The Great (Op)Poser

No sooner had the presenter of Radio National's Books & Arts Program, Michael Cathcart, featured Indian ignoramus Karan Mahajan on Monday (see yesterday's post), than he was spruiking Israeli propagandist Etgar Keret ("a virtuoso of the short story") on Tuesday (25/10)!

After listening to around half of the hour-long interview (recorded at a Perth Writers Festival session), I'm afraid I could bear no more of Keret's soft-soaping of Israel.

For example:

Cathcart: So your child was born during a terrorist attack?
Keret: This is the kind of thing that, when I go overseas, which to people sounds kind of crazy but in Israel I don't think it's the only kid who was born during a terrorist attack...

It's the old someone's-always-out-to-get-us message!

But typically, in these set pieces (in the event that one takes this kind of stuff seriously) no one, certainly neither Cathcart nor his interlocutor on this occasion, ever broaches the question why, or refers in any way to Israel's growing mountain of Palestinian corpses (almost 10,000 since September 29, 2000*).

Keret gestures vaguely in its direction ("It's experienced not only by the people in my country but it's experienced to a much stronger extent by Palestinians in the territories.") but this passes without meaningful elaboration or comment. It just is, this "situation where you have to explain to your child what the hell's going on. It's a big challenge because you don't understand yourself why things most of the time have to happen in this way."

*Sigh* WTF is this? Dopiness? Feigned ignorance? Part of the act? Seriously, would you buy a book by an Israeli who tells you he has ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA why things happen the way they do in Israel - of all places?

The old Israeli 'shoot and cry' gets trotted out a lot on these occasions. Pulls in the clueless every time:

"In the army you go through so many traumas... ethical problems that you know you can't go through it without being a little shell-shocked... "

I know what he means. I recall the recent (last month, actually) case of the poor, shell-shocked Israeli soldier who went through trauma after trauma in the "territories" (never occupied, note). First, he and his fellow ethicists had to commandeer an apartment in a Palestinian refugee (!!!) camp. Then, as if that were not traumatic enough, they had to endure near-terminal boredom on its cramped balcony while waiting for a Palestinian to venture out onto his rooftop nearby so that he could inquire of him, solicitously, 'Where do you want it?' before putting a bullet through his leg.**

"... but in Israel the army is not a luxury, and the idea of not going to the army is the same as not paying your taxes... we need the army to survive and, as somebody who's a great opposer to our current government, it's not good to leave the army in the hands of those who would happily fight the war."

OFFS, the Israeli army has been happily, gleefully fighting Indian wars ever since Jabotinsky first put the Haganah together in 1921.

BTW, you've gotta love this tick from Clive James on the cover of Keret's latest book: "One of the most important writers alive - enchantingly witty."

[*ifamericansknew.org; **See 'Where do you want it?' Israeli soldier taunts unarmed Palestinian man before shooting him, Gideon Levy, Haaretz, 15/9/16]

Made For Each Other

Poet, essayist and broadcaster Clive James, 73, who still calls Australia home, speaks to Dwight Garner of The New Republic:

DG: Do you regret supporting the invasion of Iraq?

CJ: Not at all. I thought invading Iraq, when Saddam Hussein was running it, was the thing to do. It didn't turn out very well. It could have been handled better. It sure could. Hussein was running a regime beyond evil. It was awful. What have you got to do with places like that? We're facing exactly the same dilemma now with Syria."

(Up late with Clive James, Dwight Garner, The New Republic/The Australian, 2/3/13)

Gayle Quinnell, 75, of Shakopee, Minesotta, who earlier this year told Republican presidential wannabe John McCain at a campaign rally that Barack Hussein Obama was an Arab, speaks to the media:

GQ: I went to the library in Shakopee and I got lots of... three pages of information about Obama.
...
Noah Kunin (The UpTake): Just to be sure we got your quote OK, you called Obama an Arab terrorist?

GQ: Pardon?

NK: You called him an Arab terrorist. Is that correct? Why do you think he's an Arab?

GQ: Because his dad is...

Female reporter: His dad is Muslim... Barack Obama has never been a Muslim.

GQ: No but he's...

Dana Bash (CNN): He's a Christian.

GQ: He's not an Arab either, he's a...

DB: His father was a Muslim and he's a Christian.

GQ: Yeah, but he's still got Muslim in him... I got all the stuff from the library and I could send you all kinds of stuff on him...

(McCain responds to 'Arab' epithet at rally: 'Obama a decent family man, The Huffington Post, 2/3/13)

Clive James & Brown Women

Gayatri Spivak could have had Clive James in mind when coining her classic line about the urge of the white man to save brown women from brown men. James' urge, already the subject of one post on this blog (Giving Poetry a Bad Name, 17/3/09), has resurfaced. Not that I'd have noticed without reading The Australian, of course. They just love the bugger over there at News Ltd.

