I was sitting in town today, waiting for my wife to return from shopping in Marks & Spencer. To keep things balanced, I now do a second round in Waitrose, so we get the best of both worlds. I was sitting on a bench opposite a window of John Lewis, where they were displaying large-screen televisions, and the televisions were playing clips from films. The first one was that bit during the siege of Helm's Deep, where the Riders of Rohan, led by Gandalf (returned from his fight with the Balrog), charge down upon the massed orcs of the Uruk Hai. Stirring stuff. I first read Lord of the Rings when I was thirteen, forty-seven years ago. It was my first real book, and it gripped me night after night for week after week. It's not great literature, but that's not what JRR Tolkien set out to write. He was a specialist in Old and Middle English. I also specialized in Middle English as part of my first degree. There are great books from that period, but they don't all set out to be literary masterpieces. Many of them, from Gawain and the Green Knight to the Arthurian legends, are about myth, and that's what The Lord of the Rings is about too.
Tolkien's masterpiece tells a myth of great power. In the simp;lest terms, it describes a battle between good and evil, between the Dark Lord Sauron and the forces of good (exemplified by the future king Aragorn, the Elves of Rivendell, and the Hobbits of the Shire). Good wins in the end, as it does in all great myths. The Land of Mordor is ruined and the Shire cleansed. There are echoes here of the Bible, of Arthur, of the Mabinogion.
From the beginning, we know how things stand. There is no mistaking the goodness and strength of Gandalf, the evil of the Ringwraiths. Sauron is evil through and through, as are his orcs, as are the nine Nazgul. The Hobbits epitomize goodness and simplicity, and Aragorn (despite a rocky start) reveals himself as a dedicated enemy of the Dark.
Real life is not as easy, of course. What appears good often turns out to be evil, what seems ill often turns out well. We spend our lives tussling with moral dilemmas, learning who to trust, who to be cautious with. more often than not, people get it wrong. The Germans fell in love with Nazism, learned to hate the Jews, came to put their trust in brute strength and murder. Throughout Europe, communists extolled the People's Paradise of the Soviet Union even as Stalin sent millions to their deaths. Misplaced faith hurts and kills, leads whole nations to commit crimes they will later regret.
I don't have to explain the relevance of this to Israel. Today, millions across the globe self-righteously wish the worst possible harm to befall this small nation. It is not mild criticism, it is a global effort to portray Israel as Mordor, a land whose soldiers, dressed as orcs, march from the Iron Gate to slaughter innocent Palestinians (and harvest their organs). Of course, the myth has been created in reverse. Just as it isn't hard to know who, in The Lord of the Rings, is a good guy or a bad guy, so it should be clear to anyone with a working moral compass who is on the good side or the bad side of the Middle East conflict.
I'm not talking about perfect evil set against perfect good. The real world isn't like that. I'm just looking at the broad picture and our ability as human beings to recognize good and evil within it. When one side uses suicide bombers and bombs set in cafés, buses, and restaurants, rants about how much they want to kill their foe, rejects all forms of peace-making, trains its children in hate, and turns its guns on its own people; and when the other side treats its enemies in its own hospitals, willingly departs from territory, builds a security fence that keeps the bombers out, and supplies its enemy with goods, fuel, and equipment, why is it so hard to tell which side of the border Sauron is on and which Aragorn? When one side has struggled through war and terror to destroy the other, and the other has offered its enemy a state of its own again and again, does it take the brain of a genius to see which way the horses of Rohan are riding?
Tragically, many of the world's finest brains keep failing this moral test. Intellectuals in America, Europe and elsewhere have come and continue to come to the startling conclusion that Israel is the one truly evil state in the world. This astonishing notion marches alongside many other failures of the moral compass. Intellectuals, the media and government are more and more often apologists for radical Islam. Feminists defend female genital mutilation and round on other feminists (like Phyllis Chesler) who condemn it. I recently took part in a TV debate in which one person after another spoke up loudly for a woman's right to wear a full face veil, despite the very obvious disadvantages this has for the woman and the society round her. Just looking at a woman in a burqa or a niqab, it's clear she is being treated as an inferior being, yet plenty in the audience applauded her 'choice'. Intellectuals (rightly) condemn the Transatlantic slave trade, but no voice is ever raised to condemn the larger and longer-lasting Arab and Ottoman slave trade. It has become commonplace to denounce Western empires and colonialism, but when did anyone last speak out about the many Islamic empires and their often devastating impact on countries like India.
Political correctness and multiculturalism have wrought and continue to wreak havoc in our universities and in government. Anti-racists parade their credentials everywhere, but not one of them will ever be seen to condemn Arab and Islamic anti-Semitism. Movements for the establishment or re-establishment of nationalities, from Sri Lanka to Ireland tell us that every people, however small, has right to its own homeland; but the Jews are denied that same right.
During World War II, there was never any doubt where one's loyalties lay. Apart from a few self-serving individuals, like Oswald Mosley and Lord Haw Haw, everyone knew who the enemy was. When bombs were falling every night on British cities, it was hard for anyone's moral compass to swing far off north. The more we knew about the Reich, the more obvious it was that we could not afford to lose the war, because Hitler was a Dark Lord who would enslave or kill us.
And that's the puzzling thing. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict isn't going on in someone's backyard. It's out there for everyone to see. Hamas rockets fell on Sderot, and any visiting journalist (if any had cared to visit) could have been there when they landed. But when Israel moved in to stop the barrages after many years, the world seemed not to know of any provocation and portrayed Operation Cast Lead as an unprovoked attack. All the photographs and film of destruction in Gaza made the front pages and TV screens; but there were no shots of the Gaza that had not been harmed. We all know about this, about this dishonest reporting that is more interested in keeping wounds open than in telling the truth.
But aren't these the same reporters who have been in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv in the aftermath of a terrorist attack? Don't they look at the walls in Gaza and the West Bank and see the posters making heroes of young people suborned into killing Jews? Don't they ask themselves, who hero-worships a murderer? What mother sends her children to die in this way, and hands out sweets afterwards? Desperation? Devotion to Palestine? Or simply evil? Not the mother, perhaps. But the men (and women) who send children out with bombs round their waists and who put remote controls in the package so they can detonate the vest should the child have second thoughts. Why should anyone experience a moment's hesitation in calling such people evil?
Frodo carried the ring of power to the Crack of Doom, and Gollum's greed finally carried it into the depths of the mountain, where it was destroyed and Sauron's power lost for ever. If only we had a ring like that and a Crack of Doom to throw it into. What we have instead is Israel itself. Whatever its flaws, it's a healthy country. It stands for values like democracy, freedom, human rights, and a balance between secularism and religion. Set beside its neighbours, it stands out. Good amidst evil may be overstating it. But it needs to be recognized for what it is: a land that promotes good and stands against evil.
Friday, August 28, 2009
Sunday, June 14, 2009
The One-way Street
In his next speech, at Bar Ilan University, Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu is expected to make little or no reference to establishment of a Palestinian state next to Israel, something the new American administration is pressurizing him to accept. His preference is to return to the earlier 'Road Map', in which demands are made on both sides before they even think of a two-state 'solution'. To many or most observers, it will seem yet another confirmation of Israeli intransigence if the Knesset and the Israeli public continue to deny Palestinians their right to a state of their own. In principle, of course, the Israelis have not and have never had qualms about an Arab state on its borders: they are, after all, already swimmers in a sea of Arab states. So why not just a shrug of the shoulders, a murmured 'davka', and a passport to freedom for those poor dispossessed Palestinians?
If it were only that easy. The problem, of course, is one that anyone with his eyes fully open can see: the Palestinians are intent on the destruction of Israel and the elimination of any Jewish presence in the Middle East (or anywhere else, if they could). Asking for a second state, however desirable, is, at this stage in the game (and perhaps for ever) about as sensible as asking a man whose house is surrounded by gangs of thieves to open all his doors and windows on the grounds that thieves have human rights like anybody else. Thieves do, indeed, have their rights, but not the right to steal other people's possessions. Murderers have alienable rights, but not the right to kill their fellow citizens. But surely, Obama and others may fairly ask, once the Palestinians have their own state, they will settle down and become good neighbours, allowing two countries to live side by side as part of a Mediterranean economic union that will bring prosperity and goodwill to all. And surely Syria and Hezbollah and the good people of Egypt and all those other moderate Muslim of North Africa, the Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and the re-elected Mr Ahmadeinejad and that cuddly Ayatollah Khamene'i, and those peace-loving Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia will all put down their arms and put an end to their hate speeches and anti-Semitic sermons, they will turn their missiles away from Tel Aviv and Haifa and all the cities of Israel, they will beat their proverbial swords into ploughshare and harness the shares to oxen and plough the fields to bring food and affluence and tolerance to all.
It is, of course, all hooey. Gobbleygook. Balderdash. Bosh. Tosh. Piffle. Bilge. Flapdoodle. Flimflam. Poppycock. Bunkum. Boloney. To expect anything like it, to imagine that the die-hard members of Hamas or the Iranian-controlled fighters of Hezbollah or the committed warriors of al-Qa'ida would mutter some platitudes about 'There is a Palestinian state at last, We can all go back to our lives as teachers and philosophers' would confront the stark reality of human nature with a naivete that would be funny if it were not so very dangerous. Perhaps nothing characterizes the attitude of most Western states towards the Islamic world, its governments, its institutions, its religious groupings, its religious leaders, and its entirely ineffective political parties more than an inability to think beyond the limitations of their Western equivalents. For most Westerners, and particularly Western politicians, Islamic ways of thought are counter-intuitive, and yet we cling to to fairytale that they are, at heart, just like us inside. They are, so statesmen and churchmen and journalists proclaim, as amenable to rational thought and the usefulness of secularism as their Western brothers and sisters. And that would seem plausible because there are many Muslims why have adopted Western ways of thinking, who place reason before the dictates of the Qur'an, who stand in orderly queues at the cinema, who work as doctors, lecturers, and restaurateurs, who vote for our favourite political parties, who treat women as equals. But such Muslims are, as often as not, partly or entirely secularized. I'm thinking of the majority of Muslims, for whom such accommodations with Western mores are either unthinkable or forbidden.
An Iranian friend of mine was paying a visit home some years ago. She had official documents to be stamped and had to visit a government ministry. She dressed herself in the obligatory hijab, took off all make-up, made sure her hair was tucked well inside her veil, and made to go through the checkpoint. The guard stopped her and said she had to remove her Western shoes. She pointed to the ground, showing that her shoes were covered entirely by her chador, which reached the ground. He answered that he could hear them. That is what Israel is up against. We have a Palestinian state. We have a peace treaty. The sun is smiling sweetly on us all. God is in Heaven. But there are Jews across the border, there are synagogues, the Temple Mount belongs to us, the Kotel belongs to us, Jerusalem belongs to us because it is an ancient Palestinian capital, a city that the Jews have no connection with at all, and weren't we ethnically cleansed, hasn't our vice-president Ilan Pappe explained all that?
One of the reasons it is a mistake to observe the Islamic world through European or American lenses is that it remains so much closer to the Middle Ages than any of our cultures. I don't mean chronologically, and I'm not even sure that the term 'Middle Ages' fits most Arab, Iranian, or other Islamic societies. But it expresses a mood, a mood that explains why even a technologically advanced and wealthy country like Saudi Arabia resembles nothing more than, let's say, Portugal or Spain under the Inquisition. The need for change, for political, social, and religious reform that grew in European in stages has never taken hold of people's hearts in Islam. Many of the great religious 'reformers' in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, men like Muhammad 'Abduh in Egypt, sought nothing but to return Islam to its pristine form, removing all traces of later accretions. The Wahhabis, the Salafis, the Taleban, the Mawdudists and their like are all committed to preserving the ancient order at any cost. And that cost can be very high indeed. Take the Wahhabis, whose clergy are the co-rulers of Saudi Arabia. Their king is popularly described as the Guardian of the Twin Holy Shrines (Mecca and Medina), much as our dear Queen is the Defender of the Faith. In order to protect the two holiest Muslim cities, the Saudi authorities have demolished 80% to 90% of them. The oldest buildings, the sacred graveyards with the graves of the Prophet's family and companions, houses Muhammad lived in. Their have been talks about destroying the grave of the Prophet himself. In its perverted and blinkered way, this makes perfect sense to the Wahhabi mind. More than anything, strict ~Muslims fear idolatry, the worship of anything but God. In the early days of Wahhabi/Saudi rule, they made a fetish out of destroying Sufi and Shi'i shrines at which pilgrims worshipped. But it later occurred to them that people who came to Mecca or Medina while on the hajj pilgrimage were going to these graves (some of which had domes built over them) and praying. So the domes and the other buildings had to come down. When Cromwell's men defaced the statuary in British churches and cathedrals, they were doing much the same, but at least they left the buildings standing.
