Businesses should boycott that bawling brat Bieber because of his bad behaviour

Here's a sick joke for you. Justin Bieber, the coiffed Canadian teenage singer whose head seems to have been turned by adulation, visits Anne Frank's house in Amsterdam. In the guestbook, he writes "truly inspiring to be able to come here". Wait for it, wait for it: he then comments that the Holocaust victim and literary prodigy was a "great girl" who "hopefully would have been a belieber" (one of his die-hard fans). Laughing? Me neither. It wouldn't have been so awful if it hadn't actually happened. So far, Bieber's hapless European tour has involved the star a) lashing out at photographers, b) infuriating his teenage fans by turning up two hours late to gigs, c) cancelling gigs at short notice in Portugal, and d) having his pet monkey confiscated by the authorities in Germany. Now he has topped it off by combining offensiveness and absurdity in a single off-the-cuff remark. That takes talent. It's sad in a way. I don't know if Bieber was a decent chap before fame swept him off to la-la land, but he has since become widely recognised as one of the most cretinous and ego-maniacal figures of our times. The debate is just gearing up, but the two basic positions are predictable. One group will criticise Mr Bieber for his hare-brained comments. The other will defend him on the grounds that he is young and living under the pressure of fame. Where we stand in this argument is of a greater significance than it appears. The way I see it is this. Let the singer off the hook, and we are doing him a disservice, suggesting that because he is young, he is therefore incapable of behaving responsibly. We will be limiting his horizons, and showing that we have little faith in both him and human nature. Call him to account, however, and we are demonstrating firstly that we expect better from him, and secondly " and more importantly " that we believe that he is capable of better. In my view, if he has any chance at all of surviving this maelstrom of paparazzi and pheromones, Mr Bieber needs beliebers like this. Lots of. (By "we" I am not imagining that the attitude of wider society actually makes a difference to young Justin. No: it makes a difference to society itself.) As with Justin Bieber, so with other youngsters. Last week, I wrote in these pages about Paris Brown, the 17-year-old former Youth Police and Crime Commissioner who came a cropper when her offensive tweets were revealed. I made the fairly obvious point, which is that it was a ridiculous idea to appoint a teenage girl as an adviser to a country police force in the first place. On Twitter, people complained that I had been disparaging young people. So when interviewed on BBC radio about it, I made a point of emphasising that not all youngsters are in the habit of making homophobic, violent or racist comments on Twitter or elsewhere. Paris Brown's teenage years, I said, seem to be serving her particularly badly. When this aired, I received even more accusations of disparaging the young. Sigh. The fact is that you can't have it both ways. Either young people are inherently prone to mess up, in which case you don't thrust them into the public eye. Or they are mature enough to handle such a level of responsibility, in which case you can't let them off when they mess up. A teenager is not a toddler " though it may often seem like it " and the more we kowtow to them, allowing them to be abusive, racist or otherwise offensive with impunity, the weaker our society becomes. The toleration of appalling teenagers can be found everywhere, from the state schools that teach their pupils to aim for jobs in Tesco, to the bus passengers who turn a blind eye when youngsters play loud music on their mobiles. This hyper-respect for the young, which allows them to ride rough-shod over everybody else, is mirrored by a shameful denigration of the aged " a state of affairs which Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, referred to as being "frenetically oriented towards youth". Over the last 60 years, the pervasive view of teenagehood has profoundly changed. Whereas in previous generations they were expected to fly Spitfires, become nurses or support families, these days they are expected to do little more than get apoplectically drunk, have abortions and do Media Studies. We need to believe in Paris Brown and other teenagers " yes, even Justin Bieber. And that means that we shout when they are selling themselves short, and when their behaviour is letting them down. so i m really sorry for your defeat mr pro .. i hope you cant oppose me now ...