private Bradley Manning who as an intelligence analyst stationed in Iraq has – it has been reported - managed to access, download and export 250,000 classified State Department documents. He has been incarcerated without trial in apparently inhumane conditions at a US Marine base in Virginia.

Julian Assange who runs Wikileaks and has not been accused of anything other than some unconnected rape charges. Assange’s supporters - and there is a growing number of those - firmly believe that these are trumped up charges. Some even suggest that the Swedish women, who had sex with Assange before going to the police, work for the CIA.

The newspapers that print the leaks and probably increase their circulation and profits as a result are just net gainers. I am glad that it’s the Guardian and not one of the Murdoch papers.

And the real culprits? What interests me is not Assange's motivation but why we have not heard about the imprisonment of the real culprits? Are they in a cell so deep that no one can reach them? Or have they already been secretly executed?

Why was it possible for a junior, very junior soldier stationed in Iraq to have access to so much classified material that in no way could have been relevant to whatever his work was? Why was secret material downloadable? Why is it possible to transfer secret documents to external systems? Who created the programs that were meant to prevent that? What were the specifications? Who was in charge?

I actually believe that civil servants should be able to correspond without thinking that everything they say or write will be available to the general public. It is neither the soldier who stole the documents nor anyone who makes them available that are responsible to ensure the safety of this system. Those whose responsibility it was have betrayed the confidence entrusted to them by their country. These are the people who should be in the solitary confinement cells.

This, of course, will not happen. They are – in all likelihood - all chums and I expect that the Head of the emotionally named Department for Homeland Security, the enormous apparatus that has evidently failed in securing the Homeland continues to play golf with the director of the FBI, the head of computer and system security of the State Department and the CEO of the company that supplies the clever programs that allowed all this happen.