From The Golf Room

     I am old enough to remember when we used the word ‘conquest’ when a mob of masked men and women stormed a town hall or a parliament building to raise the flag of a foreign nation. I can recall a time when the violent invasion of a nation’s high seats of civic power by a faceless swarm draped in the standard of a distant land was considered an act of brazen, treasonous hostility. So why do so many insist on referring to the thuggish usurping of the streets of Paris and beyond, by gangs flying the Palestine flag as a ‘protest’?      The scenes from France last Saturday were apocalyptic. Even in a nation famous for its street-fighting, the scale of destruction was wild. Across the capital, entire boulevards were reduced to smouldering, ash-choked wastelands of incinerated vehicles, blown-out storefronts and acrid clouds of tear gas. There were running battles between the thugs and the cops, the former armed with jagged chunks of pavement, the latter with ...