…Speech Warriors™, take note.
I haven’t read a word by Tony Kushner, and so I can’t comment on Sullivan’s harsh words in his first graf about the quality of Kushner’s Pulitzer-winning play Angels in America. (I rather like the sound of his new one, though, pace Sullivan—“The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures” sounds like a lot of fun, four hours long or no.)
But Sully goes on to nail a certain type with which many of us are all-too-familiar, incarnated here in the person of an ex-FBI agent and rabid pro-Israel nutter, one Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld.
Anyone still wondering why some of us react as we do when the Israel-right-or-wrong people try to shut down another play, close down another art exhibit, interfere with another school curriculum, all the while spraying the A-word around till we’re sticky with their foam, should check out this account. They are all Wiesenfeld.
As we await the year-late final report from the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism—its release perhaps timed to coincide with the aftermath of the election—Wiesenfeld sums up what we have long been confronting. For such doltish apologists, anti-Semitism, suitably re-defined to render the term next to meaningless, is everywhere; criticism of Israel should be verboten; and as for the Palestinians? Not human.
From such political psychopathy flows the increasing dehumanization of the dispossessed Palestinians—merely “Pallies,”cockroaches,” “grasshoppers,” they have no rights, they have no legitimate claims, and their lives are casually expendable.
Wiesenfeld, as we know very well, has more than a few Canadian brothers and sisters, Jewish and non-Jewish, aching to make criticism of Israel illegal. Those of us who insist upon looking at that state from an uncompromising social justice perspective can reasonably expect the hammer to fall, I think, now that the Conservatives have their majority.
That is, if we take Stephen Harper at his word.
