Nick Cohen on Kember

Nick Cohen examines the Kember affair and concludes the following - Yet at least Kember and his colleagues made a commitment to Iraq. They may have done no good, they may have put better and braver men in danger, yet they strike me as preferable to the majority of European liberals who have sat out the conflict.

Civilians are massacred at random: silence. Al-Qaeda hits as many Shia mosques as it can in the hope of provoking a civil war: silence again. No condemnations of barbarism are offered for fear of giving the smallest support to George W Bush and Tony Blair.

The price that has already been paid is a shrivelling of the liberal conscience. If you refuse to take sides in Iraq, you can't take them anywhere else. From Burma to Darfur, crimes against humanity that would have produced outrage in the Nineties are met with indifference today.