In the paper's column, Global Briefing: Journals, under the heading No honour in killing (8/9/09), the reader is informed that James had asked, in an essay in the British monthly Standpoint, "how Western feminists can turn a blind eye to the honour killing of women." He is quoted as saying: "We are told that when it comes to a case of honour [killing], Jordan is one of the more progressive Islamic communities. In Jordan, only one-quarter of all homicides are cases of honour. In the Palestinian sectors of the West Bank and in Gaza, the proportion is two-thirds."

We are told... By whom? James doesn't say. Unlike MERC, he doesn't do footnotes. Ready? A quick google for 'honour killings/Jordan' elicits the following: "The Jordan Times estimated in 1994 that between 28 and 60 Jordanian women... die in 'honour' killings every year... The death-toll may even run into the hundreds..." ('Honour' killings, (2) Jordan, gendercide.org). Do the same for Palestine, and you get this: "Given that honor killings often remain a private family affair, no official statistics are available on the practice or its frequency. According to a November 1997 report of the Women's Empowerment Project... there were 20 honor killings in Gaza and the West Bank in 1996." (Commodifying Honor in Female Sexuality: Honor killings in Palestine, Suzanne Ruggi, MERIP, Spring 1998)

The editor of the Australian column concludes thus: "Drawing on an article by the late Australian journalist Pamela Bone, Clive's conclusion is that feminists have been hiding - 'eloquent in their condemnation of Western evils', but ignoring the treatment of women within the culture of Islam."

Hello? Drawing on an article by the late Australian journalist Pamela Bone? Now there's an authority for you! As an apologist for Israel (and associate editor of The Age), Pamela Bone could apologise with the best of them: "Yes, what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians is terrible. But what the Palestinians are doing to the Israelis is also terrible. One can hate the destruction of Palestinian homes (I do) but could at least recognise the reason for the destruction is arms-smuggling tunnels underneath them." (Anti-Semitism: the old hatred returns, The Age, 31/7/04)

And that phrase the treatment of women within the culture of Islam - how sly is that? What precisely does within the culture of Islam mean? That the practice of honour killing is... Islamic? To return to Ruggi's article quoted above: "The honour killing emerged in the pre-Islamic era, according to Sharif Kanaana, professor of anthropology at Birzeit University... 'In an Islamic context, punishment for relationships out of wedlock is stipulated as 100 lashes if the woman is single, or if married, death by stoning. In both cases, however, there must be 4 witnesses willing to testify that the sexual act took place; conditions which make punishment difficult'." OK, so it's not Islamic, but anyone reading No honour in killing in The Australian won't be exposed to this clarification. And that's the whole point over at News Ltd, isn't it? Keep them in the dark and feed them on Islamophobic bullshit.

Should Clive have hung his Islamophobic rant on the death by stoning hook instead? Well, if he had, he'd have opened Pandora's box. According to the Bible, a woman can be stoned for adultery or for not being a virgin on her wedding night, for example. Stoning is also the penalty for apostasy, witchcraft, disobeying one's parents, breaking the Sabbath and cursing the king. And if an ox were to gore a man or woman? You guessed it - death by stoning. (skepticsannotatedbible.com)

In an attempt to ward off any scrutiny of the culture of Judaism, James issues the following disclaimer in his Standpoint essay, A Veil of Silence over Murder: "And the fact that there are men in charge of synagogues who feel the same [ie banning menstruating women] is not really an answer, because except for the occasional ultra-Orthodox headcase no man who runs a synagogue wants to burn [Pakistani-style] the women inside it." And that's that? Not by a long chalk. You see, James is as ignorant of Judaism as he is of Islam.

Israel Shahak, the late author of Jewish History, Jewish Religion (1994), tells us that "[s]exual intercourse between a married Jewish woman and any man other than her husband is a capital offence for both parties, and one of the 3 most heinous sins." But, he points out (and no doubt James will be relieved to hear this), "the concept of adultery... does not apply to intercourse between a Jewish man and a Gentile woman; rather, the Talmud equates such intercourse to the sin of bestiality... This does not imply that sexual intercourse between a Jewish man and a Gentile woman is permitted - quite the contrary. But the main punishment is inflicted on the Gentile woman; she must be executed, even if she was raped by the Jew: 'If a Jew has coitus with a Gentile woman, whether she be a child of 3 or an adult, whether married or unmarried... she must be killed, as is the case with a beast, because through her a Jew got into trouble'." (p 87)

And James reckons feminists turn a blind eye...

