Oh dear. This press release from the Liberal Democrats in the UK on Christmas Eve:

Liberal Democrats : Father Christmas should say ‘No, No, No,’ to private transport - Brake

“The fence prevented tourists from walking into town on the biblical-era route likely used by Jesus and Mary. Instead, they were forced to enter through an Israeli checkpoint. Shops, restaurants and businesses that once thrived remained shuttered, split off from the rest of the town by the barrier.”

- 30,000 pilgrims flock back to Bethlehem for Christmas, Ha’aretz, 25.12.05

Coverage of some of this year’s celebrations of the birth of Christ:

BBC Radio’s coverage of the Advent was, as usual, excellent, and I followed most of the religious broadcasts on BBC Radio 3 and 4 from the first Sunday in Advent, which was November 27. The Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s College, Cambridge was broadcast worldwide on Christmas Eve as usual and is still available online for a week. It’s worth checking in on the King’s College website’s section on the Nine Lessons, which includes the full Order of Service for the occasion.

Bethlehem celebrated the Nativity as usual, and Yahoo! News has a picture gallery of the occasion. The excellent Electronic Intifada is yet to post any local accounts of Christmas Day, but this interview with a resident of Bethlehem indicates the hardship that local Palestinians have to endure.

Bethlehem Bloggers shows some photos of the terrible wall that has been erected through their town.

Ha’aretz has a report on Christmas in Bethlehem. On the flipside of Israeli media coverage, however, is this report from Arutz Sheva, the Israel Broadcasting Network.

The Vatican’s coverage of the Advent can be found here. Vatican Radio has transcripts in English of Pope Benedict’s Midnight Mass and his Christmas message, which he delivered for the first time as Pope.

Last Friday’s Christian Science Monitor previews an unusual partnership between Christianity and Islam planned in Jakarta for this Christmas period.

“Chestnuts roasting on an open fire
Jack Frost nipping at your nose
Yuletide carols being sung by a choir
And folks dressed up like eskimos”

- from The Christmas Song, Mel Torme and Bob Wells, 1944

There are three things about Christmas that irritate me:

One, of course, is the obscene commercial exploitation as we indulge in the December 25 orgy of Xboxes, bad ties, and “The 30 Greatest Beer-Drinking Songs on CD, Volume 9″.

The second is the replacement of “Merry Christmas” by “Happy Holidays” which, thankfully, hasn’t taken root in Australia. While I respect the views of those who don’t believe in Christ (and I’ve been one in my time), the fact remains that if Christmas did not exist, we wouldn’t be enjoying a holiday period now. “Happy Holidays” sounds too much like what it really is - a cheesy, alliterative, catchy advertising-agency slogan.

(And no offence intended to those who have personally sent me “Happy Holidays” emails - it’s just not part of Australian culture yet, and hopefully not ever.)

And the third is the sheer inapproriateness of winter themes and winter music in a country which celebrates Christmas in the middle of summer. I don’t mind portrayals of the prevailing climate in Bethlehem at the time of the nativity, but Jesus wasn’t born in rural Vermont, and I don’t need to listen to “Let It Snow Let It Snow Let It Snow” while waiting at the checkout at Woolies. (And I don’t need to listen to Anne Murray or Celine Dion anytime.)

And with all due respect to Bing, “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” has sinister connotations in Australia at the moment.

Nat King Cole’s recording of the Torme/Wells song is a classic, but it belongs, for me, in the “Celebrating Christmas Around The World” niche.

It may be a bit extreme, but let this be a deterrent to others…

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Osaka groper dies after being caught by commuters

On this page I am collating an ever-expanding list of “top 10 stories of 2005″ lists that I come across on the web. (And don’t forget that I am running one myself on my cricket blog and podcast.)

• Top 10 New York news stories of 2005: Gotham Gazette (Number 9: Fulton Fish Market Leaves Fulton Street!)
• Top 10 Religious news stories of 2005: Religion Newswriters Association (Religion, it seems, equates with Christianity on this list.)
• Top 10 Radio Frequency Identification news stories of 2005: RFID Journal (And, yep you guessed it, Wal-Mart’s electronic merchandise tagging system made the list twice!)

Proof copies are now online for today’s Hansard of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly and Legislative Council. I haven’t read the whole lot, and probably won’t bother, but there was a lot of political football being played in the lower house debate, despite the bill having bipartisan support. In the upper house, where there are more minor parties represented, the debate seemed to show more literacy, with questions being raised by the Greens and Democrats as to whether, considering the police crackdown since Monday, the amending legislation is necessary at all.

And then, alas, there is David Oldfield, MLC, the former mentor of Pauline Hanson who sits in the upper house as an independent, having been elected in 1999 before the deregistration of One Nation as a political party. His speech, well, to quote the President of the Legislative Council in response to a point of order:

“…the comments of the Hon. David Oldfield about Lebanese people are racist and bordering on unparliamentary.”

Oldfield comes up for re-election in March 2007.

Before I finish tonight, a sidelight to Sunday’s displays of flag-waving nationalism of which John Winston Howard was so proud on national television the following night. Among the other Australian icons being paraded by the “We Grew Here You Flew Here” brigade was Blinky Bill. As I mentioned on Tuesday, John Huxley reported on this in that day’s SMH.

