Unbearable
Bitchslapping the Continent
January 17, 2009 42 comments
Elizabeth Wurtzel is glad she is not in Europe:
Excepting a business trip I took to England, Scotland and Ireland in early 2002, I have not been to Europe since 9/11. It’s become an unbearable place to be.
How does she know?
The same way she knows that Chomsky’s political books are about “the distinctions between Leninist and Trotskyite philosophy.”
Over here in the US I’ve been seeing references to an imaginary entity called “Eurabia” recently: these usually head anti-Islamic screeds that claim that Europe, once again, has Fallen to the Powers of Darkness and that only America holds the flickering light of hope. I’m wondering if Wurtzel’s article is informed by the same spirit (and if she’s quite sure that anti-semitism is the word she’s looking for).
…and then, of course, there’s the question of whether England, Scotland and Ireland are in Europe.
Whoa Nellie, even after subjecting us to Mel, this is something else… most of the tormented sentences and contradictions speak for themselves, but some stood out.
‘As it is my good fortune to be American…’
American and author of a bestselling memoir… some people have all the luck. What was your memoir called again?
‘But to communicate with anyone I think of as rightminded (and left-leaning) in any other part of the world is to experience the purest antisemitism since the Nazi era. In fact, in Europe right now, it is de rigueur to liken the current regime in Israel with the Nazi party’
If I follow the ‘logic’ of these sentences, then they think they are paying Israel a compliment. Or maybe it’s just ‘de rigueur’ in a post-modern French, trendy kind of a way.
‘Hamas and Hezbollah are thought by the French and British to be social welfare organisations’
Hezbollah… ran by Bono innit?
‘I am doing my best to understand the European perspective, or somehow excuse it.’
You would have to read the entire article to get that one. Still, I did find this quite interesting (and sad):
‘This, Derrida explained, is what it’s like to be Jewish: to know everyone around you is gifted, and to wish you could find a way out. Jews pride themselves on the over two hundred Nobel Prizes the group has won’
I have no interest in finding ‘a way out’ of my ethnic community (which has many parallels with the Jewish community) BECAUSE I DON’T HAVE THE FOGGIEST IDEA HOW MANY NOBEL PRIZES ‘WE’ HAVE WON!!!! I know ‘we’ bagged some for poetry (because I read it), but I tend not to take too much ‘pride’ in other people’s achievements.
Every time someone in my ethnic community wins a prize, a little part of me dies…
That is an astonishingly stupid and ignorant article.
This is a bit of a feeble gotcha. She could know that Europe is an unbearable place in to be the same way as I know that Gaza is an unbearable place to be: by reading and watching news reports. And maybe she’s right: if she truly believes that popular opposition to Israel’s attack on Gaza is motivated by anti-semitism, then it might well be unbearable for her to be surrounded by it.
I have to agree with Gareth: dumb and prejudiced though they sound, the sentences you highlight are comparatively sane by the standards of the article. Then again, it hardly seems worth considering the rest of it. There isn’t the bracing flat-out lunacy of Melanie, just meandering self-pity untainted by engagement with empirical reality. There isn’t even a purported argument on offer — just goggle-eyed assertion.
I find it more interesting to consider why this article appeared at all. What is it about writing a self-absorbed memoir fifteen years ago that grants an apparently undistinguished lawyer a CiF platform for her inane political speculations? Are best-selling authors by definition worth hearing on world affairs?
Are best-selling authors by definition worth hearing on world affairs?
Yes.
(this has been another edition of Easy Answers To Silly Questions, brought to you by Absolutely Every Piece Of Media Ever, Especially The Ones Who Publish Whatever Embarrassing Right-Wing Toss About The Muslims Martin Amis And Ian McEwan Have Written This Week.)
Yes, I had Amis in mind. But Amis had some history of non-fiction writing not entirely focused on himself. As far as I know, Wurtzel has nothing apart from Prozac Nation. I had the idea that irrelevantly qualified authors seeking newspaper promotion of their political views needed literary pretensions vaguely proportional to the seriousness of their chosen subject. Wurtzel seems to fail even this test.
Still, it’s good news for the people of Gaza that it is apparently impossible to so much as leave your hotel suite in Europe without people immediately demanding you listen to them discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Some other European Union, on some other continent has been imposing a blockade on Hamas since the 2006 elections. Could these Europes be related?
