Harry's Place

A good interview on National Public Radio with Prof. Deborah Lipstadt about the new film “Denial,” based on the legal challenge she faced from David Irving in 1996 after she called him a Holocaust denier.

Here’s the trailer. Avoid the comments if you don’t want to have your stomach turned. Apparently Irving is a martyr to a frightening number of people.

Donald Trump is prone to rail against the harmful effects of foreign imports (while having almost all of his Trump-branded products manufactured outside the US), so I found it interesting that he reportedly is bringing UKIP’s Nigel Farage over from England to help him prepared for the upcoming debates this month with Hillary Clinton.

Update: The Guardian reports:

A Ukip spokesman denied the reports but did not confirm or deny if Farage would be heading to the US in the future.

So there’s Lionel Shriver mischievously addressing the Brisbane Writers Festival about cultural appropriation through the sillier examples of sombreros and sushi and, more seriously, making the old cry for artistic freedom and the play of the imagination. Although what she said was not startling it did inspire performance art. One was from Yassmin Abdel-Magied who staged a walk out and whose article on why she did so the Guardian cruelly published. She was duly minced in the comments.

What did Shriver say in her keynote that could drive a woman who has heard every slur under the sun to discard social convention and make such an obviously political exit?

Her question was — or could have been — an interesting question: What are fiction writers “allowed� to write, given they will never truly know another person’s experience?

No, it’s not an interesting question, if it’s not as old as Sumerian cunieform, it’s as old as Plato about lying for the purposes of art.

Shriver’s ideas on identity are “the kind of attitude that lays the foundation for prejudice, for hate, for genocide. “

I do remember the days of cultural exchange, when we thought it was a good thing to broaden our minds by sampling foreign foods, foreign dance, and how this was meant to undermine the foundations for prejudice etc…. And genocide – wasn’t the European Holocaust a good deal to do with a culture embracing its own purity, uncontaminated by outside forces?

Her last paragraph is genius in its lack of self-awareness:-

The opening of a city’s writers festival could have been graced by any of the brilliant writers and thinkers who challenge us to be more. To be uncomfortable. To progress.

She was challenged and she was uncomfortable and made her progress across the floor to the exit.

It’s mean to make fun of Abdel-Massied’s histrionics. So I’ll make fun of someone else’s histrionics instead, one Maxine Beneba Clarke.

Her tone is a cross between a Red Guard kicking a professor for incorrect thoughts and a Victorian Evangelical deploring novels that depict impure subjects.

Reading a tweet account of Shriver’s speech was enough to throw her into a rage:-

Over the next 24 hours, Shriver’s speech – advocating cultural appropriation and publicly sneering at those who ask for consultation and sensitivity in the telling of others’ stories – is all any writer on the festival circuit can talk about. When we’ve tired of dissecting Shriver’s keynote speech, we talk about how desperately Shriver wants to be talked about. Then we stop talking about her at all.

(“Dissecting� with no actual corpse to cut up as Clarke had neither heard nor read the speech. )

Sensitivity? A good quality in any writing. Consultation? From who? I imagine something like a planning permission notice.

Proposed erection of novel set in Edinburgh and Glasgow constituting approximately 400 pages, 23 characters, 4 of who are of a Muslim Pakistani background, 3 Catholics of Irish descent, 2 gays (one camp, the other not). Objections should be lodged by 3 April 2017.

Anyway like those blokes in Bradford who burned The Satanic Verses, Clarke did not need to read/hear the offensive material in order to react to it as blasphemy. She confronted Shriver.

How dare you come to this country and behave like that?�

“When I come to your country,� Shriver’s chin is raised now. Her voice is strict, as if she’s speaking to small children. Though she’s shorter than I am, she somehow still manages to peer condescendingly down the bridge of her nose. “When I come to your country. I expect. To be treated. With hospitality.�

….

“You don’t even know what I said,� Shriver repeats, raising her voice slightly.

I can feel my blood pressure rising. “The entire Australian writing community has a fair idea of what you said,� I scoff. Then softer, in disbelief, almost under my breath. “You’re a disgrace.�

I love that Clarke is speaking for “the entire Australian writing communityâ€?. Did she consult? And a “writing community”? How does that work?

(By the way both Clarke & Abdel-Magied go for a setting the scene, dramatising style, which is slathers of icing on insubstantial cake.)

