I'm not that bothered if he answers Pip's questions or not. I think of idiots like that on web forums as acting like human yarrow sticks in an I Ching divination - a bundle of sticks doesn't actually need any brains to spark off connections you might not have thought of. You certainly don't think of yourself as communicating with the sticks when you reflect on the commentary.

So, two directions this goes in. Firstly, the comment about how Israeli musicians ought to perform "Israeli music". A rather extraordinary degree of igniorance about the whole culture of Israel there. In fact Israeli musicians are doing an EXCELLENT job of making music relevant to the society they live in, by combining music brought from wherever in the world Jewish immigrants have come from with the whole range of music that was there before they arrived. The heterogeneity of the result is the whole POINT. It's one of the major areas of the culture where Jews (of whatever regional origin) and Palestinians (of whatever ideology) can cooperate in a serious, productive and often exhilarating way.

Secondly: let's look at the result of the one attempt there has been to implement Franks's programme in a thoroughgoing way, i.e. the cultural policy of the Third Reich. It turned out to be catastrophically destructive to German traditional music *more than any other* - Jews and Gypsies may have been slaughtered wholesale but culturally they got the last laugh: their music came out of WW2 largely intact. I remember asking a German singer around 1980 why he didn't do any traditional German material - he said "there is blood on those songs", and his attitude was that of the two generations that came after the war. Nothing could undo the damage done by having it used as a training tool in making children into robot killers for the Hitler state. Even now it has nowhere near recovered the status of something you can just play in public for fun, without making a political statement about why you're doing it. It's hardly surprising that almost all German folkies do Irish music instead.

The greatest favour Franks could now do for English music is to shut the fuck up about it, refrain from associating his pustulent Daily Mail ideology with it, and take his asinine website off the air for good. I don't expect he will, but we can still use a steady supply of random verbal hexagrams.