In a very real sense, the Islamic world remained in all respects closely comparable to Europe in the Middle Ages through to, say the 16th century. Apart from sections of the Ottoman empire (Hungary, Romania, the Balkans, Greece), this world was almost entirely isolated from Europe, and Muslims remained unaware of social, political, scientific, and religious changes taking place elsewhere. It was only from the late 18th century that this changed, with the French invasion of Egypt or the growing British dominion over India. During the 19th century, European powers (Britain, France, and the Netherlands) created colonies that imposed Western rule on Islamic lands. Out of this emerged movements for change, pleas for constitutional government through parliaments, for religious freedom, for Western-style education and much else. By the 20th century change had taken place. In Turkey and Iran, the clergy's power had been greatly diminished. Women started to throw off the veil. And then, around the 1970s, all this progress was slammed into reverse. Islam has rushed backwards, like no society in history.
Part of the problem is that Islamic law postulates that any form of innovation is heresy and will lead to hell. The most minor things have been seized on as indicators of innovation, condemned, and used as the basis for rulings for legal cases out of which a man or woman may be flogged or even executed. In Tudor times, a butcher might be hanged for selling meat in Lent. Among the Taleban it can be as little as wearing one's trousers below the ankle.
But there's something else more relevant to Obama's grasp of what a two-state 'solution' would really mean for Israel. It is this. A distinguishing feature of Islam from the beginning has been a commitment to Muslim supremacy. And that keen sense of superiority (to Jews, to Christians, to pagans, to atheists, to secularists) creates a one-way street. Thus, Muslims demand the implementation of shari'a law in Western countries, and some (like the UK) allow them to act on rulings from shari'a tribunals, in matters like marriage and divorce or childcare. But if a Westerner were to demand a reciprocal arrangement in, say, Saudi Arabia, they would soon find themselves on a one-way flight home or doing time in the local chokey. In the West, Muslim women demand the right to wear veils, even all-enveloping ones, everywhere they go, and, naturally, we grant them that freedom. But should a Western woman turn up on the streets of Tehran dressed as she might at home, it will only be a matter of minutes before one of the Blood of God patrols turns up in a white Toyota, grabs her, and pushed her into the minibus that will come behind them. No reciprocity.
From all sides come cries for Israel to do this or that. Demolish the 'apartheid wall', grant every Palestinian on earth the right of 'return', pack up and go home. But when Israel pulled out of Gaza, things only got worse. When Israelis hand back hundreds of terrorist prisoners, they will be lucky to get a couple of corpses in return. When Israel says it will recognize a peaceful Palestinian state, Mahmoud Abbas gets uppity and says he will never recognize a Jewish state. So everybody gets uppity, not with Abbas, but with Israel. Obama hasn't even mentioned that particularly dirty little trick.
So what's a girl to do? Her tormentors openly declare their intention of raping and murdering her, and all the police can do is say 'Open your legs, dear, and let them get on with it, you know it won't hurt, or grit your lovely white teeth if you need to, just don't let them see you smiling'.
The consensus is that Muslims can always have it their way. If they don't want to make peace, what right have we to force them to? If they say black is white, that the Holocaust never happened, that the Jews are the worst human beings on the face of the planet, that no Jews set foot in the Holy Land of antiquity, that Abraham and Moses were Muslims, that if only they could have a little land, they'd behave better, that murderers are martyrs, that Yasser Arafat was a man of peace, that Islam is a religion of peace, that submission to Islam is the highest form of peace -- if they say all these things and more, all we should do is bow, as Obama bowed to the obnoxious Saudi king, and say 'what else can I do for you, honoured sir?' and then shut up in case we inadvertently offend them again.
If it were only that easy. The problem, of course, is one that anyone with his eyes fully open can see: the Palestinians are intent on the destruction of Israel and the elimination of any Jewish presence in the Middle East (or anywhere else, if they could). Asking for a second state, however desirable, is, at this stage in the game (and perhaps for ever) about as sensible as asking a man whose house is surrounded by gangs of thieves to open all his doors and windows on the grounds that thieves have human rights like anybody else. Thieves do, indeed, have their rights, but not the right to steal other people's possessions. Murderers have alienable rights, but not the right to kill their fellow citizens. But surely, Obama and others may fairly ask, once the Palestinians have their own state, they will settle down and become good neighbours, allowing two countries to live side by side as part of a Mediterranean economic union that will bring prosperity and goodwill to all. And surely Syria and Hezbollah and the good people of Egypt and all those other moderate Muslim of North Africa, the Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and the re-elected Mr Ahmadeinejad and that cuddly Ayatollah Khamene'i, and those peace-loving Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia will all put down their arms and put an end to their hate speeches and anti-Semitic sermons, they will turn their missiles away from Tel Aviv and Haifa and all the cities of Israel, they will beat their proverbial swords into ploughshare and harness the shares to oxen and plough the fields to bring food and affluence and tolerance to all.
It is, of course, all hooey. Gobbleygook. Balderdash. Bosh. Tosh. Piffle. Bilge. Flapdoodle. Flimflam. Poppycock. Bunkum. Boloney. To expect anything like it, to imagine that the die-hard members of Hamas or the Iranian-controlled fighters of Hezbollah or the committed warriors of al-Qa'ida would mutter some platitudes about 'There is a Palestinian state at last, We can all go back to our lives as teachers and philosophers' would confront the stark reality of human nature with a naivete that would be funny if it were not so very dangerous. Perhaps nothing characterizes the attitude of most Western states towards the Islamic world, its governments, its institutions, its religious groupings, its religious leaders, and its entirely ineffective political parties more than an inability to think beyond the limitations of their Western equivalents. For most Westerners, and particularly Western politicians, Islamic ways of thought are counter-intuitive, and yet we cling to to fairytale that they are, at heart, just like us inside. They are, so statesmen and churchmen and journalists proclaim, as amenable to rational thought and the usefulness of secularism as their Western brothers and sisters. And that would seem plausible because there are many Muslims why have adopted Western ways of thinking, who place reason before the dictates of the Qur'an, who stand in orderly queues at the cinema, who work as doctors, lecturers, and restaurateurs, who vote for our favourite political parties, who treat women as equals. But such Muslims are, as often as not, partly or entirely secularized. I'm thinking of the majority of Muslims, for whom such accommodations with Western mores are either unthinkable or forbidden.
An Iranian friend of mine was paying a visit home some years ago. She had official documents to be stamped and had to visit a government ministry. She dressed herself in the obligatory hijab, took off all make-up, made sure her hair was tucked well inside her veil, and made to go through the checkpoint. The guard stopped her and said she had to remove her Western shoes. She pointed to the ground, showing that her shoes were covered entirely by her chador, which reached the ground. He answered that he could hear them. That is what Israel is up against. We have a Palestinian state. We have a peace treaty. The sun is smiling sweetly on us all. God is in Heaven. But there are Jews across the border, there are synagogues, the Temple Mount belongs to us, the Kotel belongs to us, Jerusalem belongs to us because it is an ancient Palestinian capital, a city that the Jews have no connection with at all, and weren't we ethnically cleansed, hasn't our vice-president Ilan Pappe explained all that?
One of the reasons it is a mistake to observe the Islamic world through European or American lenses is that it remains so much closer to the Middle Ages than any of our cultures. I don't mean chronologically, and I'm not even sure that the term 'Middle Ages' fits most Arab, Iranian, or other Islamic societies. But it expresses a mood, a mood that explains why even a technologically advanced and wealthy country like Saudi Arabia resembles nothing more than, let's say, Portugal or Spain under the Inquisition. The need for change, for political, social, and religious reform that grew in European in stages has never taken hold of people's hearts in Islam. Many of the great religious 'reformers' in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, men like Muhammad 'Abduh in Egypt, sought nothing but to return Islam to its pristine form, removing all traces of later accretions. The Wahhabis, the Salafis, the Taleban, the Mawdudists and their like are all committed to preserving the ancient order at any cost. And that cost can be very high indeed. Take the Wahhabis, whose clergy are the co-rulers of Saudi Arabia. Their king is popularly described as the Guardian of the Twin Holy Shrines (Mecca and Medina), much as our dear Queen is the Defender of the Faith. In order to protect the two holiest Muslim cities, the Saudi authorities have demolished 80% to 90% of them. The oldest buildings, the sacred graveyards with the graves of the Prophet's family and companions, houses Muhammad lived in. Their have been talks about destroying the grave of the Prophet himself. In its perverted and blinkered way, this makes perfect sense to the Wahhabi mind. More than anything, strict ~Muslims fear idolatry, the worship of anything but God. In the early days of Wahhabi/Saudi rule, they made a fetish out of destroying Sufi and Shi'i shrines at which pilgrims worshipped. But it later occurred to them that people who came to Mecca or Medina while on the hajj pilgrimage were going to these graves (some of which had domes built over them) and praying. So the domes and the other buildings had to come down. When Cromwell's men defaced the statuary in British churches and cathedrals, they were doing much the same, but at least they left the buildings standing.
In a very real sense, the Islamic world remained in all respects closely comparable to Europe in the Middle Ages through to, say the 16th century. Apart from sections of the Ottoman empire (Hungary, Romania, the Balkans, Greece), this world was almost entirely isolated from Europe, and Muslims remained unaware of social, political, scientific, and religious changes taking place elsewhere. It was only from the late 18th century that this changed, with the French invasion of Egypt or the growing British dominion over India. During the 19th century, European powers (Britain, France, and the Netherlands) created colonies that imposed Western rule on Islamic lands. Out of this emerged movements for change, pleas for constitutional government through parliaments, for religious freedom, for Western-style education and much else. By the 20th century change had taken place. In Turkey and Iran, the clergy's power had been greatly diminished. Women started to throw off the veil. And then, around the 1970s, all this progress was slammed into reverse. Islam has rushed backwards, like no society in history.
Part of the problem is that Islamic law postulates that any form of innovation is heresy and will lead to hell. The most minor things have been seized on as indicators of innovation, condemned, and used as the basis for rulings for legal cases out of which a man or woman may be flogged or even executed. In Tudor times, a butcher might be hanged for selling meat in Lent. Among the Taleban it can be as little as wearing one's trousers below the ankle.
But there's something else more relevant to Obama's grasp of what a two-state 'solution' would really mean for Israel. It is this. A distinguishing feature of Islam from the beginning has been a commitment to Muslim supremacy. And that keen sense of superiority (to Jews, to Christians, to pagans, to atheists, to secularists) creates a one-way street. Thus, Muslims demand the implementation of shari'a law in Western countries, and some (like the UK) allow them to act on rulings from shari'a tribunals, in matters like marriage and divorce or childcare. But if a Westerner were to demand a reciprocal arrangement in, say, Saudi Arabia, they would soon find themselves on a one-way flight home or doing time in the local chokey. In the West, Muslim women demand the right to wear veils, even all-enveloping ones, everywhere they go, and, naturally, we grant them that freedom. But should a Western woman turn up on the streets of Tehran dressed as she might at home, it will only be a matter of minutes before one of the Blood of God patrols turns up in a white Toyota, grabs her, and pushed her into the minibus that will come behind them. No reciprocity.
From all sides come cries for Israel to do this or that. Demolish the 'apartheid wall', grant every Palestinian on earth the right of 'return', pack up and go home. But when Israel pulled out of Gaza, things only got worse. When Israelis hand back hundreds of terrorist prisoners, they will be lucky to get a couple of corpses in return. When Israel says it will recognize a peaceful Palestinian state, Mahmoud Abbas gets uppity and says he will never recognize a Jewish state. So everybody gets uppity, not with Abbas, but with Israel. Obama hasn't even mentioned that particularly dirty little trick.
So what's a girl to do? Her tormentors openly declare their intention of raping and murdering her, and all the police can do is say 'Open your legs, dear, and let them get on with it, you know it won't hurt, or grit your lovely white teeth if you need to, just don't let them see you smiling'.
The consensus is that Muslims can always have it their way. If they don't want to make peace, what right have we to force them to? If they say black is white, that the Holocaust never happened, that the Jews are the worst human beings on the face of the planet, that no Jews set foot in the Holy Land of antiquity, that Abraham and Moses were Muslims, that if only they could have a little land, they'd behave better, that murderers are martyrs, that Yasser Arafat was a man of peace, that Islam is a religion of peace, that submission to Islam is the highest form of peace -- if they say all these things and more, all we should do is bow, as Obama bowed to the obnoxious Saudi king, and say 'what else can I do for you, honoured sir?' and then shut up in case we inadvertently offend them again.
Thursday, December 25, 2008
The Power of Imagination
When Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad (today's superstar guest on Channel 4, where he's delivering an 'alternative Christmas broadcast) or Mahmoud Abbas or David Irving or that vast body of soi-disant leftwing anti-Semites play down the Holocaust or deny that it took place or seek to replace it with the falsified narrative of a 'Palestinian Holocaust' or some such fiddle faddle, something is going on that bears strangely little relation to the ideologies to which they separately belong.
