Glance down my blogroll, and you will find Girl With a One Track Mind, the diary of a sex fiend. Abby, or ‘The Girl’ as she calls herself, has just published her memoirs, putting the highlights of her two years online onto the printed page.
The diaries are often funny and usually titillating. However, there also exists in Abby’s writings a confident feminism and a highly moral outlook. Some of the best posts, which inspire the greatest reader response, are those which deal with overcoming harassment, and fighting against the sexism of the film industry. Being a nyphomaniac does not mean the same as ‘loose morals’ and ‘The Girl’ is actually very particular about who she chooses to take on her adventures. Honesty and full disclosure are her watchwords. Her diaries are fantastic guidance for anyone who wants to be true to themselves and their desires, while still respecting oneself and other people…
The diaries work so well in online form because they are anonymous – Abby is obviously not her real name. If ‘The Girl’ were to interact with people who knew about her writings, the entire nature of the relationships she experiences would change beyond all recognition. Her comments on hitherto anonymous lovers would become unethical and impossible, since a fairly wide circle of people would know who they were. Anonymity is crucial, and the blog cannot work in any other way. This fact is obvious to anyone who has ever read the blog, and will be apparent to anyone who buys the book.
No so obvious, however, to the idiots at the Sunday Times, who have ‘outed’ Abby, publishing her real name over the weekend – (a journalist tracked her down via her publishers). The result, claims ‘The Girl’ on her blog, is that she has had to confess her lifestyle and blog to members of her family. She will now find a whole new kind of prejudice within the film production community, if indeed she gets any further employment at all from this sector. The blog posts may well dry up as a result. Finding a boyfriend will be a nightmare. And all for a poxy, soulless, off-the-front page expose in a Sunday newspaper, by a stupid journalist, Anna Mikhailova, who has missed the entire point of The Girl’s output. The real identity of ‘The Girl’ was never important. Shame on you Anna – for spoling our fun, and quite possibly the life of a decent, talented person. You have done no good.
Month: August 2006 (Page 3 of 4)
Nevertheless, Gaarder’s essay is highly problematic. “We do not recognise the state of Israel” is not clarified in the way I attempted in my previous post, which invites the criticism slung at him by Andrew Sullivan and (no doubt) many others.
We do not believe in the notion of God’s chosen people. We laugh at this people’s fancies and weep at its misdeeds.
Crucially, his mockery of other people’s beliefs makes him look arrogant. Jews have a history of persecution we know all too well, and the exodus of the Torah is mirrored by countless diaspora in modern times. An attachment to (and a desire to live in) the Holy Land is genuine and heartfelt. In itself, it is not a reason for scorn.
We do not recognize the old Kingdom of David as a model for the 21st century map of the Middle East. The Jewish rabbi claimed two thousand years ago that the Kingdom of God is not a martial restoration of the Kingdom of David, but that the Kingdom of God is within us and among us. The Kingdom of God is compassion and forgiveness … Two thousand years have passed since the Jewish rabbi disarmed and humanized the old rhetoric of war. Even in his time, the first Zionist terrorists were operating … For two thousand years, we have rehearsed the syllabus of humanism, but Israel does not listen. It was not the Pharisee that helped the man who lay in the wayside, having fallen prey to robbers. It was a Samaritan
For most of the ‘two-thousand years’ in question, there was no ‘Israel,’ so he must be talking about The Jews. This looks like ‘classic’ anti-semitism: Jesus and the Christians had it right, while the Jews (that depraved bunch) had it wrong.
Finally:
Peace and free passage for the evacuating civilian population no longer protected by a state.
Gaarder does not consider the idea that the current Jewish residents of Israel might stay put after the anti-apartheid paradigm shift. Replacing one set of refugees with another solves nothing, it just reverses the problem. If he is saying that Jews are more suited to the refugee lifestyle than Palestinians, he is merely buying into the Old Testament tosh he refuted earlier.
Andrew Sullivan at Time Magazine’s Daily Dish says that the author Jostein Gaarder is an anti-semite, quoting an article by Gaarder in the Norweigan Aftenposten.
Sullivan claims that Gaarder is calling for the “obliteration of the state of Israel”, but on reading Gaardner in translation, I think that’s a serious misrepresentation of what he is trying to say. Gaardner repeatedly uses the word “apartheid” to describe Israel’s policies and structure. And if he, like many of us, sees an apartheid regime in Israel, then why should he not wish to call for its demise?
All too often “we do not recognize the state of Israel” is equated to mean “Jews into the sea”, or some variation thereof. When Hamas says it in their covenant, I think that’s a fair comparison… But there are many forms of non-recognition. A few months ago, I was chatting to a sixty-year old Palestinian woman, Ana, who used to live in West-Jerusalem. Her family was driven out of their house, without compensation. She fled to the Lebanon and then to Britain, and has no legal right to become a citizen of the state that currently surrounds her old house.