On another note, I think it is long overdue that the gross abuse of Godwin’s Law be challenged.
Godwin’s Law may even have ceased to serve any useful purpose in improving discourse. It seems now to be used mainly to curtail discussion of the human rights violations of governments.
‘There isn’t the bracing flat-out lunacy of Melanie’
Dunno, I think Mel would approve of the ‘Brits and French think Hezbollah and Hamas are social welfare organisations’ line.
‘I find it more interesting to consider why this article appeared at all. What is it about writing a self-absorbed memoir fifteen years ago that grants an apparently undistinguished lawyer a CiF platform for her inane political speculations? Are best-selling authors by definition worth hearing on world affairs?’
Frankly I would say that Wurzel’s article is about median in terms of unfounded, confused arguments in CiF. Brian Brivati’s review of the drama ‘The House of Saddam’ was actually worse:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comm.....ini-series
‘If you took this series as a text on international history…’ (quite)
Incidentally, an unspeak term (or maybe it’s just plain bullshit) that might be interesting to look at in future would be ‘Guardian Reader’. Given that The Guardian is turning into the British equivalent of the New York Times, I find it odd how often the phrase is used by ‘muscular liberal’ tories who barely differ from their Guardian counterparts.
‘The Ones Who Publish Whatever Embarrassing Right-Wing Toss About The Muslims Martin Amis And Ian McEwan Have Written This Week’
Again, I think it is inaccurate to say that Amis and McEwan are ‘right wing’; it is more that they spout the received wisdom and ‘muscular liberalism’ that is the staple of columnists in both openly conservative papers and the, ahem, ‘left-wing’ papers like The Independent/ The Guardian.
I actually have grudging respect for the ‘paleocons’ who it seems to me are authentic voices of traditional conservative values of scepticism about government, even though I disagree on other things. The American Conservative is possibly the most literate and well-researched political magazine I’ve come across (and in America it apparently attacked Bush more than most ‘liberal’ publications). And is anyone else disturbed that Peter Hitchens now seems to be the most vocal defender of civil liberties in Britain?
I dunno, I feel that the paleocons are only good on the foreign policy, on account of being isolationists. Which in the current climate is the equivalent of being anti-imperialist. It’s just a coincidence. A broken clock is right twice a day.
I agree with Alex that “Godwin’s Law” is now overused. It has been accepted quite uncritically and probably even spinelessly. If someone acts in a way that can be compared to Hitler or the Nazis then it is acceptable to propose the comparison without hoots of “Gotcha!” and refusals to consider the evidence further. In fact Godwin formulated his law in order that valid comparisons should not be devalued by trivial overuse. Even Britain’s own Sir Gerald Kaufman has made the connection in Parliament (in relation to Gaza) and he’s the son of Holocaust survivors. He says of the Israelis, “They’re not simply war criminals; they’re fools.” There’s a YouBeaut video here.
What an odd, little ramble, stopping only for detours into ignorance and miscomprehension.
“as the anti-American feelings in light of the Iraq war have mingled with antisemitism to a point where they are indistinguishable”
You may think, from this, that she cannot tell the difference, but the sorry truth is she can, just she cannot write well enough to tell us so.
What about the word ‘antisemitism’ itself? I know, I know. But it’s getting ridiculous, as most people who throw this word around seem to hold a deep resentment towards the Semites and I don’t believe they really consider themselves a part of this group. And thus doesn’t it manifest ‘unspeak’, and shouldn’t they be asked to give up the word?
You know, I’ve been imagining what would happen if Israel did lose a major war against its neighbours and ceased to exist. I’ve been wondering how the pro-Israeli gentiles who throw the accusation of anti-Semitism about so liberally would react to boatload after boatload of shit-scared Jewish refugees coming to their borders and demanding political asylum.
And I’m glad Elizabeth Wurtzel is not in Europe, too.
Prozac Nation is a good account of depression, but even in that book she’s utterly full of herself. I think that ego might be the explanation for her piece as much as anything else – who are all these stupid people who don’t see things the way she does?
I must say I quite admire her for going to law school. I’m sure the world would be a better place if more writers did that. And I’m also glad to have found out that she once met David Foster Wallace while wearing a silver lamé leotard. (Although probably more writers should not wear silver lamé leotards.)