Ahmadinezhad and other members of the Iranian regime are all Shi'i Muslims. Abbas is a Sunni and a professed secularist in politics. Irving belongs to the far right, and leftists stand to the left, many to the far left (albeit it with a variety of philosophical, ethical and political takes on everything). Anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism/anti-Israelism are great unifiers of the otherwise deeply divided. There are even self-hating Jews in there. Hitler and Stalin both treated their Jews as scarcely human rubbish, even when they were at one another's throats. The broad Islamic position is that, if Jews are not wholly subservient to Muslim rule, bowing beneath the weight of legislation designed to humiliate and control them, they must be dealt with more harshly, for they are the quintessential enemies of the prophets and of Islam. Neither Hitler nor Stalin would have keep a single member of al-Qa'ida or Hamas alive. They would have hunted down and summarily executed Osama bin Laden, and done the same to any Muslim calling for the building of an Islamic state.
Yet Hitler was happy to enter into an anti-Jewish deal with the deeply anti-Semitic Muslim cleric, Hajj Amin al-Husayni. Al-Husayni was eventually listed as a war criminal, yet he cheated the condign punishment that lay in wait for him and was fêted in the Arab world long after the end of World War Two. And today, a large swathe of the left, alongside groups of anarchists, postmodernists, the middle-class chatterati, and many others, thinking themselves champions of the oppressed and guardians of human rights and human dignity, willingly acquiesce in plans for the genocide of Israel. They don't think that's what they're doing, but when they cheer on Hamas or turn a blind eye to Hizbullah, when they cheer on anti-American, anti-Zionist Iran and close their eyes to the horrendous human rights abuses taking place under Mr Ahmadinezhad's nose, and when they forge and bolster lies about Israel, false narratives about the West Bank and Gaza, that is exactly what they endorse. They have lost their moral compass. Utterly.
I won't attempt to try to explain all this in the present blog. Whole volumes have been written in which writers more learned and percipient than myself have hurled themselves at the gates of explanation, often to fall back winded. One part of any explanation must lie here, that those who deny or play down the Holocaust suffer from a severe lack of imagination. Or perhaps it's more that a different kind of imagination is in play. When I was a little boy back in the 50s, somebody tried to persuade me that there was no Santa Claus, that our parents did it all. I, however, being a staunch believer, vigorously defended the beautiful dream, and at one point fancied I could hear the jingling of sleigh-bells in the sky. Later, I learned that one must muster logical arguments, backed by evidence in order to defend what one believes to be truth. And part of that is a willingness to discard what one believes when the evidence shows a different truth.
When I speak of 'a different kind of imagination', I'm not talking about the levels of fantasy used by novelists and film-makers. I mean something less elevated yet essential to any understanding of the human state. What I mean is an emotional insight into the lives and feelings of other people. This ability, which we all have in some measure, is the capacity to imagine another's person's thoughts and feelings. Most of us develop that insight through literature, film, ballet, painting, music, and the other arts. We learn it in childhood via fairy stories, in our teenage years through more adult fantasy, science fiction, horror, and, if we're lucky, good quality ghost stories. Better still, we have our first encounters with Shakespeare, our first ventures into Jane Austen and her perfectly-formed world. Above all, we learn empathy through our close ties to friends and family. As adults, the greatest empathy of all comes in the form of a lasting attachment to another adult — a wife, husband, or partner.
This is why novels, the stage, cinema, and television drama are such a large part of most people's lives: they provide well-imagined characters as props for our empathy. Who has not shed a tear for Anna Karenina or Tess of the D'Urbevilles as they go to their undeserved deaths? Or let fall a little tear of gladness when Colin Firth asks his Portuguese cleaner to marry him, and she says 'Yes' and tells him she'd like that very much? These are invented figures, but the skills of the novelist or the film-maker convey so much of their circumstances, their feelings, and their thoughts that we feel we know them better than all but the best of our friends.
But if that sense of empathy — let's call it the empathetic imagination — is absent or atrophied, we would see no point in fiction, we would never adopt the orphan or feed the hungry or visit the sick or think imaginatively about the lives of our ancestors. It's not optional. Its absence is responsible for all the murders, wars, massacres, pogroms, and genocides in history. On Christmas Eve, a man dressed in a Santa outfit shot an eight-year-old girl in the face when she opened the door to him, and proceeded to kill seven other people. In Israel some years ago, a Palestinian terrorist called Samir Kuntar smashed the skull of a little girl and shot her father. Today, rockets fired from Gaza into southern Israel are timed to take advantage of the 15-minute period during which schoolchildren are walking from home to school in Sderot. We are programmed to protect little children. We don't have to be parents to experience this. I could no more hit or kill a child than I could hit or kill my wife. Yet some people do all that and worse. In many countries, mostly among Muslims, though sometimes in other communities, honour killings are carried out by fathers, brothers, cousins, even mothers in order to regain the family 'honour' by punishing women for 'crimes' as serious as having a boyfriend. That a father will slit his daughter's throat while her mother holds her down runs counter to all we hold sacred. It is an abomination, yet large communities consider the men who do these things to be heroes. Entire cultures have so far abolished empathy that they have carried its absence into the most intimate areas of the family. When a man beheads his wife and slaughters their children, and all because she would not wear a headscarf or wanted to wear jeans, he has breached what should never be breached. That such a man could not imagine the feelings of his own wife and children to the point where salvaging his honour over something trivial became more pressing than his natural instinct to protect them from harm must be the very epitome of an absence of real love and empathy.
The Nazis and those who collaborated with them also lacked love and empathy to an appalling degree. What's worse, they were able to slaughter and torture their fellow human beings, not in the heat of sudden rage, not from a commitment to a distorted sense of 'honour', but routinely, just as so many of us go to work in their offices and factories every day. Despatching someone to a gas chamber seems to have caused no more damage to the conscience than pulling a lever on a car assembly line. We know roughly how it works, of course. Everyone has heard of the probing experiments carried out in 1961 by Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University. Milgram used volunteers to operate a simple switch that delivered increasingly severe electric shocks to unseen individuals. In fact, the shocks were fake and the 'victims' actors. An experimenter in a white coat would order the volunteer to increase the 'voltage', and every time it went up, there would be sounds of pain. A very high number of people were so willing to obey the authority figure that they took the voltage up so high they thought it was causing actual damage. Later replications and a meta-analysis showed that between 61% and 66% of volunteers took the 'voltage' up to its maximum level when ordered to do so by the authority figure, even when the actors banged on the wall or talked of their heart condition. Only one person in Milgram's experiment walked out at a point lower than 300 volts, well below the maximum.
Milgram's experiment explains a lot of things. Primarily, it shows that a high percentage of people anywhere (the replications were spread over several countries) are capable of harming others when under the influence of authority figures. But I think it also shows that, under these conditions, empathy for victims is made subservient to the priorities of whatever belief system the authority figures subscribe to (in Milgram's case, it was 'the advancement of science').
I can't imagine killing another human being under ordinary circumstances, and certainly not when the situation is under my control. If someone was wielding an axe, however, and was about to attack my wife, and if I had a gun, shooting him would be
simple, if my attempts at persuasion had fallen on deaf ears. I've even found it difficult at times to kill off a beloved character in my novels. But in real life to kill a stranger who posed no actual threat to me would be impossible.
To herd frightened, naked children into a gas chamber and then press the button or pull the lever to release the gas is, surely, not simply bestial, cruel and sub-human, actually untermensch. It finally represents a total failure of the imagination, a dee-seated incapacity to put oneself in someone else's shoes, to realize their fear, to share it, or to grasp the ultimate consequences of one's actions both for the victims and for oneself.
Most of us, I am certain, come away from the contemplation of such undiluted inhumanity with a sense of shock and disbelief. When we hear of an unrepentent Nazi (and there have been so many of them), we wonder how they can live with themselves, in the full knowledge of what they have been, of what they have done. I have never met anyone like that, never known someone who would ever commit that sort of evil. But if Milgram's experiment is to be believed, we must be surrounded by such people. We all know how common it is, when someone (our Santa killer, say) has just killed a large number of people, has massacred his fellow students, or been captured and exposed as a serial killer, or has immolated himself on the London tube or elsewhere — we all know that we will very soon hear his friends, room-mates and family tell us what a lovely person he was and how shocked they have been to learn what he has just done. '"He was just the nicest guy," said Jan Detanna, who worked with Pardo [the murderous Santa] as an usher at the Holy Redeemer Catholic Church.' The chances are they are telling the truth. Anyone who has watched the video of Mohammed Siddique Khan, the ringleader of the 7/7 bombers, saying farewell to his baby daughter, sees, not a crazed suicide bomber, but a gentle, loving father expressing genuine love for this tiny person he is about to leave behind. Read all accounts of the four bombers, and you'll see, again and again, that they are described as 'nice boys', popular, keen sportsmen, contributers to the community, and so on. It was not, in a sense, goodness that they lacked, but a proper awareness of what goodness is about. Goodness cannot really be about loving your baby girl yet not giving a damn about the babies who may be on that train when you set out to murder at random. Real goodness is closely linked to real perception, to an insight into our common humanity.
Hannah Arendt set out for us the concept that evil can be banal, that even the masters of genocide were not visibly 'monsters'. I happen to think that that makes the horror much greater than it might be where it otherwise. Someone who is deeply mentally disturbed may be frightening, but my next-door neighbour with a chainsaw in his hand makes me lose hope. I can make some sense of the paranoid schizophrenic, but my neighbour on a rampage has no place at all in my moral universe. Once we humanize our monsters, we no longer know where they get that monstrosity from.
I won't attempt to psychoanalyze Hitler or Himmler or Saddam Husayn: I'm not a psychologist, and it's been done before anyway. But if I had to opt for one thing, I'd say again it all stemmed from an absence of imagination. None of them could internalize their victims to the point where it would have hurt them more to kill than to save. But I think they may also have had an excess of imagination. That faculty worked well for Hitler when it came to picturing the Thousand-Year Reich in his mind's eye. All those plans and diagrams and models by Albert Speer that Hitler so much admired were part of his inner landscape, in the same way that Paris came alive for him once he had conquered it. He could not empathize with a Jew in striped pyjamas, but he could see a new Berlin take shape on paper, beneath the shadow of the swastika.
I seem to have come a long way from Israel here, but Israel is really at the heart of this piece. Israel is not just a living reality, but a land of the imagination, a country two thousand years in contemplation. Theodor Herzl and all the early Zionists imagined a city of Zion in the heart of desert, the first and later yishuvs populated that land in their imaginations, built Tel Aviv in their minds, created the Knesset and the IDF and a united Jerusalem in their hearts. Without those early visions, Palestine would still be desert and marshland. Those dreams have, in one way or another, become reality. It's not important that the Knesset is divided between warring factions or that the IDF didn't defeat Hizbullah or that Ehud Olmert was a bad prime minister. What matters is that there is a Knesset, that Israelis all have the vote, that the IDF won so many wars and will win again, and that Olmert will soon step down and will be succeeded, not be his son or another appointee or an army general, but by a democratically elected Israeli citizen.
Imagination and reality have achieved something amazing in Israel. No other country has been envisioned or moulded in this way. And no other country has been born (nor should any more be born) out of so much suffering. Two thousand years of persecution crowned by the Nazi Holocaust. How dare anyone sneer at this? How dare anyone proclaim there was no Holocaust, or invent a fake Holocaust to replace it, or call Israel's sons and daughters murderers and terrorists? How do terrorists and their fellow travellers denounce Israel as a Nazi state or an apartheid state or a racist state? It's clear to me that they lack all imagination. Not once have I heard from a Palestinian or Arab or Iranian source a dream of Palestine, a vision of prosperity and tolerance and progress. I have heard and read dreams of violence, dreams of genocide, dreams of a God grown so crazed with a lust for blood that he has exiled all other divinities and replaced love and mutual respect as the bases on which human society is to be erected. The G-d of Israel faces a God of the suicide belt, a God with hands lifted, smeared with blood, a God who smiles on child martyrs and gunmen and rockets, and whose face is reflected in the martyr's smile. This Arab God is a false God, even to those who worship him, for he brings them only greater suffering. He is a God without imagination, for he shows no signs of love and understanding for the Jews and Christians.
The world is filled with people who hate Israel. I have to ask, what is their problem? Don't they admire human rights, don't they care for free speech, democracy, the rule of law, a stable culture? Can't they imagine what it was like in the death camps? I was never in one, but the very thought chills me. I know what it is to be cold or hungry or frightened or anxious, because I'm human, and we all experience those things from time to time. However little our suffering when compared to that endured in the camps, it's enough to let us get a glimpse and to construct a more complete image on the strength of it. Can't they use their imaginations to picture what it's like to be a woman or a homosexual or a member of a religious minority or, above all, to be a Jew in modern Israel, and then to shift that imagination to grasp what it is to be any of those things anywhere else in the Middle East? It needs to work the other way around, of course. But, contrary to myth, not that many Israelis want to see the end of any Palestinian state, or a genocide of the Palestinian people. It is more urgent than ever that the Palestinians and other Arabs start to use their imaginations so they can picture what it is like to be threatened with extinction, and not for the first or second time. And there is no excuse for Westerners opposed to Israel not to access the vast imaginative resources of their own culture. Their only imaginative endeavours, like those of the Palestinians, have been focussed on a mythic vision of Israel, in which everything is topsy turvy: a rights-based society becomes an apartheid entity, the survivors and children of survivors of the Nazi genocide are given Totenkopf badges to wear and jackboots to strut in and are told they are the thing they most detest, the most liberal of Middle Eastern countries undergoes a dark change to become the most repressive. All in their imagination. They tell stories about Muhammad Dura and uranium weapons and dead children in Lebanon, and such are their skills at narrative that the world believes them without evidence, or in spite of the evidence. This is imagination on a grand scale, yet it achieves nothing because it tells a false narrative. That is a great fault, for the imagination thrives best on truths. However much they may be fiction, no great stories are untrue. Not a word of Shakespeare is untrue, however fanciful his stories may be, because they are faithful to a level of truth that begins where fantasy ends.
