Akerman, Hamas, Israel, fundamentalism and the benefits of nude bathing

The portly (some might say bloated) Piers Akerman is always in reliable form - it's very hard not to think of Billy Bunter yowling "Yarooh" when you read him - and this week he's on his usual anti-Hamas, pro-Israeli binge (as Bunter might say, he's a bit like a sheep's head, all jaw). If you can stand the tension, visit here.

I don't have much time for Islamic fundamentalism (does that qualify me for my 'loon of the week' contest?), about as much time as I have for fundamentalist Jews or fundamentalist Christians or Hindus or Zionists, or for that matter right wing ratbags whose rhetoric always seems designed to ensure conflict will continue. 

It's also continually wondrous the way right wing loons think the world will be sorted out by armed conflict - it worked so well for Israel in Lebanon, right, and as for Iraq, what a success story. It's like being a cheer squad for death and destruction, while all the softy liberals in the middle are called pussies who need a good ass-kicking. It'd be really nice to be a kung fu fighting centrist and pacifist, who with one deftly placed touch to the neck, could produce peaceful silence, especially when anyone mentions doing anything in the name of any god.

We'll have to see if Akerman can muster an original thought in his musings for the Daily Telegraph during the week, but right now this column must surely place him as a rank outsider for loon of the week, for its predictability and its blather and its singular optimism as to ways forward in the middle east through death and destruction. 

Trouble is, when you've got nothing to live for, why not die like a spectacular rocket. There's something profoundly sick about psyches that rely on suicide bombing as a means to an end, since if you have an ounce of secular thinking in you, you'd quickly realize it's only a means to a very dead, for a very long time, end. How can you kill people to sort things out if they're people who want to kill themselves provided they can kill other people?

Meantime, I look forward to a fierce diatribe from Akerman against the Christians proposing to ban nude swimming on Sydney beaches. In fact the more drinking of alcohol and fornicating sex we can indulge in, of a gay, pre-marital or adulterous kind, the more we'll be taking a stand against fundamentalist religious values of any stripe. Party on dudes, and keep those glassings coming. Akerman loves to flourish gin as a metaphor, so the drink of the week is a gin and tonic with a wedge of lime. Chardonnay drinkers, fuck off.