Clarke was outraged by Shriver’s hauteur, the hauteur any writer worth her salt would display to some individual who had not read/heard her work before sounding off about it. Of course Shriver treats with disdain philistines responding to something they hadn’t read.

Also how righteous and certain Clarke is, like a Southern Baptist preacher denouncing sin. The idea of “cultural appropriation� is established and unquestionable for some, it seems.

Clarke’s last sight of Shriver is her sitting alone, which she thinks is a terrible indictment. She has her own cultural blind spot, for aloneness against a bunch of group thinkers shouting “blasphemerâ€? raises Shriver’s stature considerably in Anglo culture. Clarke has appropriated for Shriver the gaunt icon of Orwell standing alone against the Stalin-worshipping group think of his own day, and Shriver, though she calls herself an “iconoclastâ€? doesn’t really deserve it as about half the opinionated population snorts at sombreros and sushi and being told what you can and can’t say.

A third respondent, Suki Kim, did hear Shriver through and is calmer in her response, though she misrepresents Shriver’s ideas:-

Being gay is not an identity. Being deaf, blind, or wheelchair-bound is not an identity, nor is being economically deprived.� She tempered what amounted to a right-wing case against affirmative action and political correctness with a paean to cultural exchange, proclaiming, “I hope the concept of cultural appropriation is a passing fad,

Shriver said nothing against affirmative action or even political correctness when it comes to ordinary human interaction, and her words about identity were identity for the purposes of fiction, i.e. it is not enough for a character to be the Gay person, the Deaf person etc – they have to be other things as well, like kind or selfish or troubled.

In a diatribe that has since become notorious, she proceeded to enumerate the various ways in which cultural appropriation—the idea that white artists and communities have stolen elements of minority cultures in ways that are oppressive—was harmful to people everywhere.

What elements? How can you “steal�* elements of minority cultures by portraying members of them in fiction, writing haikus or dancing the tango? There are things you can steal, loot, treasures, eg those Maori heads that were eventually returned to their home or you can steal the royalties for a song that someone else made up (The Lion Sleeps Tonight for example). But intangibles? She should have named these “elements�, which would have exposed the general wrongness of this idea.

Kim spoke on a panel which was a Right of Reply to Shriver’s address:-

Afterward, once I finally finished my own book event and walked into what was known as the Artist’s Den, a private hotel room the festival had rented out for the writers to relax with drinks, several writers congratulated me on my performance. No one was referring to the one I did for my book…

I had been invited to the Brisbane Writers Festival as a writer, but now I was here, foremost, as an Asian. This was yet more proof, if it was needed, that Shriver was spewing nothing but nonsense: Some of us have no choice when it comes to identity.

Kim has the usual writerly irritation that people preferred to talk about her discussing Shriver’s thoughts rather than her own book. Writers – Martin Amis, Gore Vidal – have frequently complained that interviewers would rather ask them about their “viewsâ€? than the thing that they wrote. She is reasonably pissed off at being the “non-whiteâ€? representative, the substance of whose work is ignored however she has no qualms about treating Shriver as a white representative, whose opinions are treated as racial arrogance and which she has distorted. Kim can write about who she likes – WASPy bankers and black rappers if she can get away with it, i.e. do it convincingly and so can Shriver.

The examples Shriver gives of the chilling effect of the cultural appropriation movement on her own writing are being taken to task by reviewers and an internal nervousness that she will be vilified by people whom she thinks are wrong-headed and won’t have read her work. That is hardly the government censor or the publisher indicating to Thomas Hardy to lay off the sensuality in Tess of the D’Urbervilles. So her complaints seem over the top as far as the writing profession goes – she sells, she is speaking at the Marlborough Literary Festival this weekend.

You write well, you write badly, you write courageously, you write timidly. Our two great humane, and humanist, novelists – George Eliot and E M Forster – were great cultural appropriators, Eliot in Daniel Deronda, a plea against antisemitism in her portrayal of Jewish pawnbrokers, artists and proto Zionists, and Forster in A Passage to India, the most anti-imperialist of English novels with its Muslim and Hindu Indians. They both took pains, researched, asked insiders about their accuracy. Then they imagined and wrote. And by their works we know them.

*(I filched this point from here.)

