Israel

Literary Life

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(A break from the election, for those who can bear to tear themselves away from contemplating Tuesday’s Presidential Election, and the judicial murder of squirrels.)

I was briefly nonplussed when a question for me showed up on my message stack on Quora last week – what did I think of Sally Rooney’s not allowing her books to be translated into Hebrew or be published and distributed in Israel, and demanding that other authors insist on the same. All because of Israeli treatment of the poor, poor, pitiful Palestinians in Gaza. My initial reaction was – who the hell is Sally Rooney?
(Subsequent brief pause for a look-up and a review of sample chapters of her books on Amazon.) Oh, that’s … precious. An Irish millennial with popular literary credentials, much lauded in the correct circles, describing the landscape of a generational navel with exquisitely elaborate original prose of the sort much favored by jaded teachers of creative writing. Four books with pretty much the same plot, it would appear, noted as a significant voice of her generation – a kind of literary Lena Dunham. Also a fashionably self-proclaimed Marxist, which is weird because that type never actually chooses to live in a place currently being run under strict Marxist lines. Curious, that. More importantly for this discussion, a raving antisemite, or as I prefer to spell it in the interests of bald accuracy, a Jew-hater. As an aside, it has always struck me as a peculiarly Irish quality, to rush into a full-body embrace with any movement perceived to be an enemy of their enemy, on the somewhat questionable grounds that an enemy of your old enemy must therefore be an acceptable ally to you. (This explains how Southern Ireland remained a neutral in WWII, while radical IRA members collaborated with Nazi Germany at the time, and decades later took funding from Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi.)

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Quote of the Day

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Jacob Howland:

What Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iran, and the other Islamist enemies of Israel have forgotten is that God chose the Jews to be a light unto the nations. Dispersed throughout the world, their light seems small and weak when times are good, but shines most brightly in the deepest darkness. The attacks of October 7 have stirred in the Jews — Hasidic and atheistic; Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, and Sephardic; Indian, Chinese, Australian, and American — what Lincoln called “the mystic chords of memory”. Today, in an existential crisis that may turn out to be the denouement of the central drama of Western civilisation, these unwilling protagonists — the whole people of Israel — are determined to defend themselves and the light they carry.

He’s got a point.

Slow But Exceedingly Fine

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I see from various sources that the Israelis have finally done in one of Hezbollah’s senior-ranking terrorists, one Fouad Shakar, who had a multi-million-dollar bounty on his head for involvement in the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. The mills of justice may grind very slowly, but they eventually grind very fine. Well, he got to live more than forty years longer than the 241 Marines blown up in 1983, and I hope without much conviction that he spent every one of those years looking nervously over his shoulder. The Hezbollah organization was also behind the kidnapping, gruesome torture and murder of Americans in Lebanon in the 1980s, and the protracted hijacking of TWA 847 in the summer of 1985.

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Finishing School

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So, the recent fiery yet “mostly peaceful” pro-Hamas demonstrations of support on various university campuses making the fiery and “mostly peaceful” headlines over the last couple of weeks may yet have unfortunate results for the affected schools. This would be a consummation devoutly desired by those of us on the sort-of-conservative side of the political spectrum, who have viewed the increasing academic lunacy and dysfunction with concern and mistrust. Honestly, it’s long been obvious that there is a massive stench emanating from those ivy-hung quadrangles of higher learning. The tuition to attend them has been increasing at a breakneck rate for two or three decades, even above the rate of inflation, while the graduates of those institutions appear dumber and dumber and the ratio of administrative staff to student body approaches 1:1. Of late, even those graduates boasting diplomas from formerly respected colleges appear barely scathed by literacy, or any kind of practical, useful-to-the-working-world knowledge and skills at all. No wonder that an increasing number of 18 year olds are coldly, rationally considering the cost-to-benefit ratio and opting for a trade school or an apprenticeship.

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