Minor Omissions

The Foreign Office's annual report on selected human rights is set to "raise further suspicions in the Arab world" that the Vicar of Downing Street and his master in Washington are biased towards Israel. Due to an oversight - the kind of honest mistake that happens all the time in the public relations business - the report condemns Hizbullah's rocket attacks on Israel, which killed about forty civilians, but omits all mention of Israel's rampage in Lebanon, which killed over a thousand civilians. According to "a Foreign Office source", this was because "the British embassy in Damascus had sent information on Syria and Hizbullah for inclusion in the report but there was no such communication from the British embassy in Israel". Evidently the British diplomatic service is careful nowadays to employ only the right sort of anti-semite.

The Minister for the Rest of the World Excluding Europe and the Liberated Territories, Margaret Beckett, said that the omission occurred because the publication deadline was "a little bit tight" and, it appears, wholly beyond the control of the Foreign Office, which published the report. Despite this unfortunate imposition, the report does manage to include a reference to the ceasefire which occurred a little more than thirty days after the Foreign Office refused to call for one, and to a speech by Bashar Assad, the president of Syria, two days after that. There is also a photograph of "a Lebanese woman amid the rubble of Beirut", presumably engaged in abusing Israeli human rights.

Still, Beckett did manage to denounce the Guantánamo Bay anomaly as "unacceptable in terms of human rights" and "ineffective in terms of counter-terrorism". Sanctions against the US are already in place, with the government refusing to take back those inmates who have families or refugee status in Britain. That will teach them.