Giving Poetry a Bad Name

I first came across the following poem on Michael Danby's website. (Before you leap to the conclusion that Danby's a lover of verse, let me stress that it is the one & only poem on his website):-

Yusra

The Public Morals Unit of Hamas
Saw Yusra al-Azzuri, bold as brass,
In Gaza City, walk with her betrothed,
Her sister also present. Half unclothed.
All three behaved as if beyond the reach
Of justice. Laughing, dancing on the beach,
They almost touched. They thought to drive away.
The Unit followed them without delay.
Her young man drove. Beside him as they fled,
Yusra died quickly in a hail of lead.
The other two were hauled out of the car
And beaten senseless. With an iron bar,
The riddled corpse of Yusra, as the worst
Offender, was assaulted till it burst.
She would have prayed for death. It can be said,
Therefore, it was a blessing she was dead
Already. Thus we look for just one touch
Of grace in this catastrophe. Too much
To bear, the thought that those young men were glad
To be there. Won't the memory drive them mad?
Could they not see the laughter in her face
Was heaven on earth, the only holy place?
Perhaps they guessed, and acted from the fear
That Paradise is nowhere if not here.
Yusra, your name too lovely to forget
Shines like a sunrise joined to a sunset.
The day between went with you. Where you are,
That light around you is your life, Yusra.

It was written by expatriate Australian poet and UK TV wit Clive James and published in The Australian's literary supplement The Australian Literary Review of September 7 2007. To the best of my knowledge, apart from Danby's website, its only other airing has been in James' recently published collection Opal Sunset: Selected Poems 1958-2008. Thank God for small mercies.

At first blush, one might assume, as reviewer Benjamin Lytal of the Los Angeles Times did, that Yusra has some basis in fact: "Others, like Yusra, take a name out of the headlines in order to saddle current events with James' metered chivalry." But, like Lytal, you'd be wrong. Yusra al-Azzuri is pure fiction and Hamas has no 'Public Morals Unit'.

The closest I can find to a 'PMU' in the Palestinian territories is a 'morality police' unit set up by the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah following Hamas' successful pre-emptive coup in Gaza in 2007. Its job is reportedly to "comb the streets of central Ramallah to maintain 'public order' and 'tradition' [and] bust anyone caught violating the fast during Ramadan..." (Fatah uses 'morality police' to burnish image, Joshua Mitnick, Christian Science Monitor, 11/10/07) And that's "bust," as in take offenders down to the station for a talk - not riddle them with bullets and beat their corpses to a pulp. While noting that the PA's establishment of a 'morality police' unit was designed to compete with Hamas' reputation among all Palestinians for piety and lack of corruption, Mitnick writes that "no such morality squad exists in Gaza," and adds that "local observers say that in a territory known as more traditional than the West Bank, Hamas has been careful not to give its critics a justification for allegations that it is a Taliban wannabe."

James' fabrication cannot simply be excused as poetic licence. Yusra is blatant black propaganda, pure and simple. It tells us nothing whatever about Hamas, Palestinians, or Gaza. Just look at those young lovers: taking the (sports?) car for a spin along the coast as though they were the Gazan equivalent of middle class Lebanese twentysomethings on a jaunt to Beirut's Corniche, for God's sake. The fact that blockaded, impoverished, fuel-starved Gaza has been virtually carless for years, is simply not on James' radar. No, what Yusra is really all about is James and his lurid, post 9/11 orientalist fantasies.

In the unlikely event that James ever chooses to write about the real thing, of course, he could always draw on the actual case of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish divorcee who was beaten to the point of requiring medical treatment in her Jerusalem home by thugs in the pay of an ultra-Orthodox 'modesty patrol' because she had allegedly "stopped maintaining an ultra-Orthodox lifestyle and had relationships with men." The mercenaries who carried out the attack had been, in the words of the Israeli judge who sentenced one of them to 4 years jail, "hired to beat and abuse, to curse and threaten, to humiliate and brutalize" the woman. (Modesty patrol 'mercenary' gets 4 years for assaulting woman, Yair Ettinger, Haaretz, 16/3/09) Fat chance!

But there's another twist to this story. George Orwell, who once opined that "during times of universal deceit, telling truth becomes a revolutionary act," would no doubt be turning in his grave if he knew that James had been awarded the 2008 Orwell Prize for political journalism. Here's Jean Seaton, chair of the Orwell Prize and professor of media history at the University of Westminster: "Clive James is a master, in the Orwell tradition, of the essay. Whether written or broadcast, his words are sharp but humane."(Hari & James take Orwell prizes, Stephen Brook, guardian.co.uk, 25/4/08)

Ever read a James essay? One such appeared in The Australian of 10 April 2004. Written in bad blood is James' take on the history of the Palestine -Israel conflict. Unsurprisingly, considering he's the author of Yusra, he manages to get just about everything wrong. For reasons of space, I will deal only with the slanders, distortions, and errors of just the first half of this appalling diatribe:-