“Do you recognise the state of Israel?” I asked her.
“Why should I?” she replied, and I had no answer. If your house has been taken away in the name of a State, why should you then regard that State as legitimate? Of course Ana doesn’t recognise Israel, but that doesn’t mean she wants all the Jews out of the Middle-East, and she says as much.
She just wants her house back.
I think Gaarder uses the phrase in a similar manner. At each step, he declares the framework of the State of Israel to be immoral, and advocates a paradigm shift. The comparisons with South Africa are apt here. Why recognise and perpepuate the apartheid system, when you can have a Rainbow Nation? South Africa implemented a new constitution in 1994. We could therefore say that South Africa was destroyed and reborn when the change took place. But no-one was driven into the sea. The whites were considered ‘liberated’ as much as the blacks. They all stayed where they were, political equals with their neighbours.
Andrew Sullivan chooses to sneer at Gaarder’s (admittedly divisive) rhetoric. In doing so, he completely fails to address the key question: “Is there apartheid in Israel?”
From the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (2003)
The Committee reiterates its concern that the “excessive emphasis upon the State as a ‘Jewish State’ encourages discrimination and accords second-class status to its not-Jewish citizens.
When the state denies Arab Bedouin access to water and healthcare, while their Jewish neighbours live in in luxury, then something is wrong. When American or British Citizens, born and bred in The West, can make alyia at a moments’ notice, but Ana cannot visit the town of her birth (let alone be recognized as a citizen of that town), then something is wrong. When universities favour Jewish students over Arab students of other faiths, then something is wrong. When the state builds walls through school playgrounds in the name of ‘security’, and children are legitimate terrorist suspects, then something is wrong.
Should a country called ‘Israel’ exist? Sure thing – the millions of Jewish people who already live between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan should be allowed to live where their heart dicates. However, it must be achieved without recourse to an aparthied system. Otherwise, it is not worth the effort, and we would be right to shun it, as Jostein Gaarder advocates. It is inequality which defines the current status quo. Primacy should not awarded to one group over the other. If the current system does this, then it is unviable, and unworthy of support in its current form. This, I beleive, is the only genuinely pro-semitic position. Everything else is unwitting prejudice.
The religious idea that a group of people have a divine right to the Holy Land, can never be part of the philosophy of a state – be it Jewish or Islamic. The messy conflicts, and sticky diplomacy which will guarantee the safety of everyone in the region, can only begin once this central tenet has been agreed upon. We count the bangs as we wait.
Update
I’ve made some more comments on Gaarder’s problematic essay.
Now something more sober. Browsing a post by Curious Hamster, I thought I would begin the week by reiterating a point I struggled to make (or rather, reposing a question I have yet to answer) in my first ‘proper’ post on this blog, about what we do when we’re constrained by our own rules.
In war, as in a game of chess, you are sometimes manoevred into positions where you have to take up counter-intuitive positions. In the classic board game, you might find your opponents Queen or rook open for the taking. In the short term, its a good move, and you award yourself a ‘!’. In the long term, however, your bold and decisive move leaves your peices in the wrong place. Ultimately you find yourself in a stalemate, and those examining the game mark your moves with a ‘?’.
This, it seems to me, is what is occurring in this current Lebanese crisis. Attacks on civilians are justified on the basis that the evil Hezbollah are hiding among them. Short term logic. Instead, how about admitting that if Hezbollah have hidden amongst the civilians, it means we can’t bomb them. We (well, the Israelis, but current analysis would put us as their ally) have been outmanoevred here, and the decisive move by our ‘opponent’ was made a long time ago. Our response has not been to ackowledge that we need to defend against these moves, but to try and change the rules by which we play. But we made those rules for ourselves because of well-founded humanitarian reasons. To change them now is to admit the defeat of those ideals. We might be taking a beating now, in the short term. But it is something we have to acknowledge if we want to emerge as ultimate victors over these cheaters.
There is more than one way to defend against Hezbollah’s rockets. Ditto the ways in which we might defend against the wider Al Q’aeda threat. I’m not sure what an alternative strategy might be, but do I know the current strategy is not working.
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Midnight, and a busker on Edinburgh’s Cowgate cannot believe his luck. Two drunk young ladies with belts for skirts decide to whip up some loose change from the punters, by performing an erotic dance for passers-by. While the guitarist strums rock classics, badly, they rub their arses on each others breasts, and (with practiced ease) bite each others buttocks. The crowd is three deep. The minge of the fringe.
We walk on to the Smirnoff Underbelly, and into the popular late night comedy review ‘Spank’. They have a popular feature called ‘The Naked Promo’ where one plucky Fringe performer can promote their show, on stage… but only if they are naked. An actor from the much trailed Bloggers takes the challenge, and we get to hear all about the show, while looking at his cock.
I think I’ve seen enough pubic hair for one night.