Receiving the Jerusalem prize for literature Sunday night, novelist Ian McEwan criticized Israel in front of an audience that included Israeli President Shimon Peres. McEwan attacked Hamas’ “nihilism,” but said that Israel shared it: “It is nihilism to make a long-term prison camp of the Gaza Strip. Nihilism has unleashed a tsunami of concrete across the occupied territories." He also referred to “continued evictions and relentless purchases of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem, the process of the right of return granted to Jews but not to Arabs, the so-called facts on the ground of hardening concrete over the future, over future generations of Palestinian and Israeli children who will inherit the conflict and find it even more difficult to resolve than it is today."Israel has made a prison camp of Gaza? Better go back and read the Hamas Charter, Mr. Big Deal lefty author. (Dare I say the Jews are in line for some 'Atonement'?)
Monday, February 21, 2011
'A Pox on Both Your Nihilistic Houses'
That, in essence, is the message, of British moral relativist Ian McEwan:
The Leftist intelligentsia of the West has a long record of suppressing "inconvenient truths," whenever these do not conform to the politically correct paradigm in vogue at the time. For example, the Castro regime had to suppress a much larger guerrilla insurrection in 1960-66 than the one they had themselves conducted against Batista in 1956-59; the Castros were quite proud of the success of their anti-insurgency campaign, including the extreme methods--like the placing of large numbers of peasants in concentration camps to keep them from aiding the guerrillas--they employed to prevail. Cuban bookstores and libraries are replete with books by government authors that detail this nasty little war, and some of these are easily available in American university libraries, e.g., Norberto Fuentes' _Cazabandidos_; books have also been written by Cuban exiles, e.g., Enrique Encinosa's _Escambray: La Guerra Olvidada_, also widely available in university libraries in the U. S. Yet almost no Americans--and, I dare say, fewer Canadians--are even aware of this historical event so close to home. You see, it does not fit the approved paradigm of a mass uprising against Batista, followed by a socialist utopia of happy workers and peasants (marred only by the disaffection of the the ex-exploiters in the exile community).
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