De te fabula narratur

Talking of newspaper headlines, the Daily Mail today carries the front-page headline:

FREE TO PEDDLE POISON

Presumably the Mail knows, and presumably it does not care, that many people will have felt a gut reaction on the lines of yes, you are.

I have, as it happens, met the writer of the piece, albeit many years ago. I was at college with his sister, who like me, completely failed to make anything of herself after leaving Oxford. I became, eventually, a librarian: she became, eventually, a schoolteacher as well as the mother of a number of children. As far as I am aware she has also completely failed to contribute anything to the current climate of Muslim-hunting and intolerance.

Whether, as an educator, and therefore as a champion of learning, she manages to cancel out the total quantity of ignorance produced by her brother at the Vile, I cannot say. Probably she does. Yin and yang, the universe in balance, the fine but unchanging balance between good and evil: they probably cancel each other out exactly. But I cannot say for sure.

I can say, however, that however loathsome and potentially dangerous the hotheads currently mouthing off in mosques for the benefit of the tabloid media, they will have to mouth off very loud and very long indeed before they're quite so loathsome - or remotely so dangerous - as the Daily Mail.