Now while the original adventures of Blinky Bill, written by Dorothy Wall, have passed into the public domain, the character himself has not. Blinky Bill is owned by Yoram Gross-EM TV, the respected and highly successful producers of films and TV programs for children whose studios are about two kilometres from here. Gross is a survivor of the Holocaust and it’s hard to imagine anything more incongruous (not to mention illegal) than using one of his properties for neo-fascist purposes.

(Acknowledgement to the anti-racist blog Fight dem back! for bringing this to my notice.)

“What we’ve seen in the last 72 hours are more urban terrorists terrorising the community”

- Peter Debnam, New South Wales Leader of the Opposition, 15.12.05

Pete, in the words of another passionate Australian xenophobe: Please explain?

Pollies aside, the community is getting on with the job of resolving the underlying causes of Sunday and Monday’s riots. The Lebanese community - Muslim and Christian - have offered curfews this weekend as a means of helping defuse things this weekend. The Sutherland Shire Council’s website has a sequence of media releases online outlining their course of action.

State parliament is recalled for today to deal with the “law and order” issues. Whether the changes are appropriate (P.Debnam thinks they don’t go far enough) is something I can’t comment on yet. I’ll link to Hansard once it is available. Debate is currently winding up in the upper house - here’s the link to the webcast. (Oops, it seems to have finished just as I was writing that.)

But will all the players in this dreadful episode be accounted for? There’s the case of Allan Belford Jones, who is alleged to have repeatedly made comments on 2GB last week which appear to have breached the Racial Hatred Act 1995. (Here’s the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s explanatory page relating to the Racial Hatred Act.)

And then there’s “Australia First” who apparently exuberantly performed rent-a-crowd duties at Sunday’s North Cronulla gathering. Make sure you hold your nose before you visit their website and note their pre-publicity for the “Cronulla Mass Mobilisation”. There’s a lot of disturbing reading there that we probably should all be aware of.

One of Australia First’s more prominent members, Jim Saleam, ran for council in Marrickville’s South Ward in the March 2004 local government elections. He received 41 votes.

Moving briefly onto overseas coverage, Germaine Greer has written a piece for The Guardian today which reminds us of some of the outstanding Australians of Lebanese heritage - the Governor of New South Wales, Marie Bashir; her husband, former Lord Mayor of Sydney and Australian rugby union legend Nick Shehadie; and current rugby league legend Hasem el-Masri of the Canterbury Bulldogs. She could have added Victorian premier Steve Bracks.

And the BBC World Service website has a moderated forum for discussion of the Sydney riots. Interesting to see what the punters around the world think of it all.

From the Murdoch fish-and-wrapper that has no idea when to shut up:
http://www.dailytelegraph.news.com.au/story/0,20281,17558480-5001030,00.html

There can be no doubt that racial hatred is a major element in this week’s riots in and around Cronulla. Is Australia an inherently racist society? No - we’ve come a long long way since the massacre of Aborigines and the proliferation of the White Australia Policy. But there’s still a hard core of rednecks in this country who believe that their brand of Australian nationalism - an unwritten White Australia Policy if you will - is the right one. Pauline Hanson, curiously enough, lives at Sylvania Waters, a few kilometres up the George’s River from Cronulla.

There are those who say this is only a “law and order” issue and that we should not “over complicate this” - and I’ll discuss the conduct of those persons in a future posting. Yes, there is a great deal of evidence that the Cronulla-Sutherland district has been under-resourced in NSW police personnel for quite a while. It’s a point of criticism that opponents of the ten year-old Labor government in New South Wales have been quick to pounce on. But “law and order” only becomes an issue when there is “disorder” that needs policing.

What about the causes of that “disorder”?

Racism is an important issue here, but it’s really just a platform on which a greater problem is being thrashed out. Call it xenophobia, or even more fundamentally, call it intolerance. The issues are complex, and they are issues of clash, not of cultures, but of society.

People in the Sutherland Shire feel aggrieved about a number of problems that have festered over the years, and they all came to a head when those two lifesavers were bashed up on the weekend before last. However, these people jumped to the wrong conclusion, and took entirely the wrong approach to a solution. Highly irresponsible (and highly paid) people in the media spurred them on.

While the state government and affected community groups are getting together to try and sort out the underlying problems (and secure a peace in the immediate term), and they are to be commended for this, there is no time more important than the present for sound Leadership at the national level. And it is the conduct of our national Leader that I will discuss next.

There’s a concept that has been much discussed this week that I’m having a bit of trouble with. “Middle Eastern appearance.”

What does a Middle Eastern gentleman look like?

Is he Pakistani? Is he Afghani? Is he Iranian? Is he Iraqi? Is he Kurdish? Is he Yemeni? Is he Omani? Is he Qatari? Is he Kuwaiti? Is he Turkish? Is he Syrian? Is he Lebanese? Is he Jordanian? Is he Palestinian? Is he Israeli? Is he Saudi Arabian? Is he Egyptian? Is he Libyan? Maybe he looks like a Brazilian walking to catch his train.

Or maybe he looks like that chap from Nazareth whose birth we are celebrating in twelve days’ time.