The proper use of the Arab imagination today is to create in minds and hearts a true vision of a Palestine in which all citizens participate in a culture that is far removed from today's culture of death as possible. The Palestinians and their aiders and abettors here in the West must start picturing happy, smiling children to whom they can entrust their futures. No mother should have to imagine handing round sweets to celebrate when her daughter or her son has killed herself or himself. She should instead do what mothers all round the world do, and picture her children being educated, going out to play, making friends, reading, painting and playing music, laughing, growing up, becoming useful and happy citizens of a stable state. Israel has not prevented such a vision from coming into being. The opportunity is permanently there. When will the Palestinian imagination seize it?
Ahmadinezhad and other members of the Iranian regime are all Shi'i Muslims. Abbas is a Sunni and a professed secularist in politics. Irving belongs to the far right, and leftists stand to the left, many to the far left (albeit it with a variety of philosophical, ethical and political takes on everything). Anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism/anti-Israelism are great unifiers of the otherwise deeply divided. There are even self-hating Jews in there. Hitler and Stalin both treated their Jews as scarcely human rubbish, even when they were at one another's throats. The broad Islamic position is that, if Jews are not wholly subservient to Muslim rule, bowing beneath the weight of legislation designed to humiliate and control them, they must be dealt with more harshly, for they are the quintessential enemies of the prophets and of Islam. Neither Hitler nor Stalin would have keep a single member of al-Qa'ida or Hamas alive. They would have hunted down and summarily executed Osama bin Laden, and done the same to any Muslim calling for the building of an Islamic state.
Yet Hitler was happy to enter into an anti-Jewish deal with the deeply anti-Semitic Muslim cleric, Hajj Amin al-Husayni. Al-Husayni was eventually listed as a war criminal, yet he cheated the condign punishment that lay in wait for him and was fêted in the Arab world long after the end of World War Two. And today, a large swathe of the left, alongside groups of anarchists, postmodernists, the middle-class chatterati, and many others, thinking themselves champions of the oppressed and guardians of human rights and human dignity, willingly acquiesce in plans for the genocide of Israel. They don't think that's what they're doing, but when they cheer on Hamas or turn a blind eye to Hizbullah, when they cheer on anti-American, anti-Zionist Iran and close their eyes to the horrendous human rights abuses taking place under Mr Ahmadinezhad's nose, and when they forge and bolster lies about Israel, false narratives about the West Bank and Gaza, that is exactly what they endorse. They have lost their moral compass. Utterly.
I won't attempt to try to explain all this in the present blog. Whole volumes have been written in which writers more learned and percipient than myself have hurled themselves at the gates of explanation, often to fall back winded. One part of any explanation must lie here, that those who deny or play down the Holocaust suffer from a severe lack of imagination. Or perhaps it's more that a different kind of imagination is in play. When I was a little boy back in the 50s, somebody tried to persuade me that there was no Santa Claus, that our parents did it all. I, however, being a staunch believer, vigorously defended the beautiful dream, and at one point fancied I could hear the jingling of sleigh-bells in the sky. Later, I learned that one must muster logical arguments, backed by evidence in order to defend what one believes to be truth. And part of that is a willingness to discard what one believes when the evidence shows a different truth.
When I speak of 'a different kind of imagination', I'm not talking about the levels of fantasy used by novelists and film-makers. I mean something less elevated yet essential to any understanding of the human state. What I mean is an emotional insight into the lives and feelings of other people. This ability, which we all have in some measure, is the capacity to imagine another's person's thoughts and feelings. Most of us develop that insight through literature, film, ballet, painting, music, and the other arts. We learn it in childhood via fairy stories, in our teenage years through more adult fantasy, science fiction, horror, and, if we're lucky, good quality ghost stories. Better still, we have our first encounters with Shakespeare, our first ventures into Jane Austen and her perfectly-formed world. Above all, we learn empathy through our close ties to friends and family. As adults, the greatest empathy of all comes in the form of a lasting attachment to another adult — a wife, husband, or partner.
This is why novels, the stage, cinema, and television drama are such a large part of most people's lives: they provide well-imagined characters as props for our empathy. Who has not shed a tear for Anna Karenina or Tess of the D'Urbevilles as they go to their undeserved deaths? Or let fall a little tear of gladness when Colin Firth asks his Portuguese cleaner to marry him, and she says 'Yes' and tells him she'd like that very much? These are invented figures, but the skills of the novelist or the film-maker convey so much of their circumstances, their feelings, and their thoughts that we feel we know them better than all but the best of our friends.
But if that sense of empathy — let's call it the empathetic imagination — is absent or atrophied, we would see no point in fiction, we would never adopt the orphan or feed the hungry or visit the sick or think imaginatively about the lives of our ancestors. It's not optional. Its absence is responsible for all the murders, wars, massacres, pogroms, and genocides in history. On Christmas Eve, a man dressed in a Santa outfit shot an eight-year-old girl in the face when she opened the door to him, and proceeded to kill seven other people. In Israel some years ago, a Palestinian terrorist called Samir Kuntar smashed the skull of a little girl and shot her father. Today, rockets fired from Gaza into southern Israel are timed to take advantage of the 15-minute period during which schoolchildren are walking from home to school in Sderot. We are programmed to protect little children. We don't have to be parents to experience this. I could no more hit or kill a child than I could hit or kill my wife. Yet some people do all that and worse. In many countries, mostly among Muslims, though sometimes in other communities, honour killings are carried out by fathers, brothers, cousins, even mothers in order to regain the family 'honour' by punishing women for 'crimes' as serious as having a boyfriend. That a father will slit his daughter's throat while her mother holds her down runs counter to all we hold sacred. It is an abomination, yet large communities consider the men who do these things to be heroes. Entire cultures have so far abolished empathy that they have carried its absence into the most intimate areas of the family. When a man beheads his wife and slaughters their children, and all because she would not wear a headscarf or wanted to wear jeans, he has breached what should never be breached. That such a man could not imagine the feelings of his own wife and children to the point where salvaging his honour over something trivial became more pressing than his natural instinct to protect them from harm must be the very epitome of an absence of real love and empathy.
The Nazis and those who collaborated with them also lacked love and empathy to an appalling degree. What's worse, they were able to slaughter and torture their fellow human beings, not in the heat of sudden rage, not from a commitment to a distorted sense of 'honour', but routinely, just as so many of us go to work in their offices and factories every day. Despatching someone to a gas chamber seems to have caused no more damage to the conscience than pulling a lever on a car assembly line. We know roughly how it works, of course. Everyone has heard of the probing experiments carried out in 1961 by Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University. Milgram used volunteers to operate a simple switch that delivered increasingly severe electric shocks to unseen individuals. In fact, the shocks were fake and the 'victims' actors. An experimenter in a white coat would order the volunteer to increase the 'voltage', and every time it went up, there would be sounds of pain. A very high number of people were so willing to obey the authority figure that they took the voltage up so high they thought it was causing actual damage. Later replications and a meta-analysis showed that between 61% and 66% of volunteers took the 'voltage' up to its maximum level when ordered to do so by the authority figure, even when the actors banged on the wall or talked of their heart condition. Only one person in Milgram's experiment walked out at a point lower than 300 volts, well below the maximum.
Milgram's experiment explains a lot of things. Primarily, it shows that a high percentage of people anywhere (the replications were spread over several countries) are capable of harming others when under the influence of authority figures. But I think it also shows that, under these conditions, empathy for victims is made subservient to the priorities of whatever belief system the authority figures subscribe to (in Milgram's case, it was 'the advancement of science').
I can't imagine killing another human being under ordinary circumstances, and certainly not when the situation is under my control. If someone was wielding an axe, however, and was about to attack my wife, and if I had a gun, shooting him would be
simple, if my attempts at persuasion had fallen on deaf ears. I've even found it difficult at times to kill off a beloved character in my novels. But in real life to kill a stranger who posed no actual threat to me would be impossible.
To herd frightened, naked children into a gas chamber and then press the button or pull the lever to release the gas is, surely, not simply bestial, cruel and sub-human, actually untermensch. It finally represents a total failure of the imagination, a dee-seated incapacity to put oneself in someone else's shoes, to realize their fear, to share it, or to grasp the ultimate consequences of one's actions both for the victims and for oneself.
Most of us, I am certain, come away from the contemplation of such undiluted inhumanity with a sense of shock and disbelief. When we hear of an unrepentent Nazi (and there have been so many of them), we wonder how they can live with themselves, in the full knowledge of what they have been, of what they have done. I have never met anyone like that, never known someone who would ever commit that sort of evil. But if Milgram's experiment is to be believed, we must be surrounded by such people. We all know how common it is, when someone (our Santa killer, say) has just killed a large number of people, has massacred his fellow students, or been captured and exposed as a serial killer, or has immolated himself on the London tube or elsewhere — we all know that we will very soon hear his friends, room-mates and family tell us what a lovely person he was and how shocked they have been to learn what he has just done. '"He was just the nicest guy," said Jan Detanna, who worked with Pardo [the murderous Santa] as an usher at the Holy Redeemer Catholic Church.' The chances are they are telling the truth. Anyone who has watched the video of Mohammed Siddique Khan, the ringleader of the 7/7 bombers, saying farewell to his baby daughter, sees, not a crazed suicide bomber, but a gentle, loving father expressing genuine love for this tiny person he is about to leave behind. Read all accounts of the four bombers, and you'll see, again and again, that they are described as 'nice boys', popular, keen sportsmen, contributers to the community, and so on. It was not, in a sense, goodness that they lacked, but a proper awareness of what goodness is about. Goodness cannot really be about loving your baby girl yet not giving a damn about the babies who may be on that train when you set out to murder at random. Real goodness is closely linked to real perception, to an insight into our common humanity.
Hannah Arendt set out for us the concept that evil can be banal, that even the masters of genocide were not visibly 'monsters'. I happen to think that that makes the horror much greater than it might be where it otherwise. Someone who is deeply mentally disturbed may be frightening, but my next-door neighbour with a chainsaw in his hand makes me lose hope. I can make some sense of the paranoid schizophrenic, but my neighbour on a rampage has no place at all in my moral universe. Once we humanize our monsters, we no longer know where they get that monstrosity from.
I won't attempt to psychoanalyze Hitler or Himmler or Saddam Husayn: I'm not a psychologist, and it's been done before anyway. But if I had to opt for one thing, I'd say again it all stemmed from an absence of imagination. None of them could internalize their victims to the point where it would have hurt them more to kill than to save. But I think they may also have had an excess of imagination. That faculty worked well for Hitler when it came to picturing the Thousand-Year Reich in his mind's eye. All those plans and diagrams and models by Albert Speer that Hitler so much admired were part of his inner landscape, in the same way that Paris came alive for him once he had conquered it. He could not empathize with a Jew in striped pyjamas, but he could see a new Berlin take shape on paper, beneath the shadow of the swastika.
I seem to have come a long way from Israel here, but Israel is really at the heart of this piece. Israel is not just a living reality, but a land of the imagination, a country two thousand years in contemplation. Theodor Herzl and all the early Zionists imagined a city of Zion in the heart of desert, the first and later yishuvs populated that land in their imaginations, built Tel Aviv in their minds, created the Knesset and the IDF and a united Jerusalem in their hearts. Without those early visions, Palestine would still be desert and marshland. Those dreams have, in one way or another, become reality. It's not important that the Knesset is divided between warring factions or that the IDF didn't defeat Hizbullah or that Ehud Olmert was a bad prime minister. What matters is that there is a Knesset, that Israelis all have the vote, that the IDF won so many wars and will win again, and that Olmert will soon step down and will be succeeded, not be his son or another appointee or an army general, but by a democratically elected Israeli citizen.