Although pro-choice campaigners will of course oppose Poland’s planned further restrictions on its already very narrow criteria for legal abortion, many who identify as pro-life will probably be equally concerned by the proposals. Currently women in Poland can only secure an abortion if their life is in danger, if the foetus is seriously deformed, or in cases involving rape or incest.  But the new law will only allow abortion if the mother’s life is at risk, meaning that young girls, including rape victims, will be forced to carry their pregnancies to term. Those found breaking the law will face jail. 58% of Poles approve of this tighter legislation, even though only 1000 legal abortions are carried out in Poland each year.  This move also has the support of both the Church and the thoroughly illiberal Law and Justice Party, currently in government.  On Monday many female workers will go on strike in protest against this curtailment of their rights.

Women keen to compete in next year’s world chess championship will be forced to don a hijab.  This announcement immediately prompted calls to boycott the event.  I can understand the misgivings of some Iranian women who welcome the chance to compete in an international event on their home turf. For example Ghoncheh Ghavami, a British-Iranian woman who was jailed for her part in a campaign to allow women spectators at men’s volleyball games, opposes the boycott.

Ghavami, whose time in jail drew international attention, said from Tehran: “The world must hear the pro-reform voices of people inside Iran and not ignore these pleas by isolating the country.�

But the statement from Fide’s commission for Women’s Chess, exhorting participants to respect ‘cultural differences’, glosses over the fact that only women have to modify their dress, and also brushes aside (unlike Ghavami) the struggles of many Iranian women to defy the law on this issue.

US chess champion Nazi Paikidze-Barnes has made the difficult decision to boycott the contest:

“Some consider a hijab part of culture. But I know that a lot of Iranian women are bravely protesting this forced law daily and risking a lot by doing so,” she told Alinejad. “That’s why I will not wear a hijab and support women’s oppression. Even if it means missing one of the most important competitions of my career.”

She has explained and defended her decision in forthright but measured tones.  People might reach different conclusions about how best to support women in Iran over this issue, but Paikidze-Barnes’ attitude seems far preferable to that of Susan Polger, US Grand Master, with whom she has been sparring on twitter:

This is a guest post by Eve Garrard

Jackie Walker, not content with claiming that Jews were the chief financiers  of the slave trade, has also said that antisemitism charges have been “exaggerated for political purposesâ€?, and “the most fundamental aim of such allegations …..  is to undermine Jeremy Corbynâ€?, and “silenceâ€? his supporters. (See Anoosh Chakelian in the New Statesman here). Furthermore, warming to her theme, she says that some of those who are criticising her for her antisemitic remarks (referencing Jeremy Newmark and the Jewish Chronicle here) do so out of racism towards a black woman.

There’s an interesting gap in the logic here.  Walker deploys a version of the Livingstone Manoeuvre in seeking to dismiss charges of antisemitism by declaring those making them to have covert motives – such allegations are really designed to weaken Jeremy Corbyn.  This means that those who level them are being deceitful and cunning, they have ulterior and disgraceful motives. (Her further declaration that antisemitism charges are weapons of ‘political mass destruction’ adds the clotted cream to this poisonous coffee by suggesting that those who are  involved in making these scurrilous and mendacious charges have extraordinary and malignant powers.)

But the thing I’d like to focus on is her purported explanation of why people should make such dreadful charges against her.  It’s because they’re racist, she says, and she’s a black woman.  And the interesting logical gap she needs to bridge is why charges of antisemitism should be treated as false and manipulative, whereas charges of anti-black racism should be taken at face value.

Now, I don’t doubt that Jackie Walker is a black woman, as she tells us.  But if she’s thinking that gives her claim of being the target of anti-black racism some special authority, then she has to accept that Jews making charges of antisemitism also have special authority to do so.  We can be sure that that’s not what she wants to claim.  (Neither do I, for that matter, but what’s sauce for the goose etc etc.)  So the supposed authority of the victim won’t bridge the logical gap for her.

Jackie is also Jewish, as she so very frequently tells us – perhaps this is supposed to account for the disparity in her treatment of different kinds of racism.  But it’s hard to see how it can do so, unless she’s thinking that being Jewish, she has special authority to call out lies supposedly made by Jews, since she herself, being Jewish, can’t possibly be antisemitic, so must be telling the naked truth when she accuses Jews of some malpractice.

