Does Satan have a sense of humour?

I throw out the above topic as a possible object of research for some keen young DPhil student on the threshold of a brilliant career in Academe.

Here is some evidence for her to consider.

A couple of evenings ago, I was watching the Beeb on my computer: a late-night slot in which media experts tell you what the interesting stories in the following morning's papers are, and ... on a good evening ... sometimes hint at what the 'Fleet Street' gossip behind and about them is.

Very unusually, one of the newspapers they had in front of them that evening was Polish! Yes, the news had just come through that the Polish Constitutional Court had ruled against the pre-birth destruction of the handicapped.

Of the three broadcasters (occasionally the three may include a man, but most commonly they are all women), the 'Anchor' was an elderly lady 'of Polish heritage'; another was Women's Editor on a right-wing paper generally known as The Torygraph; she was called Claire Cohen.

Cohen reacted to the Polish Breaking News with the phrase "really shocking". The Anchor seemed not unsympathetic to this laconic pronouncement. There was no suggestion that this was a merely personal view to which Cohen was entitled; the phrase was left hanging in the air as an obviously objective observation. Nobody offered any balance.

Poland is a country in which, within still living memory, there were the very grossest Extermination Camps engaged in the sadistic slaughter of millions of human beings, many of them with names like, er, Cohen. And the country itself suffered from a murderous Nazi tyranny determined to reduce the numbers of 'sub-human' Slavs and to destroy its cultural identity.

Yet Cohen, and her Polish chum, sophisticated ladies, had graduated far beyond any simple-minded revulsion at the slaughter of the innocent. Instead, they seemed horrified that the current holocaust of 'sub-human' babies might in anyway be interrupted. 

Ridete, quidquid est Daemoniorum!!