I must say I quite admire her for going to law school. I’m sure the world would be a better place if more writers did that.
I’m not sure the implications are clear. Does this better place contain more lawyers, or more literate lawyers, or fewer writers, or writers with less free time, or writers with more legal expertise, or some combination of these?
All of the above!
Wurtzel may be a bit of an idiot in general, but she happens to be right – Europe /has/ become an unbearable place to be. My evidence is empirical (I’m a Jewish Israeli, I live in Europe), so I find it more cogent to judge this particular statement on the basis of “does it fit observed reality” rather than “is it lucidly and legitimately expressed”. But of course that would disqualify it from making an appearance on this blog…
To the point about Godwin’s law and comparing Israelis to Nazis: I’ve been following the coverage of the Gaza conflict closely, as you may well imagine, and I’ve seen plenty of “he who smelt it dealt it” style attempts to pre-empt such accusations by auto-Godwinating the Godwinators, as it were. You know the sort I mean: the “why can’t anybody say anything bad about Israel without being accused of antisemitism” straw man argument that frames sixteen paragraphs of bad things being said about Israel. Quite often the bad tings are true and sometimes they’re even justified, but one does so wish that the commentator didn’t feel the need to bolster his opinions with this sort of tacit claim to moral courage (it’s ever so much sexier to write about something that’s dangerous and controversial, even when it’s not).
And what I’m especially disappointed by is that this particular kind of Unspeak is not discussed in these worthy pages; a bit of bias that’s more predictable than not, but that still manages to cause me a pang of sadness. Hamas is not an organisation that’s famous for shying away from propaganda and melodramatic rhetoric, but their assaults on truth and reason are mentioned only in a footnote, and only as an aside. That’s exactly the kind of thing that makes Europe “unbearable” – the feeling one gets that the demands of intellectual probity apply to one side only, as well as the rest of the weight of moral and political responsibility. I’d be able to handle the two latter better, I think, if the former was not so much in evidence.
but their assaults on truth and reason are mentioned only in a footnote
Also not criticized often enough: propaganda and melodramatic rhetoric of the Vietcong, Belarus partisans, and 1572 Parisian Huguenots.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n02/sieg01_.html
Thanks for proving my point, Steven:
— “Everyone seems to have forgotten that Hamas declared an end to suicide bombings and rocket fire when it decided to join the Palestinian political process, and largely stuck to it for more than a year.”
So, they were small suicide bombs and mini-missiles, then?
— “[…]when Hamas – brutally, to be sure – pre-empted this violent attempt to reverse the result […]”
Wah-hay for the doctrine of pre-emption! We all love it when the US claims to use it, don’t we?
I thought this blog was here to highlight bias, illogic and implicit propaganda wherever they are found. Which I took to mean that, when it comes to abuse of rhetoric, what’s sauce for the gander should be sauce for the goose. Silly me.
Or is it that I lack the necessary street cred, established as it is by conspicuous displays of Condemning Israel’s Actions(tm)?
Well, it appears to be your position that criticism of pro-Israeli rhetoric is impermissible unless accompanied by an exactly similar amount of condemnation of pro-Palestian rhetoric, so you ought to be constrained by the converse if you are sincere about the rule. I commend to you in this regard the discussion of “balance” in Unspeak.
One of the problems seems to be that the same imaginary guy promised exclusive use of the same playground to two different children.
So the Israelis and their supporters and the Palestinians and their supporters are jostling for moral superiority by competing for greater victimhood.
I like to remember that “the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment [happy birthday Robbie Burns] asserted the fundamental importance of human reason combined with a rejection of any authority which could not be justified by reason”* and that, as belief in the existence of any “god” is not justified by reason, nor is any authority that might spring from such a “god” justified by reason.
The question is not whether the Israelis or the Palestinians deserve exculpation by dint of some historical or biblical-theological exceptionalism. The question is, are people going around killing other people and are you opposed to that?
For my part I note that Israelis have been killing a lot of children and other people. I am opposed to that. The US killed a lot of people in Iraq. I was opposed to that. Hamas has killed people. I am opposed to that.