Imagination and reality have achieved something amazing in Israel. No other country has been envisioned or moulded in this way. And no other country has been born (nor should any more be born) out of so much suffering. Two thousand years of persecution crowned by the Nazi Holocaust. How dare anyone sneer at this? How dare anyone proclaim there was no Holocaust, or invent a fake Holocaust to replace it, or call Israel's sons and daughters murderers and terrorists? How do terrorists and their fellow travellers denounce Israel as a Nazi state or an apartheid state or a racist state? It's clear to me that they lack all imagination. Not once have I heard from a Palestinian or Arab or Iranian source a dream of Palestine, a vision of prosperity and tolerance and progress. I have heard and read dreams of violence, dreams of genocide, dreams of a God grown so crazed with a lust for blood that he has exiled all other divinities and replaced love and mutual respect as the bases on which human society is to be erected. The G-d of Israel faces a God of the suicide belt, a God with hands lifted, smeared with blood, a God who smiles on child martyrs and gunmen and rockets, and whose face is reflected in the martyr's smile. This Arab God is a false God, even to those who worship him, for he brings them only greater suffering. He is a God without imagination, for he shows no signs of love and understanding for the Jews and Christians.
The world is filled with people who hate Israel. I have to ask, what is their problem? Don't they admire human rights, don't they care for free speech, democracy, the rule of law, a stable culture? Can't they imagine what it was like in the death camps? I was never in one, but the very thought chills me. I know what it is to be cold or hungry or frightened or anxious, because I'm human, and we all experience those things from time to time. However little our suffering when compared to that endured in the camps, it's enough to let us get a glimpse and to construct a more complete image on the strength of it. Can't they use their imaginations to picture what it's like to be a woman or a homosexual or a member of a religious minority or, above all, to be a Jew in modern Israel, and then to shift that imagination to grasp what it is to be any of those things anywhere else in the Middle East? It needs to work the other way around, of course. But, contrary to myth, not that many Israelis want to see the end of any Palestinian state, or a genocide of the Palestinian people. It is more urgent than ever that the Palestinians and other Arabs start to use their imaginations so they can picture what it is like to be threatened with extinction, and not for the first or second time. And there is no excuse for Westerners opposed to Israel not to access the vast imaginative resources of their own culture. Their only imaginative endeavours, like those of the Palestinians, have been focussed on a mythic vision of Israel, in which everything is topsy turvy: a rights-based society becomes an apartheid entity, the survivors and children of survivors of the Nazi genocide are given Totenkopf badges to wear and jackboots to strut in and are told they are the thing they most detest, the most liberal of Middle Eastern countries undergoes a dark change to become the most repressive. All in their imagination. They tell stories about Muhammad Dura and uranium weapons and dead children in Lebanon, and such are their skills at narrative that the world believes them without evidence, or in spite of the evidence. This is imagination on a grand scale, yet it achieves nothing because it tells a false narrative. That is a great fault, for the imagination thrives best on truths. However much they may be fiction, no great stories are untrue. Not a word of Shakespeare is untrue, however fanciful his stories may be, because they are faithful to a level of truth that begins where fantasy ends.
The proper use of the Arab imagination today is to create in minds and hearts a true vision of a Palestine in which all citizens participate in a culture that is far removed from today's culture of death as possible. The Palestinians and their aiders and abettors here in the West must start picturing happy, smiling children to whom they can entrust their futures. No mother should have to imagine handing round sweets to celebrate when her daughter or her son has killed herself or himself. She should instead do what mothers all round the world do, and picture her children being educated, going out to play, making friends, reading, painting and playing music, laughing, growing up, becoming useful and happy citizens of a stable state. Israel has not prevented such a vision from coming into being. The opportunity is permanently there. When will the Palestinian imagination seize it?
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Academic fictions
I have just posted the following on the Engage website. It follows several pieces there on a recent talk at Goldsmith's College by a certain Suzanne Weiss, entitled 'From the Warsaw Ghetto to the Gaza Ghetto', in which a false analogy was made between the situation in the Nazi-controlled Warsaw ghetto and that in modern Gaza (a region not controlled by Israel but by cuddly, peace-loving terrorist enterprise, Hamas).
This tiresome series of analogies (Jews=Nazis, Israel=apartheid South Africa) are, in one sense, remarkable. They are manifest fiction, yet large numbers of well-educated academics, writers, intellectuals, and commentators believe in them with an almost religious fervour. This Warsaw/Gaza comparison strikes me as particularly painful. It has also alerted me to where the root of this may lie. If I put on my hat as a fiction writer, I can see it straight away. Putting a plot together can be great fun, especially if you are writing stories that incorporate fact (I write thrillers, but this is true of other genres, notably historical fiction). I may take one fact, then read more about the subject and stumble on another, unrelated, but fictitiously useful fact, then be led to a strange Wikipedia article that draws my attention to something else that can be fitted in. As the plot itself develops during writing (and this is the crucial thing), it acquires richness, and this richness allows me to embed quite disparate information within it. For the purposes of authorship, the writer 'believes' in his characters and plot elements, and as new 'facts' enter the story, the whole thing acquires a believability that makes the novel resonate with readers. More than once, I've had letters from readers declaring how wonderful I am in 'knowing the truth'. It's pure fiction, of course, but if it has been crafted well, there is a verisimilitude that provokes the classic suspension of disbelief.
This happens with conspiracy theories, in which often genuine fact is blended with hearsay (4,000 Jews stayed away from the twin towers) to persuade the gullible to screw up their lives trying to secure 'justice' or retribution for a supposed crime. While some conspiracy theorists may be intelligent, it is rare to find mainstream academics, lawyers, scientists and others among them (I think I'm right in saying that).
But the IDF soldier/Nazi stormtrooper analogy and all the others that cluster around this trope have become the conspiracy theory that has been made respectable by intellectuals and academics worldwide, to the point where patently false history has been allowed to replace archived records as the basis on which political decisions are take. I have worked with historical controversies in the past, and I believe I know how to distinguish between, say, hagiographic accounts and those formulated on the basis of eye-witness statements an do on. The processes that have taken Benny Morris from his earlier positions to his present views (based on a more complete engagement with archive resources) are ones I recognize. Whatever debate emerges from all that is a manageable academic debate. But where can we go when academics stray so far from the standards of debate that they use fantasy to bolster their views, much as religious believers use hagiography?
The most worrying aspect of these analogies is their very deliberate juxtaposition of extreme images. Logic tells us that 'Jew' and 'Nazi' belong at opposite ends of a spectrum. Or that Israel and apartheid South Africa have nothing in common. A balanced approach would say, perhaps, that Israelis sometimes do bad things to Palestinians (how bad depending on debatable emphases) or that anti-Arab discrimination in Israel is a form of racism. But Israel's (or, more plausibly, Jews') detractors are not context with a normal discourse. They must grow perverse. And that perversity extends to making the sufferings of the Palestinians hagiographic, even iconographic (especially in the extreme Christian belief that makes Palestinians the body of Christ, crucified by Jews once more). Large numbers of Palestinians are terrorists who commit dreadful deeds, yet their defenders can only portray them as innocent victims.
Again, this is novelistic. Making the Palestinians victims 'fits' a perverted theology, combining the old view that the Jews killed Jesus with a new dimension, all of which meshes in the believer's mind because it feels somehow 'right'. As a novelist, I can make you believe half a dozen bizarre things before breakfast. But at the end of the book, you should awaken from the fantasy and smile a wry smile and move on to the next story. Our anti-Israel academics seem unable to do this. What academic has not made some sort of journey, from the views adopted for his/her PhD to those in his last article? That journey is made by recognizing our mistakes, whether these be misreadings of factual information or misinterpretations of a text or an experiment. Since the arguments currently being used to demonize Israel are patent falsehoods, what is preventing these academics seeing them for what they are and at least moving on to more rational criticisms? Instead, they give lectures at academic institutions, ennobling their conspiracies and doing untold damage to impressionable students. That is where I believe we should focus: on convincing university authorities that students are being subjected to a level of argument that is not a centimeter above the conspiracy theorists that claim Jews and the CIA destroyed the twin towers. Surely someone has a duty to insist that all such talks come with a health warning at least, or a proper rejoinder at best.
This tiresome series of analogies (Jews=Nazis, Israel=apartheid South Africa) are, in one sense, remarkable. They are manifest fiction, yet large numbers of well-educated academics, writers, intellectuals, and commentators believe in them with an almost religious fervour. This Warsaw/Gaza comparison strikes me as particularly painful. It has also alerted me to where the root of this may lie. If I put on my hat as a fiction writer, I can see it straight away. Putting a plot together can be great fun, especially if you are writing stories that incorporate fact (I write thrillers, but this is true of other genres, notably historical fiction). I may take one fact, then read more about the subject and stumble on another, unrelated, but fictitiously useful fact, then be led to a strange Wikipedia article that draws my attention to something else that can be fitted in. As the plot itself develops during writing (and this is the crucial thing), it acquires richness, and this richness allows me to embed quite disparate information within it. For the purposes of authorship, the writer 'believes' in his characters and plot elements, and as new 'facts' enter the story, the whole thing acquires a believability that makes the novel resonate with readers. More than once, I've had letters from readers declaring how wonderful I am in 'knowing the truth'. It's pure fiction, of course, but if it has been crafted well, there is a verisimilitude that provokes the classic suspension of disbelief.
This happens with conspiracy theories, in which often genuine fact is blended with hearsay (4,000 Jews stayed away from the twin towers) to persuade the gullible to screw up their lives trying to secure 'justice' or retribution for a supposed crime. While some conspiracy theorists may be intelligent, it is rare to find mainstream academics, lawyers, scientists and others among them (I think I'm right in saying that).
But the IDF soldier/Nazi stormtrooper analogy and all the others that cluster around this trope have become the conspiracy theory that has been made respectable by intellectuals and academics worldwide, to the point where patently false history has been allowed to replace archived records as the basis on which political decisions are take. I have worked with historical controversies in the past, and I believe I know how to distinguish between, say, hagiographic accounts and those formulated on the basis of eye-witness statements an do on. The processes that have taken Benny Morris from his earlier positions to his present views (based on a more complete engagement with archive resources) are ones I recognize. Whatever debate emerges from all that is a manageable academic debate. But where can we go when academics stray so far from the standards of debate that they use fantasy to bolster their views, much as religious believers use hagiography?
The most worrying aspect of these analogies is their very deliberate juxtaposition of extreme images. Logic tells us that 'Jew' and 'Nazi' belong at opposite ends of a spectrum. Or that Israel and apartheid South Africa have nothing in common. A balanced approach would say, perhaps, that Israelis sometimes do bad things to Palestinians (how bad depending on debatable emphases) or that anti-Arab discrimination in Israel is a form of racism. But Israel's (or, more plausibly, Jews') detractors are not context with a normal discourse. They must grow perverse. And that perversity extends to making the sufferings of the Palestinians hagiographic, even iconographic (especially in the extreme Christian belief that makes Palestinians the body of Christ, crucified by Jews once more). Large numbers of Palestinians are terrorists who commit dreadful deeds, yet their defenders can only portray them as innocent victims.
Again, this is novelistic. Making the Palestinians victims 'fits' a perverted theology, combining the old view that the Jews killed Jesus with a new dimension, all of which meshes in the believer's mind because it feels somehow 'right'. As a novelist, I can make you believe half a dozen bizarre things before breakfast. But at the end of the book, you should awaken from the fantasy and smile a wry smile and move on to the next story. Our anti-Israel academics seem unable to do this. What academic has not made some sort of journey, from the views adopted for his/her PhD to those in his last article? That journey is made by recognizing our mistakes, whether these be misreadings of factual information or misinterpretations of a text or an experiment. Since the arguments currently being used to demonize Israel are patent falsehoods, what is preventing these academics seeing them for what they are and at least moving on to more rational criticisms? Instead, they give lectures at academic institutions, ennobling their conspiracies and doing untold damage to impressionable students. That is where I believe we should focus: on convincing university authorities that students are being subjected to a level of argument that is not a centimeter above the conspiracy theorists that claim Jews and the CIA destroyed the twin towers. Surely someone has a duty to insist that all such talks come with a health warning at least, or a proper rejoinder at best.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
The annihilation of the Jews
Here's the transcript of a clip that appeared recently on al-Aqsa television, a Palestinian channel. It's conventional enough stuff, I suppose. I've certainly heard and seen it all before. But it got me thinking.
'Following are excerpts from an interview with Palestinian cleric Muhsen Abu 'Ita, which aired on Al-Aqsa TV on July 13, 2008:
Muhsen Abu 'Ita: Naturally, the Koran chapters conveyed to Muhammad in Mecca only rarely deal with the Jews – like in "those who incur Allah's wrath," which appears in the Al-Fatiha chapter. Hence, it is strange to find an entire chapter bearing the name of the Jews, or Bani Israil. It is even more peculiar that this chapter does not talk about the Jews of the Qaynuqa, Nazir, or Qurayza tribes. It talks about the Jews of our times, of this century, using the language of annihilation, the language of grave digging. Note that in this chapter, the Jews were sentenced to annihilation, before even a single Jew existed on the face of the earth. This Koranic chapter talked about the collapse of the so-called state of Israel, before this state was even established. From here stems the importance and oddity of this chapter.
[...]
The blessing of Palestine is dependent upon the annihilation of the pit of global corruption in it. When the head of the serpent of corruption is cut off here in Palestine, and its octopus tentacles are severed throughout the world, the real blessing will come. The annihilation of the Jews here in Palestine is one of the most splendid blessings for Palestine. This will be followed by a greater blessing, Allah be praised, with the establishment of a Caliphate that will rule the land and will be pleasing to men and God.'
