I know Peter Hitchens is a proll - a professional troll. His entire reason for existing is to try and say something sufficiently outrageous or unjustifiable that it gets him some attention. He has no logic to his arguments - it's just a series of random thoughts, which if they came from anyone else would be instantly ignored as the slightly twatty ramblings of an idiot. But because it's the Hitch, someone who's mysteriously regarded as being intelligent, despite all the evidence to the contrary, he is elevated to a level beyond the average pub bore - or the average crap blogger - to someone who gets a column in a national newspaper.

He's written two pieces today, and while one of them is entitled "Israel wasn't tough enough", it's not that piece of flame-bait that I want to concentrate on. However, it does give an indication as to the kind of schtick these people have - think about an issue, think about the most contrarian and least plausible position that a human being could possibly hold, then go for it and take it to the nth degree. If you were to indulge in the kind of 'psychobabble' that Hitch rips into in the piece I'm about to look at, you might say he is like an infant rubbing shit over his face to try and get attention from his parents. But that might be unkind. To shit-covered infants.