What I object to is that, if I am opposed to people killing other people and I note that people are killing other people, I am told that I ought not say so in the particular case that it is the Israelis who are doing the killing because they have a Special Dispensation, not only from their imaginary friend in the sky but also because they are still Upset about their History. It is very understandable that they are upset about episodes of Jewish history but their upset doesn’t confer on Israel special permission to kill a whole lot of other people. (It would be like, I don’t know, George Bush killing a whole lot of Iraqis because some Saudi Arabians flew planes into buildings in New York, because, well, hell, you gotta kill someone. Nor, in the same way, does it give Hamas or anyone else any similar permission.
It is just the same if I see a bully in the schoolyard. I will not refrain from intervening simply because the bully has a note from his mother explaining that he is a troubled child who should be cut some slack because his uncle abused him when he was little and anyway his grandfather told him he owned the schoolyard.
*Wikipedia
My evidence is empirical (I’m a Jewish Israeli, I live in Europe)
You use the word “empirical.” I do not think it means what you think it means.
Steven, how did we get from “manages to cause me a pang of sadness” to ” impermissible”? My opinions seem to have trvelled quite a distance between what I said and how you interpreted it, could you explain what has provided the motive force for that movement please?
meatwork: the “guy” in question is hardly imaginary, and “his” hand is in evidence in other territorial disputes in the world. Ask the Kashmiris. The rest of your argument is frankly a straw man, or at best an argument against an opinion that is not expressed either here or in any of the respectable media outlets (i.e. that all comment on casualties caused by Israel ought to be suppressed). All I personally am lamenting is the disparity in the standard of intellectual probity applied to discussion of the two points of view, especially as regards the carte blanche that comes with the kind of “street cred” that I, as an Israeli, cannot possess: the tacit permission to use inflammatory, emotive, unhelpful language to stir up passion rahter than illuminate a difficult issue. This lament was inspired by the celerity with which Elizabeth Wurtzel landed in hot water on this blog while her many (equally hysterical) antagonists in the Guardian CiF pages got off scot-free. One concrete example, one concrete opinion. That’s all.
Oh, and by the way, “empirical”:
Wikipedia: The word empirical denotes information gained by means of observation, experience, or experiment
Dictionary.com: derived from or guided by experience or experiment
Merriam-Webster: originating in or based on observation or experience
Since my opinion of what it’s like to live in europe is based on observations made as part of my experience of living in Europe, where’s the problem with what I said, Cynic?
And yet my criticism of Wurtzel was merely that she was talking confidently about how it feels now to live on a continent that she hasn’t visited for six years. You will appreciate, of course, how absurd an assumption it is that anyone I don’t explicitly criticize on my blog is therefore given my “tacit permission” to do or say whatever they like.
More generally, it does indeed appear to be your position that criticism of pro-Israeli rhetoric “causes you a pang of sadness” or inspires a “lament” unless it is accompanied by an exactly similar amount of condemnation of pro-Palestian rhetoric. I commend to you in this regard the discussion of “balance” in Unspeak.
I’m intrigued by how Wikipedia is being used as a standard reference here: my feeling is that this is universal practice among US undergrads and in private discourse among grad students, but still frowned on in actual term papers. Is there some social positioning involved in using it on this forum, or am I just 6 months behind the times and unaware that it’s become the de facto reference in all fora?
All hysterical outbursts are not the same. There are good reasons why people might get hysterical, in which case one tends to sympathize. The narcissistic hissy fits, OTOH, do deserve mocking.
There’s simply no symmetry here, no equivalence, no “two points of view”, nothing like that.
This lament was inspired by the celerity with which Elizabeth Wurtzel landed in hot water on this blog while her many (equally hysterical) antagonists in the Guardian CiF pages got off scot-free.
Is there some convention that when discussing a online column with which one takes issue, one must also discuss and take issue with those who have posted comments on it?
Richard — my own feeling is that, though I would never cite Wikipedia in a book, it’s often convenient to link to it in a blog or comment when invoking some general idea or fact that looks appropriately sourced — though I take it as understood that any particular Wiki entry to which appeal is made is open to challenge and may indeed be cited along with a proviso in the first instance that it is not necessarily reliable (as was the case here).
The word definition from Wikipedia cited at #29 here is rubbish, of course: “empirical” does not “denote information”.
— “There’s simply no symmetry here, no equivalence, no “two points of view”, nothing like that.”