Does this bridge the logical gap?  Does it explain why it’s ok for her to dismissively treat Jewish charges of antisemitism as dishonest and manipulative, but not ok for the rest of us to dismissively treat her own charges of racism in the same way?  Well, no, it doesn’t.  It relies on the assumption that Jews can’t possibly be antisemitic.  But this assumption would be funny if it weren’t also tragic.  Throughout history some Jews have sought to escape the hostility that so often targets all Jews by putting themselves ostentatiously on the side of the hostile ones, and hoping to count as ‘good Jews’, not to be targeted. This motivation, though not an admirable one, is understandable and sad. Of course, there are various other reasons for Jewish antisemitism, but its existence can’t plausibly be denied.

On the basis of the assumption I’m criticising here, Jews of this kind are absolutely invaluable to those who are hostile to Jews in general or to the Jewish State – they provide moral and political cover against any charges of antisemitism that might be thought to flow from that hostility.  (We can’t be antisemitic, we have a real live Jew here who agrees with us!) We might, following a splendid precedent provided by those who dismiss Israel’s well-known acceptance of LGBT groups and individuals as mere pink-washing, refer to this as Jew-washing.  Jackie Walker is industriously engaged in Jew-washing her toxic views just as clean as she can get them.  She does not, however, succeed.  Her hostile treatment of charges of antisemitism is noticeably different from her unquestioning deployment of charges of anti-black racism, and such double standards call out for justification, or failing that, explanation.  In the absence of any justification, the explanation is unlikely to be a creditable one.

A postscript on apologies:

Walker has now apologised for her remarks.  Unfortunately her apology misses the mark by several hundred miles.  She says that “If offence has been caused, it is the last thing I would want to do and I apologise.�  Doubtless her remarks have caused offence.  But that’s not what’s wrong with them.  What’s primarily wrong with saying that Jews were the chief financiers of the slave trade, or that the proceedings on Holocaust Memorial Day say nothing about other genocides, or that Jewish concerns about antisemitism in the Labour Party are nothing but a malicious plan to bring down Jeremy Corbyn, is above all that they’re false.

The last giant of the founding of Israel has left us and now we are alone. With him dies an era of adventure and rebirth for the Jewish people, with him dies an age of dreams, of visions and of Hebrew prophets. Peres goes on his way to join the other giants of his time and his name surely ranks among the likes of Jabotinsky, Ben Gurion, Yigal Allon, Moshe Dayan, Abba Eban and Golda Meir. Of Pinsker, Ahad Ha’am, Rav Kook and a whole legion of giants now long gone.

Our link to those special Jews is now banished from living memory and resigned to the history books.

Now he lies in state and the flag flies at half mast the last of a generation that achieved the impossible heads on his way leaving us mere mortals to find a way to continue on our own. And on our own we continue with a nuclear country, a country at peace with two neighbours, a country with the most powerful military and economy in the region. Some of this we can place directly at the door of Peres others indirectly. Let us not forget that this man who now lies at peace was involved in every major challenge the country faced since its inception.

Peres is most respected around the world for the work that led to his receipt of the Nobel Prize for Peace, he is most respected in Israel for his work ensuring Israel’s nuclear capability which almost certainly resulted in Israel obtaining weapons of mass destruction. That quirk says rather a lot about Israel and probably rather a lot about everyone else too. That the same man did both says even more about him. Giving Israel the capacity to set the world ablaze while recognising just how vulnerable Israel is even with that capability.

What becomes clear when looking back at his life is the extent to which he grew along with the country. As well as steering Israel through various periods of her existence he also changed and grew along with it. Often this propensity for growth was passed off as something less than noble, less than honest. A man who people couldn’t trust at the helm of the country. But I see a man who grew, whose positions didn’t stagnate with time but evolved, he was a man who had the courage of his convictions, far from being ashamed of this fact he flaunted it, he pushed it and time will show him to be either a visionary or a fool for doing so. In any case the line between the two is so thin it’s almost impossible to define.

True leaders aren’t afraid to let the people know their vision for the future and allow them to choose accordingly. The alternative is a leader with nothing to offer but empty words, a leader without vision. Something Peres can never be accused of. Nevertheless Israelis consistently chose leaders who were weak on vision and offered Israel more of the same, they tended to view Peres as a risk. A man to be trusted with a purely ceremonial position but not with the future of the country he helped create and define.

What is certain is that the last of the greats has left us, there will be no one to tell us of the legends of our time who actually knew them and worked with them, no one left to guide us through the tough times and certainly no one at all with that indomitable spirit that knew for certain that if you will it is no dream, because they willed it and as a result we’re living it.