Before I make the comment I originally wanted to make about Abu 'Ita's remarks, let me do a little Qur'an interpretation here, because that will also be revealing. Take the following: ' the Koran chapters conveyed to Muhammad in Mecca only rarely deal with the Jews – like in "those who incur Allah's wrath," which appears in the Al-Fatiha chapter'. If you have read the first chapter of the Qur'an, which has only seven verses, you will know why this is dangerous nonsense. Here's Sura 1 (my translation):
'In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. Praise be to God, Lord of the worlds. The Merciful, the Compassionate. King of the Day of Judgement. Thee do we worship, and to thee do we turn for help. Guide us upon the straight path. The path of those upon whom Thou hast shown blessings, not those who have incurred thy wrath, and not those who have gone astray.'
Where are the Jews? This is the first sura, so there is no reference to Jews before it. This is a generalized reference, like the one before it and the one after it. Anything else is speculation. The rest of his interpretation is even more bizarre: 'in this chapter, the Jews were sentenced to annihilation, before even a single Jew existed on the face of the earth. This Koranic chapter talked about the collapse of the so-called state of Israel, before this state was even established.
It's bad enough that the Qur'an does have many negative things to say about Jews, but it's beyond toleration to see Muslim clerics glossing every negative remark in the book as 'Jews'. I have a Qur'an right next to me. What's to stop me going through it verse by verse, and every time it refers to 'unbelievers' or 'enemies' or whatever, arguing 'this means the Jews, and it prophecies the fall of Israel'?
That is the level to which discourse has fallen for many Muslims. It makes any attempt to break out of the present impasse well nigh impossible.
But what I wanted to say is this. What if he's right and Israel does succumb? After all, the forces arrayed against her are greater now than they have ever seemed. If Hizbullah, Hamas, and Iran (for starters), aided and abetted by the UN, the Islamic world, and many Western countries achieve their ends, whether by force or by imposing a one state solution, where will that leave things? The Palestinians will, of course, tear themselves to pieces, Hizbullah will take over Lebanon, and Iran will try to conquer Iraq. The Middle East will be in greater turmoil than ever.
And how will that be resolved? With no more Israel to focus on, the Middle East will need someone to take her place. How long will it be before Surat al-Fatiha is re-interpreted? God's wrath will fall upon the Christians and those Jews who live outside Israel. And this will be a different struggle to the present one. If the Islamists can claim a victory over the Jews, their fervour will be picked up everywhere. It will be obvious that God is on their side. After all, didn't God prophesy the fall of Israel in Surat al-Fatiha? And in every other sura. And does he not now prophesy the fall of America or Britain or anywhere else?
None of this is preposterous. There is no rationality here. Islam has no room for reason or freedom or conscience. It could have, but today's clerics have set their faces hard against those things. Reason is profoundly dangerous to an Islam based on heartfelt acceptance of every word of the Qur'an and the Hadith, dangerous to the clergy who survive by presenting a hardline interpretation of the texts.
People ask why Israel has to defend herself by force. This is the reason, that the forces of moderation in the Islamic world are still too weak to serve as a defence for anyone against jihadist extremism, and jihadist extremism derives much of its inspiration from irrational readings of the Qur'an. The Salafis, Wahhabis, Mawdudists, and many others prefer a literal interpretation of scripture above any nuanced or modernizing commentary. In most countries, Britain included, there's a tendency to pretend that the real risk comes from 'violent extremists' (we're not allowed to call them Muslim extremists any more). But it doesn't. It comes from clerics who provide interpretations like the one we've just had, who extol martyrdom, who condemn terrorism while encouraging suicide bombing in 'Palestine', or who just create a hardline Islam that serves as a breeding ground for every kind of crazy hope and unbalanced fear.
'Following are excerpts from an interview with Palestinian cleric Muhsen Abu 'Ita, which aired on Al-Aqsa TV on July 13, 2008:
Muhsen Abu 'Ita: Naturally, the Koran chapters conveyed to Muhammad in Mecca only rarely deal with the Jews – like in "those who incur Allah's wrath," which appears in the Al-Fatiha chapter. Hence, it is strange to find an entire chapter bearing the name of the Jews, or Bani Israil. It is even more peculiar that this chapter does not talk about the Jews of the Qaynuqa, Nazir, or Qurayza tribes. It talks about the Jews of our times, of this century, using the language of annihilation, the language of grave digging. Note that in this chapter, the Jews were sentenced to annihilation, before even a single Jew existed on the face of the earth. This Koranic chapter talked about the collapse of the so-called state of Israel, before this state was even established. From here stems the importance and oddity of this chapter.
[...]
The blessing of Palestine is dependent upon the annihilation of the pit of global corruption in it. When the head of the serpent of corruption is cut off here in Palestine, and its octopus tentacles are severed throughout the world, the real blessing will come. The annihilation of the Jews here in Palestine is one of the most splendid blessings for Palestine. This will be followed by a greater blessing, Allah be praised, with the establishment of a Caliphate that will rule the land and will be pleasing to men and God.'
Before I make the comment I originally wanted to make about Abu 'Ita's remarks, let me do a little Qur'an interpretation here, because that will also be revealing. Take the following: ' the Koran chapters conveyed to Muhammad in Mecca only rarely deal with the Jews – like in "those who incur Allah's wrath," which appears in the Al-Fatiha chapter'. If you have read the first chapter of the Qur'an, which has only seven verses, you will know why this is dangerous nonsense. Here's Sura 1 (my translation):
'In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. Praise be to God, Lord of the worlds. The Merciful, the Compassionate. King of the Day of Judgement. Thee do we worship, and to thee do we turn for help. Guide us upon the straight path. The path of those upon whom Thou hast shown blessings, not those who have incurred thy wrath, and not those who have gone astray.'
Where are the Jews? This is the first sura, so there is no reference to Jews before it. This is a generalized reference, like the one before it and the one after it. Anything else is speculation. The rest of his interpretation is even more bizarre: 'in this chapter, the Jews were sentenced to annihilation, before even a single Jew existed on the face of the earth. This Koranic chapter talked about the collapse of the so-called state of Israel, before this state was even established.
It's bad enough that the Qur'an does have many negative things to say about Jews, but it's beyond toleration to see Muslim clerics glossing every negative remark in the book as 'Jews'. I have a Qur'an right next to me. What's to stop me going through it verse by verse, and every time it refers to 'unbelievers' or 'enemies' or whatever, arguing 'this means the Jews, and it prophecies the fall of Israel'?
That is the level to which discourse has fallen for many Muslims. It makes any attempt to break out of the present impasse well nigh impossible.
But what I wanted to say is this. What if he's right and Israel does succumb? After all, the forces arrayed against her are greater now than they have ever seemed. If Hizbullah, Hamas, and Iran (for starters), aided and abetted by the UN, the Islamic world, and many Western countries achieve their ends, whether by force or by imposing a one state solution, where will that leave things? The Palestinians will, of course, tear themselves to pieces, Hizbullah will take over Lebanon, and Iran will try to conquer Iraq. The Middle East will be in greater turmoil than ever.
And how will that be resolved? With no more Israel to focus on, the Middle East will need someone to take her place. How long will it be before Surat al-Fatiha is re-interpreted? God's wrath will fall upon the Christians and those Jews who live outside Israel. And this will be a different struggle to the present one. If the Islamists can claim a victory over the Jews, their fervour will be picked up everywhere. It will be obvious that God is on their side. After all, didn't God prophesy the fall of Israel in Surat al-Fatiha? And in every other sura. And does he not now prophesy the fall of America or Britain or anywhere else?
None of this is preposterous. There is no rationality here. Islam has no room for reason or freedom or conscience. It could have, but today's clerics have set their faces hard against those things. Reason is profoundly dangerous to an Islam based on heartfelt acceptance of every word of the Qur'an and the Hadith, dangerous to the clergy who survive by presenting a hardline interpretation of the texts.
People ask why Israel has to defend herself by force. This is the reason, that the forces of moderation in the Islamic world are still too weak to serve as a defence for anyone against jihadist extremism, and jihadist extremism derives much of its inspiration from irrational readings of the Qur'an. The Salafis, Wahhabis, Mawdudists, and many others prefer a literal interpretation of scripture above any nuanced or modernizing commentary. In most countries, Britain included, there's a tendency to pretend that the real risk comes from 'violent extremists' (we're not allowed to call them Muslim extremists any more). But it doesn't. It comes from clerics who provide interpretations like the one we've just had, who extol martyrdom, who condemn terrorism while encouraging suicide bombing in 'Palestine', or who just create a hardline Islam that serves as a breeding ground for every kind of crazy hope and unbalanced fear.
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Going to sea in little boats
The following is a letter I have just written to Angela Godfrey-Goldstein, a leading light in the Free Gaza Movement. I have made a few small corrections.
Angela Godfrey-Goldstein
Media Team
Free Gaza Movement
Dear Angela,
You don’t know me, and perhaps you never will. I’m just a British-Irish writer and academic with a lifetime’s interest in and knowledge of the Middle East. As your small flotilla of boats wends its way back to these islands, I thought I would share with you some of my thoughts on your endeavour. Perhaps you will ignore them, perhaps they will help.
Here in the UK, where I live, we have, as you will know, a proud tradition of sailing small ships into dangerous waters, in times of great danger. The Spanish Armada was brought low by smaller English ships and high winds. Off the northern Irish coast, divers still bring up shining treasure from sunken galleons. Dunkirk was a victory of small boats against the ruthless might of the Nazi state and its military strength. Over in Ireland, we remember the little corracles who plied the high Atlantic waters off the west coast and out of the small fishing islands of Inis Mór and Inis Beg. Many seafaring nations have memorialized their nautical past in prose and verse: the great Lusiades of the Portuguese poet and adventurer Luis de Camoes stands out, Moby Dick is one of the greatest works of North American fiction, Synge’s Riders to the Sea was one of the first realistic depictions of Irish life and death in tiny boats.
In the United States a few years ago, work was started on the rebuilding of the famous slave ship Amistad, and today the ship sails from continent to continent telling the tale of the slave trade and building a community for students and disadvantaged young men and women. Other great ships of historical significance are moored in harbours across the world, telling their stories, educating children and adults in the histories they carry. Others lie in greater numbers beneath the sea, ships sunk in battle or in storm or lost on voyages of discovery.
They are a source of pride, these ships. All those sunken merchant vessels downed by German U-boats while bringing precious cargo to a beleaguered island. Those wooden ships holed below the waterline in wars with France and Spain. Those rusting hulks that once brought my Irish ancestors out of famine to a new life in America. Those little boats that didn't make it on their errand of mercy out of Dunkirk.
There’s one ship, though, that stirs my imagination for the profound symbolism of its voyage and the shame it brings on Britain even after all these years, and that is the Exodus 1947. I’m sure you know the story of this little ship, well past its best days, that set sail from France carrying Jewish refugees, Holocaust survivors for whom Palestine had become a beacon of hope and a promise of resurrection. Boarded by the Royal Navy, the Exodus was towed to Haifa and the refugees sent by force back to Europe, where they were placed in internment camps, mostly in Germany, and enclosed behind barbed wire. That was a day of shame for Britain that the country will always bear.
I know you feel a deep love for the Palestinian people. There can be no harm in that, though I wonder that you seem blind to the deep veins of hatred, rejection of compromise, and genocidal longing that have for so many years perverted the Palestinian leadership and ruined the lives of so many Palestinians. About the time the Exodus left port in France, the Arabs of the Middle East were planning to wipe out any future Jewish state. They planned, not just to turn Holocaust survivors from their shores — a startling inhospitality when set beside the record of France or the UK, countries that have taken millions of refugees from all around the world — but to massacre those who did reach the country of their dreams. The Arabs spoke of massacre and acted in 1948 to commit just that.
If you have no sympathy for those Jews fleeing concentration and internment camps and bringing their skills and energies to a country badly in need of them, if you cannot feel your heart break when you contemplate what they suffered, yet what a great thing they achieved, I find it hard to believe that your compassion for the Palestinians is real. Compassion is a single, an indivisble thing. If you feel for the Palestinians, why do you not feel for the Jews, who have suffered more greatly since the 1930s than the Palestinians ever have? One love does not have to drive out the other. I certainly do not despise the Palestinians simply because I love the Israelis. What I do despise (and it horrifies me that you and other pro-Palestinian activists seem to be in harmony with it) is the vein of terror, the utter ruthlessness that runs through Palestinian history.
Your recent project to sail two boats to Gaza went badly wrong for one simple reason: you seriously misunderstood the Israelis. You created an image of them as demons, Nazis, ruthless fiends bent on harming the people of the West Bank and Gaza. You also invented notions of international law that anticipated conflict, and perhaps you and your colleagues even looked for a martyrdom of some kind. In the end, the Israelis reacted quite differently, because their history has shown them to be tough when necessary but capable of compromise and more when appropriate. To have blocked the entry of two ships carrying hearing aids and balloons would have been high-handed and pointless. You were allowed through. But somewhere a young Palestinian woman is strapping on a suicide belt; if she gets through the checkpoints, she will head for a restaurant or a hospital or a nursery school, and she will kill the innocent. That’s the sort of thing the Israelis try their hardest to block, and it is morally blameworthy to complain that they do it.