Ironically, you’re the one who’s created a kind of symmetry, by inverting the hackneyed old “no partner for peace” argument so beloved of right wing Israeli politicians and applying it to Israel itself. Israeli opinion, or even (as is actually the case in this particular thread) non-anti-Israeli opinion, is not worth engaging with, according to what you say above.
Furthermore, because there is no valid point of view on the other side, any anti-Israeli diatribe gets a free pass from being scrutinised for Unspeak. I have to confess that I don’t quite see the causality here, but it’s at least cogent.
It’s cogent, that is, as long as the sum total of one’s intentions are to nail some morally acceptable colours to a mast. That’s not going to be good enough for me; I have family, friends, memories, as well as consience and personal integrity at stake here. I want to talk about positions that can be made to work on the ground in the Middle East, not positions that are politically sexy from a safe haven here in the UK.
It’s tempting to wish that Israel simply didn’t exist, but it does. It’s easy to say it was a mistake that it had ever been created, but it was. It’s tempting to dream that those pesky refugees from WWII (mentioning the H word in this context has become bad manners recently) just had somewhere else to go, but they didn’t. So these are the realities we have to work with, and in the context of those I, at least, don’t have the luxury of denying anyone a point of view or a right to voice an opinion.
Which, despite some unfavourable interpretations on my assumed, apparent, implicit etc. etc. opinion made further up this thread, I’m not doing. Everyone who criticizes Israel has a right to their public platform. What they don’t have an unlimited license for is talking bloody rubbish, because we’ve got ample bloody rubbish being talked right on our own doorstep, thankyouverymuch; if you guys really want to help the Palestinians, make yourselves useful by either a) talking some sense, or b) taking to task everyone on all sides who’s spouting nosense, or, preferably, both.
Except of course, according to you there is only one side, so that’s not going to happen, so Israelis are going to continue to be suspicious and contemptuous of partisan and biased international public opinion, which will cause them to go on throwing out the baby of good advice (let journalists and observers in, dammit) with the murky bathwater of namecalling (Nazis, genocidal maniacs) and act in defiance of their own long term interests. At which point everyone’s opinions of them will be confirmed, the name calling will be post factum justified, and everyone can sleep soundly knowing that they’ve been right about the other guys all along.
I’m sorry if my attempts to rock that particular boat seem immoral or perverse to you. I hoped, here of all places, to find some partners in clear thinking that could help me develop my opinions on this topic rather than stonewall me and use my words to reinforce their own sense of moral superiority; but I guess that was naive, and also unfair. It’s natural – and right – for you to care more about who’s right and who’s wrong than to strive towards something like a workable solution, because in reality your internal sense of justice is the only part of you that is directly impacted by the situation. It’s left for me, and people who, like me, want to make a case they can campaign for peace with back home in Israel, to work out how to make that case while swimming in the shallow pools of those who agree with us anyway (since among those who don’t, such as yourself, we can’t develop a dialogue by dint of not having a point of view).
I commend to you in this regard various past entries on this blog, and also Chapter 4 of Unspeak.
Since my opinion of what it’s like to live in europe is based on observations made as part of my experience of living in Europe, where’s the problem with what I said, Cynic?
The difference between anecdote and data. Whilst I’m sure your experiences are pertinent, this does not mean they are either representative of the one true observable reality, as you suggest, or even able to be generalised as such.
It is fun playing Dictionary Semantics though, isn’t it?
I commend to you in this regard various past entries on this blog, and also Chapter 4 of Unspeak.
Alas, that parting shot of TheLady’s, then, seemed not to be based upon observation or experience. So much for Mirriam-Webster!
Can you point me in the direction of the ones you’re thinking of, please? My original comments were motivated by the fact that I used the search function on the blog to look for just such part entries, but couldn’t find any.
Not really, no.
Actually, no, I won’t, since I don’t agree with the premise that the validity of any criticism of pro-Israeli-violence rhetoric depends on their existence. But such entries are to be found if you’re interested in finding them. (I have sort of let the cat out of the bag as to the location of Chapter 4 of Unspeak, though, haven’t I?)
But a workable solution has been known for decades, spelled out a million times in hundreds of languages and dialects: return of the refugees and end of the occupation; some criminal prosecutions and some serious remorse would be nice too, of course, but no phony “campaigns for peace” please. Once that is done, sure, by all means, let’s start denouncing anti-Israeli diatribes, but before that? Why?