Jimmy Reid: The US president

I LOVE Trollope, even though his surname sounds like a country dish made from things like tripe and pigs’ feet.

Last week, I went back to reading Trollope’s The Claverings in search of sanctuary from the obsequious, over-the-top reaction of the British media to the death of the Queen Mother. She lived to the grand old age of 101. Some innings. That was not enough. They had to portray her as a mixture of Sophia Loren, Mother Theresa, Queen Boadicea with a few morsels of Mary Queen of Scots thrown in.

I might have enjoyed a few gins and tonic with the old girl. I have enjoyed more than a few gins and tonic with lots of old girls. (Where have all the young girls gone? that’s what I want to know.) What we do know is that the Queen Mother was a Thatcherite long before Maggie was a gleam in her grocer father’s eye. Still, I’m sorry to see her go as I have been sorry to see a lot of old girls go who were, in their own way, as worthy as she.

Last week, I was also driven to surfing the telly in search of a news programme that wasn’t indulging in a mawkish parade of spurious grief. Events in the Middle East - the most serious threat to world peace since the Cuban crisis of the Sixties - were considered secondary to the death of a 101-year-old lady whose life had been fully lived. This was deemed more important than the death of many children in the Middle East with the inherent threat of more to come.

I stumbled on an ITV programme with Trevor McDonald interviewing President George Bush. Bush was super-confident, truculent, full of himself. He answered some questions monosyllabically, leaving Trevor gasping for a follow-up. Bush obviously felt top man. Trevor is black, George a white Southerner. I was half expecting George to call Trevor "boy", as in "look here, boy". Bush kept talking about "evil". Terrorism was "evil". Terrorists were "evil". That, he implied, explained everything.

What made these people evil? He didn’t venture an explanation. If the Arabs are more evil than the Jews - why? Is it about genes? Are Arabs more evil than Gentiles? Are the peoples of the world to be divided into evil and good based on presumed inferior and superior genes? Has George been reading Mein Kampf and replacing Jews with Arabs as the major scapegoats?

An intelligent, 16-year-old Palestinian girl, with no known connections to a political organisation, walks into a public place in an Israeli town and blows herself up, and also those around her. George Bush calls her evil. Let’s surmise, and we won’t be far out, that her grandparents were forcefully evicted from their homes to make way for the State of Israel. They became refugees living in a camp. Her parents were refugees. She is a refugee. Her cousins are refugees.

United Nations resolutions calling for Israel’s return to the borders of 1957 and the establishment of an independent Palestinian homeland have never been implemented. America has built up the Israeli army into the best equipped and the strongest in the region. President Bush rants on about Iraq’s suspected weapons of mass destruction, or its possible acquisition of such weapons, and completely ignores the established fact that Israel has well in excess of a hundred nuclear warheads.

The young girl sees male schoolchildren take to the streets to fight the Israeli army with stones. She sees young Israeli soldiers reply with bullets. She watches young men that we call terrorists but she calls freedom fighters take to the streets with rifles against Israeli tanks and aircraft that rain down rockets. She sees them die.

One day she goes to the people who can dress her with concealed explosives, walks into Israel, and blows herself up.

George Bush calls her evil. I call him an ignorant, insensitive bum.