The Jews who set sail on the Exodus 1947 did so out of desperation, just as the first Jewish settlers headed for a backwater of the Ottoman empire, to desert and marshland, not because they were evil Zionists bent on conspiracy, but because they had fled pogroms and massacres in order to reach a promised land. It matters little how they understood that promise. Today, there are Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Punjabis, Jamaicans, Poles, and countless others who have found their promised land in the UK. This country does not threaten to massacre them or to kick them into the sea. We live together, not always comfortably, but in peace.
Hamas and other organizations in Gaza and the West Bank do not think that way. They would not have turned the Exodus back, they would have torpedoed her. Their founding documents — which I suggest you read, for I really can’t believe you have done — describe jihad as the only solution to their problem, and the expulsion or slaughter of the Jews as their proper fate.
Jews make good neighbours. You really should know that. I’m not a Jew, but a lifetime has taught me that that is true. Israel is a country that attracts tourists and investors. It is a good place to live and work. It is one of the most successful multicultural countries in the world. Minority religions like the Baha’is are given refuge there. Gay men and women from Arab countries go there for shelter. Ethiopians have made new lives there, and Russians, and, most recently Indians. It should be the Palestinian dream to live shoulder to shoulder with the democrats, the entrepreneurs, the inventors, the writers and artists and musicians on the other side of the fence. With Israeli help, a Palestinian state could grow in stature in a matter of years. There would be a peace dividend like no other. Instead, all some Palestinians seem to do is parade and scream and honour men and women whose only achievement was to murder children and survivors of the Holocaust. I don’t believe ordinary Palestinians are really like that at all. I was born in Belfast, and I grew up with bigotry as part of the scenery. Just as left for university, that bigotry exploded into violence and a deeply divided society. Today, that bigotry is receding. And that’s because both sides have learned lessons from the path and have built something new out of compromise. But Hamas and Fatah refuse to compromise. Each wants everything and gets nothing. Where is the sense in that?
Desperation is no excuse for hatred. Those Holocaust survivors had greater desperation than the Palestinians ever have done. They set out to kill no-one, but, as history so very clearly records, they were attacked by five armies and barely survived a second time. Today’s Palestinians do suffer, but they are not defending themselves against genocidal attack. There are no Israelis left in Gaza (though there are plenty of Arabs in Israel). But Hamas builds its arsenal, Islamic Jihad builds another, and every so often Israeli border guards detect and arrest another would-be suicide bomber.
You thought you were taking a risk sailing to Gaza, only to find nobody in Israel was much interested in your stunt. To the extent that you may have believed you would be arrested and imprisoned or worse, I commend your courage. But there are better forms of courage, less negative ones. If only you and your colleagues could sustain the courage to speak to men and women of merit in Gaza, community leaders, even perhaps leaders of Hamas, explain to them how dedicated you are to the Palestinian people and its emergence from the long tunnel it has been in for 60 years and more, and tell them that compromise will bring benefits, that even if they don’t take Israel back (and destroy it with inter-factional fighting) they can have what they were promised all those years ago, and that compromise will result in peace, and that peace will lead to prosperity, and that prosperity will give their children what they never had: a future.
And if you get turned down on all sides, or threatened or beaten — and I hope none of those things will happen to you — will you please admit that the Palestinians, or their leadership at least, are bringing their humiliation and poverty on their own heads? Will you make this your new mission? To show solidarity, not with the men of violence who rule Gaza today, but with moderate Palestinians, men and women of good heart, and to show that solidarity means compassion for the people you hope to free, and that freedom for the people of Gaza will come when there is a will towards peace? For if you and other pro-Palestinian organizations persist in support for the status quo, in which violence dictates a life without a future, then lovers of peace like myself will understand you better. And however many boats you sail, however many hearing aids you carry, however many brightly-coloured balloons you distribute, you will never convince the world that you mean anything but the destruction of Israel and the ruination of the Palestinian people.
Yours sincerely,
Dr. Denis MacEoin
Angela Godfrey-Goldstein
Media Team
Free Gaza Movement
Dear Angela,
You don’t know me, and perhaps you never will. I’m just a British-Irish writer and academic with a lifetime’s interest in and knowledge of the Middle East. As your small flotilla of boats wends its way back to these islands, I thought I would share with you some of my thoughts on your endeavour. Perhaps you will ignore them, perhaps they will help.
Here in the UK, where I live, we have, as you will know, a proud tradition of sailing small ships into dangerous waters, in times of great danger. The Spanish Armada was brought low by smaller English ships and high winds. Off the northern Irish coast, divers still bring up shining treasure from sunken galleons. Dunkirk was a victory of small boats against the ruthless might of the Nazi state and its military strength. Over in Ireland, we remember the little corracles who plied the high Atlantic waters off the west coast and out of the small fishing islands of Inis Mór and Inis Beg. Many seafaring nations have memorialized their nautical past in prose and verse: the great Lusiades of the Portuguese poet and adventurer Luis de Camoes stands out, Moby Dick is one of the greatest works of North American fiction, Synge’s Riders to the Sea was one of the first realistic depictions of Irish life and death in tiny boats.
In the United States a few years ago, work was started on the rebuilding of the famous slave ship Amistad, and today the ship sails from continent to continent telling the tale of the slave trade and building a community for students and disadvantaged young men and women. Other great ships of historical significance are moored in harbours across the world, telling their stories, educating children and adults in the histories they carry. Others lie in greater numbers beneath the sea, ships sunk in battle or in storm or lost on voyages of discovery.
They are a source of pride, these ships. All those sunken merchant vessels downed by German U-boats while bringing precious cargo to a beleaguered island. Those wooden ships holed below the waterline in wars with France and Spain. Those rusting hulks that once brought my Irish ancestors out of famine to a new life in America. Those little boats that didn't make it on their errand of mercy out of Dunkirk.
There’s one ship, though, that stirs my imagination for the profound symbolism of its voyage and the shame it brings on Britain even after all these years, and that is the Exodus 1947. I’m sure you know the story of this little ship, well past its best days, that set sail from France carrying Jewish refugees, Holocaust survivors for whom Palestine had become a beacon of hope and a promise of resurrection. Boarded by the Royal Navy, the Exodus was towed to Haifa and the refugees sent by force back to Europe, where they were placed in internment camps, mostly in Germany, and enclosed behind barbed wire. That was a day of shame for Britain that the country will always bear.
I know you feel a deep love for the Palestinian people. There can be no harm in that, though I wonder that you seem blind to the deep veins of hatred, rejection of compromise, and genocidal longing that have for so many years perverted the Palestinian leadership and ruined the lives of so many Palestinians. About the time the Exodus left port in France, the Arabs of the Middle East were planning to wipe out any future Jewish state. They planned, not just to turn Holocaust survivors from their shores — a startling inhospitality when set beside the record of France or the UK, countries that have taken millions of refugees from all around the world — but to massacre those who did reach the country of their dreams. The Arabs spoke of massacre and acted in 1948 to commit just that.
If you have no sympathy for those Jews fleeing concentration and internment camps and bringing their skills and energies to a country badly in need of them, if you cannot feel your heart break when you contemplate what they suffered, yet what a great thing they achieved, I find it hard to believe that your compassion for the Palestinians is real. Compassion is a single, an indivisble thing. If you feel for the Palestinians, why do you not feel for the Jews, who have suffered more greatly since the 1930s than the Palestinians ever have? One love does not have to drive out the other. I certainly do not despise the Palestinians simply because I love the Israelis. What I do despise (and it horrifies me that you and other pro-Palestinian activists seem to be in harmony with it) is the vein of terror, the utter ruthlessness that runs through Palestinian history.
Your recent project to sail two boats to Gaza went badly wrong for one simple reason: you seriously misunderstood the Israelis. You created an image of them as demons, Nazis, ruthless fiends bent on harming the people of the West Bank and Gaza. You also invented notions of international law that anticipated conflict, and perhaps you and your colleagues even looked for a martyrdom of some kind. In the end, the Israelis reacted quite differently, because their history has shown them to be tough when necessary but capable of compromise and more when appropriate. To have blocked the entry of two ships carrying hearing aids and balloons would have been high-handed and pointless. You were allowed through. But somewhere a young Palestinian woman is strapping on a suicide belt; if she gets through the checkpoints, she will head for a restaurant or a hospital or a nursery school, and she will kill the innocent. That’s the sort of thing the Israelis try their hardest to block, and it is morally blameworthy to complain that they do it.
The Jews who set sail on the Exodus 1947 did so out of desperation, just as the first Jewish settlers headed for a backwater of the Ottoman empire, to desert and marshland, not because they were evil Zionists bent on conspiracy, but because they had fled pogroms and massacres in order to reach a promised land. It matters little how they understood that promise. Today, there are Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Punjabis, Jamaicans, Poles, and countless others who have found their promised land in the UK. This country does not threaten to massacre them or to kick them into the sea. We live together, not always comfortably, but in peace.
Hamas and other organizations in Gaza and the West Bank do not think that way. They would not have turned the Exodus back, they would have torpedoed her. Their founding documents — which I suggest you read, for I really can’t believe you have done — describe jihad as the only solution to their problem, and the expulsion or slaughter of the Jews as their proper fate.
Jews make good neighbours. You really should know that. I’m not a Jew, but a lifetime has taught me that that is true. Israel is a country that attracts tourists and investors. It is a good place to live and work. It is one of the most successful multicultural countries in the world. Minority religions like the Baha’is are given refuge there. Gay men and women from Arab countries go there for shelter. Ethiopians have made new lives there, and Russians, and, most recently Indians. It should be the Palestinian dream to live shoulder to shoulder with the democrats, the entrepreneurs, the inventors, the writers and artists and musicians on the other side of the fence. With Israeli help, a Palestinian state could grow in stature in a matter of years. There would be a peace dividend like no other. Instead, all some Palestinians seem to do is parade and scream and honour men and women whose only achievement was to murder children and survivors of the Holocaust. I don’t believe ordinary Palestinians are really like that at all. I was born in Belfast, and I grew up with bigotry as part of the scenery. Just as left for university, that bigotry exploded into violence and a deeply divided society. Today, that bigotry is receding. And that’s because both sides have learned lessons from the path and have built something new out of compromise. But Hamas and Fatah refuse to compromise. Each wants everything and gets nothing. Where is the sense in that?
Desperation is no excuse for hatred. Those Holocaust survivors had greater desperation than the Palestinians ever have done. They set out to kill no-one, but, as history so very clearly records, they were attacked by five armies and barely survived a second time. Today’s Palestinians do suffer, but they are not defending themselves against genocidal attack. There are no Israelis left in Gaza (though there are plenty of Arabs in Israel). But Hamas builds its arsenal, Islamic Jihad builds another, and every so often Israeli border guards detect and arrest another would-be suicide bomber.
You thought you were taking a risk sailing to Gaza, only to find nobody in Israel was much interested in your stunt. To the extent that you may have believed you would be arrested and imprisoned or worse, I commend your courage. But there are better forms of courage, less negative ones. If only you and your colleagues could sustain the courage to speak to men and women of merit in Gaza, community leaders, even perhaps leaders of Hamas, explain to them how dedicated you are to the Palestinian people and its emergence from the long tunnel it has been in for 60 years and more, and tell them that compromise will bring benefits, that even if they don’t take Israel back (and destroy it with inter-factional fighting) they can have what they were promised all those years ago, and that compromise will result in peace, and that peace will lead to prosperity, and that prosperity will give their children what they never had: a future.
And if you get turned down on all sides, or threatened or beaten — and I hope none of those things will happen to you — will you please admit that the Palestinians, or their leadership at least, are bringing their humiliation and poverty on their own heads? Will you make this your new mission? To show solidarity, not with the men of violence who rule Gaza today, but with moderate Palestinians, men and women of good heart, and to show that solidarity means compassion for the people you hope to free, and that freedom for the people of Gaza will come when there is a will towards peace? For if you and other pro-Palestinian organizations persist in support for the status quo, in which violence dictates a life without a future, then lovers of peace like myself will understand you better. And however many boats you sail, however many hearing aids you carry, however many brightly-coloured balloons you distribute, you will never convince the world that you mean anything but the destruction of Israel and the ruination of the Palestinian people.
Yours sincerely,
Dr. Denis MacEoin
Monday, August 25, 2008
The Holocaust and its impersonators
I've just finished proof-reading my forthcoming academic book, The Messiah of Shiraz. Weighing in at just under 800 pages (with the index to come) it's going to be sold in hardware shops as a doorstop. Deathless prose it may be, but it's filled with transliterations from Arabic and Persian (dashes over 'a's, 'i's and 'u's, dots under a whole range of consonants), so going through it checking for errors has left me squinting and drawing sharp breaths.