According to James, the Palestinians are possessed of "the mad idea that the Jews have no right to exist... and the equally mad idea that the state of Israel can somehow be eliminated." That's "the Jews" anywhere and everywhere, folks, not just those who flooded into Palestine. A bit like asserting that indigenous Australians were not only opposed to those who invaded and colonized their homeland but also opposed the very existence of each and every European in the lands from which the invaders and settlers first issued. For James, the Palestinians weren't simply opposed to the handover of their homeland by a European colonial power to a bunch of European settlers who wanted to turn it into an ethnically exclusive state at their expense - no, they just hated Jews. Full stop. End of story.

This outrageous slander of the victims of the Zionist colonial-settler project in Palestine came about, according to James, because the "Arab nations never studied at the University of the Holocaust [and] saw nothing wrong with Hitler's determination that as many potential colonists as possible should be dealt with at source."

Studied at the 'University of the Holocaust'?! Presumably, "the Arabs" (but not necessarily the Europeans) should have been alive to the fact that another European colonial power, other than the one forcing the foreign settlers on them, had 'issues' with certain European 'tribes' to its east and was intent on rolling them. And not only should they have twigged to that - they should also have jumped for joy at the prospect of helping out the most persecuted of those European 'tribes' by a) prevailing upon their own colonial master to open the gates of Palestine to said 'tribe', and b) prevailing upon the Palestinians themselves to shower its members with rice and rose petals before promptly handing over their house and car keys and then decamping across the Jordan.

Apart from the odd reference to this or that Zionist primer, James appears simply to make things up as he goes along: "Ben-Gurion was ready to accept a partition of Palestine: even though his resulting portion would be tiny..." Oh, really?If 56% of Palestine is "tiny" for those who had bought up a mere 6% of it prior to 1947, how then would James describe the 44% alloted to the Palestinians? Teensy? How, moreover, would he describe a Palestinian state on a mere 22%? Teensy weensy? And how would he describe a Palestinian state on 22% minus Jewish settlement blocs, apartheid wall, Jews-only roads, army bases, etc? Microscopic?

James makes basic errors such as in "when the new state was attacked [by the Arab states] from all sides... the Irgun teamed up with the Stern Gang to massacre over 300 Arabs at Deir Yassin, and the exodus of the Palestinians ensued." The Deir Yassin massacre occurred over a month before the Arab armies entered Palestine, and just over 100 Palestinians were butchered. Moreover, the Palestinian "exodus" was well under way by the time the Arab armies intervened.

Crucially, he glosses over David Ben-Gurion's key role in planning and implementing the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, using the Irgun and Stern Gang as fall guys: "Although [the Palestinians'] disappearance suited Ben-Gurion's purposes - already embattled on a half-dozen external fronts, he would probably have lost the war if he had been forced to fight on an internal front as well." As Zionist historian Benny Morris has pointed out, Ben-Gurion was a "transferist... He understood that there could be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in its midst... Without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here." To which I would add this from Israeli historian Ilan Pappe: "On 2 November, ie, almost a month before the UN General Assembly [partition] Resolution was adopted... the Executive of the Jewish Agency, Ben-Gurion, spelled out for the first time in the clearest possible terms that ethnic cleansing formed the alternative, or complementary means of ensuring that the new state would be an exclusively Jewish one. The Palestinians inside the Jewish state, he told his audience, could become a fifth column, and if so 'they can either be mass arrested or expelled; it is better to expel them'." ( The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, p 49)

And check out these bizarre sentences: "The Jews were suitably sorry at the time. But the Palestinians were sorry forever." Run that past me again. If "the Jews" were in fact "suitably sorry" at the time, all they had to do was facilitate the return of the refugees - as opposed to what they actually did (and have continued to do ever since) - block it and confiscate the refugees' homes and lands. And if the Palestinians, as a consequence of their dispossession in 1948, then became in James' ridiculous phraseology "sorry forever" would that not be sufficient to account for their rage without all that nonsense about anti-Semitism?

Nowhere does James' cluelessness come through better than in this outrageous statement: "There is enough oil money in the Arab nations to give every refugee a hotel suite with 24-hour room service. Instead they have been obliged to remain in camps that are display cases, so that they can testify with their desperation to Jewish inhumanity." If the goose had bothered to find out what the refugees themselves thought about their plight, he'd have discovered that nothing short of a return to what is rightfully theirs is acceptable to them. But face it, research or no research, if you've got a modicum of empathy for anyone who has been rudely shoved aside by those more powerful, you wouldn't even entertain such a callous and insensitive idea in the first place.

Poet? Orwell-Prize-winning journalist? You've got to be joking!