Because she has dared to point out the increasingly authoritarian and conspiracy-minded nature of the Polish government under the Law and Justice party, and to suggest parallels to Donald Trump, the cesspit that is the Breitbart.com website has called the distinguished historian and journalist Anne Applebaum a “Polish, Jewish, American elitist.”

The author of the piece (check out the comments for a sampling of old-fashioned rightwing Jew-bashing) is reportedly Jewish, but as we’ve seen in the Labour party and elsewhere, that’s not an automatic exculpation of antisemitism. As Applebaum herself observes:

@20committee @davidfrum @Yair_Rosenberg But he needs to sound anti-semitic in order to impress the far-right. It's a career move.

— Anne Applebaum (@anneapplebaum) September 28, 2016

Breitbart.com has become one of the leading voices for extremist alt-Right supporters of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Trump’s campaign chief Stephen Bannon is on leave as chairman of Breitbart.com.

Jackie Walker’s original comments about the slave trade were bad enough.  But it is possible to fall into error, pick up misinformation, and then reflect and rethink – as Naz Shah has done. Jackie Walker, by contrast, seems to want to compound the problem.  To remind readers, she wasn’t simply admitted back into the Labour Party – she is now Vice Chair of Momentum and has since been photographed alongside Jeremy Corbyn at a rally in Ramsgate.

Now it transpires that she came out with a series of offensive comments relating to antisemitism at a meeting on Monday. First she complained that she hasn’t been able to find a definition of antisemitism she can work with. There are many definitions – surely she can find one she can put up with, and even if she can’t, that doesn’t stop her trying to engage with the problem rather than find excuses to brush it aside.

Next she complained that Holocaust Memorial Day was too exclusive – ‘look at the website’ someone in the audience suggested.  This would have informed her that HMD is a time to remember all victims of the Nazis, for example the Roma, and victims of other genocides too.

She then sought to trivialise the way Jewish schools (and other Jewish organisations and events) rely on security, and seemed unconcerned when reminded that Jews were targets for terrorist attacks.

Finally she completely garbles ‘the Livingstone theory’ (sic) – ‘if it is an antisemitic issue, if you deny it, it’s antisemitic’. I assume she was referencing the Livingstone formulation which in fact refers to the accusation that the issue of antisemitism is being raised in bad faith to deflect criticism of Israel.

Here’s is Jackie Walker’s response.  If she’s now essentially backtracking on every single point she made, why did she make them in the first place?

habibi adds: here’s John McDonnell showing his solidarity with Jackie Walker at a Labour Representation Committee meeting in Brighton on 12 September 2016.

Walker also spoke at the meeting. She dismissed antisemitism charges as bids to undermine Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters and silence criticism of Israel.

Shimon Peres, who made aliyah with his family to pre-state Palestine in 1934 and whose life in many ways embodied the history of modern Israel, has died at the age of 93.

After the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, Peres became acting prime minister of Israel. The following year, in the one and only Israeli election with separate voting for prime minister, I was proud to vote for Peres. But he very narrowly lost to Benjamin Netanyahu.

Peres’s loss can probably be traced to the dashing of hopes for peace with the Palestinians in the months leading up to the election. Ironically it may have been Peres’s approval of the assassination of Hamas bombmaker Yahya Ayyash (“The Engineer”) in January 1996 that cost him the election.

The entirely deserved death of Ayyash led to a wave of retaliatory bombings by Hamas that killed dozens of Israeli civilians. Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat appeared unable or unwilling to crack down on Hamas in any serious way. This enabled Netanyahu and his supporters to argue that the Oslo peace accords which Peres negotiated as foreign minister and strongly backed were making Israel less secure.

If Peres had won the 1996 election, would the chances for a durable two-state solution have been any better? There is reason to be dubious. But I always believed that Peres balanced his wish for peace with a hard-headed understanding of Israel’s need for security.

A socialist Zionist from his youth, Peres courted his future wife Sonya with romantic readings of “Das Kapital.” It must have been effective, because they were married from 1945 until her death in 2011.

Zichrono livracha. May his memory be a blessing.

Update: A nice tribute to his friend from President Obama.

Lengthy, personal Obama tribute to Peres: "There are few people who we share this world with who change the course of human history." pic.twitter.com/T2h9Plw84e

— Noga Tarnopolsky (@NTarnopolsky) September 28, 2016