But out of all that verbiage, one thing and one thing only has stuck in my mind. This is a short passage that includes two quotations relating to events that took place after the 1852 assassination attempt on the life of Nasir al-Din Shah, the Iranian monarch who reigned till 1896. George Curzon called him philo-uxorious, meaning that he had a lot of wives. After a trip to Paris, he made his harem dress in tutus and, given that most of these ladies were, shall we say, large of stature, the results were, let's just say, spectacular. But that's not why someone tried to kill him. First suspicions fell on a militant sect, the Babis, who form the main topic of my book. Some Babis were killed, others imprisoned, but a combination of reports by European travellers and diplomats gave rise to the myth that there had been a serious massacre. Later histories by members of the Baha'i religion (who have their roots in Babism) perpetuate this myth. Here's the passage that stood out for me:
According to a later writer, the 1851 killings were ‘a blood-bath of unprecedented severity,’ ‘a holocaust reminiscent of the direst tribulations undergone by the persecuted followers of any previous religion,’and ‘the darkest, bloodiest and most tragic episode of the Heroic Age of the Bahāʾī Dispensation.
This is strong stuff. One wonders why, if it was the equal of the worst things suffered by the followers of any religion, a holocaust no less, an unprecedented severity, we didn't all read about it in our school history books. Actually, the tally of Babi dead was 37. Believe me, I have conducted extensive researches on all cases of Babis killed between 1844 and 1852, and 37 is correct.
Well, this is just exaggeration by a writer who was no stranger to the genre, but in recent years he has found himself in good (or not so good) company. Since the 1980s, the 'Palestinian Holocaust' has become a badge for left-liberals everywhere, a rallying cry for the Islamic world, an internet 'reality' that could have stepped out of Second Life, a cause for much wringing of hands, a matter for public lamentation, a summons for vindication, a justification for 'retaliatory' violence, an explanation for Palestinian intransigence and failure, a texture woven through the cloth of Arab policies, an incantation ringing out in Islamic sermons, on the voices of little children, in the streets and suqs, a banner waving beside the Palestinian flag.
Enough with the purple prose. The Palestinian Holocaust never happened. We are living in the real world. We are, if you like, living in history, and history has no record of a Palestinian Holocaust.
But let me take this beyond mere assertion. The term 'Holocaust' as applied to the Palestinians is derived directly from the same word in English, corresponding to the Hebrew Shoah. Writing in Arabic or Farsi, the word is hulukast (with three of those long-vowel dashes on the vowels, neatly avoiding any Arabic, Persian, or other term that might have been more appropriate.
So, the Palestinian 'Holocaust' is modelled on something that happened in Europe, the slaughter of some 6 million Jews by the Nazis before and during the Second World War. Of the reality of the Jewish Holocaust, there can be no doubt. It is recorded lavishly in the memories of survivors, on film, in photographs, and, above all, in mile after mile of German, Russian, Hungarian, Polish, and other archives, archives whose multitudinous files contain vastly more evidence of murder and bestiality than the police records of any country on earth. No other crime or set of crimes have been so meticulously recorded.
In face of this overwhelming evidence, many Muslims -- notably the Iranians -- have joined forces with a much smaller number of right-wing extremists (and not a few on the far left) who flatly deny that the Holocaust ever took place, who insist there were no gas chambers and who would have it that not a single Jew died as a result of Nazi brutality. Or who argue that the Nazis looked after the Jews well, and that it was disease, not lethal gases, that killed them. Better still, never content with one explanation when three or four will do, they argue that the Holocaust was a dastardly Zionist plot, a conspiracy between Nazis and Zionists to imprint the deaths of Jews on the world's conscience in order to guarantee the creation of Israel once the war was over.
This denial -- egregious, sickening and degenerate as it is -- matches claims that there was, that there is, a Palestinian Holocaust. No Jews died, but, hey, look at the slaughter of the Palestinians by the Jews. It also matches the transparent nonsense that Israel is a Nazi state and, what's more, a Nazi state built on that non-existent Holocaust.
It does not need saying that no serious person would fall for any of this, except that so many have. The Palestinian Holocaust, a vast massacre for which not a shred of evidence exists, is passing fare at polite middle-class dinner tables, it is fodder for intellectuals of a certain ilk, it passes for historical fact among well-educated people who find it easier to sneer than read a book of properly-researched history.
Why has this happened? Why has history been stood on its head, and, with it, terminology? If I call Israel a Nazi state, am I not obliged to demonstrate this by reference to Israeli doctrines, policies, and actions that parallel those of the German National Socialist Party? If I pontificate about a Palestinian Holocaust, am I not bound to cite places, dates, and numbers? And since there are no such facts to bandy about, just as there are no Israeli apartheid laws, what do I have to do? All it seems to take is repetition. Say it often enough and people take it in and give it shelter, a lie big enough to choke them.
Some of these moral degenerates, like Ilan Pappé, say they aren't interested in facts, that it's the progressive argument or something, whatever it's called, that counts. But as every criminal knows when he's dragged to court, the facts will grind you down. However much you fudge and cover, slip and slide, a good barrister will wear you out, because there will be demonstrable facts to expose your lies.
Beneath the surface (though not far beneath) is an abiding anti-Semitism, a moral failing that drives its exponents to lies. Far-right groups like Stormfront have no compunctions about being anti-Semitic. They aren't ashamed of it, in fact they're proud to be Hitler's successors. But what about the European and American left? Not all the left, not all the liberals, but a large body who are not really liberal at all. After the Holocaust, it became a shameful thing to speak ill of Jews and, for some time, to condemn Israel. But there gradually came into existence a new kind of left-winger, someone for whom everything Western was anathema. So, America is the devil, the UK is the devil, Israel is the devil, imperialism, colonialism, and all the rest are part of Satan's attack on the poor and wretched of the earth. One problem, of course, for this approach is that you have to turn a blind eye to Islamic imperialism (especially the late, great Ottoman empire), or Arab and Turkish slavery, and all those other things the non-Western world has been responsible for. That means re-writing history, and that's the direction chosen by leftist intellectuals. Israel has been of particularly value for this, allowing liberals to cry 'I'm not anti-Semitic, I'm anti-Israel'.
The antidote to these arguments may be found in a remarkable book by Bernard Harrison, The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism. Harrison's an academic philosopher, and his analysis of this problem about anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism is outstanding. Slowly, painstakingly, he subjects articles, individuals, and arguments to a critique to which they have never been subjected before. His discussion of Tom Paulin alone makes the book worth buying.
Rather than digressing into his complex arguments, I'll leave this post here and possibly return to it another day.
But out of all that verbiage, one thing and one thing only has stuck in my mind. This is a short passage that includes two quotations relating to events that took place after the 1852 assassination attempt on the life of Nasir al-Din Shah, the Iranian monarch who reigned till 1896. George Curzon called him philo-uxorious, meaning that he had a lot of wives. After a trip to Paris, he made his harem dress in tutus and, given that most of these ladies were, shall we say, large of stature, the results were, let's just say, spectacular. But that's not why someone tried to kill him. First suspicions fell on a militant sect, the Babis, who form the main topic of my book. Some Babis were killed, others imprisoned, but a combination of reports by European travellers and diplomats gave rise to the myth that there had been a serious massacre. Later histories by members of the Baha'i religion (who have their roots in Babism) perpetuate this myth. Here's the passage that stood out for me:
According to a later writer, the 1851 killings were ‘a blood-bath of unprecedented severity,’ ‘a holocaust reminiscent of the direst tribulations undergone by the persecuted followers of any previous religion,’and ‘the darkest, bloodiest and most tragic episode of the Heroic Age of the Bahāʾī Dispensation.
This is strong stuff. One wonders why, if it was the equal of the worst things suffered by the followers of any religion, a holocaust no less, an unprecedented severity, we didn't all read about it in our school history books. Actually, the tally of Babi dead was 37. Believe me, I have conducted extensive researches on all cases of Babis killed between 1844 and 1852, and 37 is correct.
Well, this is just exaggeration by a writer who was no stranger to the genre, but in recent years he has found himself in good (or not so good) company. Since the 1980s, the 'Palestinian Holocaust' has become a badge for left-liberals everywhere, a rallying cry for the Islamic world, an internet 'reality' that could have stepped out of Second Life, a cause for much wringing of hands, a matter for public lamentation, a summons for vindication, a justification for 'retaliatory' violence, an explanation for Palestinian intransigence and failure, a texture woven through the cloth of Arab policies, an incantation ringing out in Islamic sermons, on the voices of little children, in the streets and suqs, a banner waving beside the Palestinian flag.
Enough with the purple prose. The Palestinian Holocaust never happened. We are living in the real world. We are, if you like, living in history, and history has no record of a Palestinian Holocaust.
But let me take this beyond mere assertion. The term 'Holocaust' as applied to the Palestinians is derived directly from the same word in English, corresponding to the Hebrew Shoah. Writing in Arabic or Farsi, the word is hulukast (with three of those long-vowel dashes on the vowels, neatly avoiding any Arabic, Persian, or other term that might have been more appropriate.
So, the Palestinian 'Holocaust' is modelled on something that happened in Europe, the slaughter of some 6 million Jews by the Nazis before and during the Second World War. Of the reality of the Jewish Holocaust, there can be no doubt. It is recorded lavishly in the memories of survivors, on film, in photographs, and, above all, in mile after mile of German, Russian, Hungarian, Polish, and other archives, archives whose multitudinous files contain vastly more evidence of murder and bestiality than the police records of any country on earth. No other crime or set of crimes have been so meticulously recorded.
In face of this overwhelming evidence, many Muslims -- notably the Iranians -- have joined forces with a much smaller number of right-wing extremists (and not a few on the far left) who flatly deny that the Holocaust ever took place, who insist there were no gas chambers and who would have it that not a single Jew died as a result of Nazi brutality. Or who argue that the Nazis looked after the Jews well, and that it was disease, not lethal gases, that killed them. Better still, never content with one explanation when three or four will do, they argue that the Holocaust was a dastardly Zionist plot, a conspiracy between Nazis and Zionists to imprint the deaths of Jews on the world's conscience in order to guarantee the creation of Israel once the war was over.
This denial -- egregious, sickening and degenerate as it is -- matches claims that there was, that there is, a Palestinian Holocaust. No Jews died, but, hey, look at the slaughter of the Palestinians by the Jews. It also matches the transparent nonsense that Israel is a Nazi state and, what's more, a Nazi state built on that non-existent Holocaust.
It does not need saying that no serious person would fall for any of this, except that so many have. The Palestinian Holocaust, a vast massacre for which not a shred of evidence exists, is passing fare at polite middle-class dinner tables, it is fodder for intellectuals of a certain ilk, it passes for historical fact among well-educated people who find it easier to sneer than read a book of properly-researched history.
Why has this happened? Why has history been stood on its head, and, with it, terminology? If I call Israel a Nazi state, am I not obliged to demonstrate this by reference to Israeli doctrines, policies, and actions that parallel those of the German National Socialist Party? If I pontificate about a Palestinian Holocaust, am I not bound to cite places, dates, and numbers? And since there are no such facts to bandy about, just as there are no Israeli apartheid laws, what do I have to do? All it seems to take is repetition. Say it often enough and people take it in and give it shelter, a lie big enough to choke them.
Some of these moral degenerates, like Ilan Pappé, say they aren't interested in facts, that it's the progressive argument or something, whatever it's called, that counts. But as every criminal knows when he's dragged to court, the facts will grind you down. However much you fudge and cover, slip and slide, a good barrister will wear you out, because there will be demonstrable facts to expose your lies.
Beneath the surface (though not far beneath) is an abiding anti-Semitism, a moral failing that drives its exponents to lies. Far-right groups like Stormfront have no compunctions about being anti-Semitic. They aren't ashamed of it, in fact they're proud to be Hitler's successors. But what about the European and American left? Not all the left, not all the liberals, but a large body who are not really liberal at all. After the Holocaust, it became a shameful thing to speak ill of Jews and, for some time, to condemn Israel. But there gradually came into existence a new kind of left-winger, someone for whom everything Western was anathema. So, America is the devil, the UK is the devil, Israel is the devil, imperialism, colonialism, and all the rest are part of Satan's attack on the poor and wretched of the earth. One problem, of course, for this approach is that you have to turn a blind eye to Islamic imperialism (especially the late, great Ottoman empire), or Arab and Turkish slavery, and all those other things the non-Western world has been responsible for. That means re-writing history, and that's the direction chosen by leftist intellectuals. Israel has been of particularly value for this, allowing liberals to cry 'I'm not anti-Semitic, I'm anti-Israel'.
The antidote to these arguments may be found in a remarkable book by Bernard Harrison, The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism. Harrison's an academic philosopher, and his analysis of this problem about anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism is outstanding. Slowly, painstakingly, he subjects articles, individuals, and arguments to a critique to which they have never been subjected before. His discussion of Tom Paulin alone makes the book worth buying.
Rather than digressing into his complex arguments, I'll leave this post here and possibly return to it another day.
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