In 1975, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, one of the leading postwar film directors and writers in Germany, wrote a play entitled “Garbage, the City and Death.” Set in a desolate urban landscape of prostitutes and seedy nightclubs, the play cemented Fassbinder’s infamy largely because of the inclusion of a character named “The Rich Jew.”
Female passengers aboard the two ships travelling to “break the siege of Gaza,” be warned: should you get there, showing any flesh will be frowned upon by the Hamas masters of the territory.
Eamonn was saying in an earlier post that he hadn’t seen any left-wing demonstrations outside the Russian Embassy in Buenos Aires protesting events in Georgia. It’s a safe bet that there’s the same degree of invisibility in other metropolises.
This is a guest post by Contentious Centrist
The reactions to the death of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, as always when a controversial figure passes away, can be arranged along a continuum, from the most rhapsodic to the most satirical.
It looks like the fighting in the Caucasus is over, at least for the moment. It’s hard to know how many people have been killed or driven from their homes in recent days but the figure must run to thousands in the former category and tens of thousands in the latter. Let me mention a few of the things I haven’t seen in Buenos Aires in the last seven days.
Continue reading ‘Six Things I Haven’t Seen In The Last Week’
“While current hostility to Jews in the UK is frequently packaged as ‘progressive’ political comment, its origins are in traditional social attitudes that have been integral to Britain’s history for centuries.” So concludes Shalom Lappin in a new paper entitled “This Green and Pleasant Land: Britain and the Jews.”
Howard Rotberg is a Canadian novelist. I have to confess that I’m not familiar with his work, but this extraordinary story brings to mind one of the great novels of the twentieth century.
Just occasionally, the good guys win. On the 14th of November last year in Buenos Aires, a bus driver shouted racial insults at the son of a rabbi who wanted to board his vehicle then physically attacked him, smashing his glasses, before kicking him back on to the street. The youth found a policeman and told him what had happened and the policeman managed to stop the bus and arrest the driver.
French prosecutors have opened an investigation after T-shirts carrying anti-Semitic slogans were seen on sale in a shop in Paris.
This is a guest post by Contentious Centrist
Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s passing resulted in a torrent of comment, most of it complimentary, from journalists and bloggers. Even Christopher Hitchens’ tribute was uncharacteristically devoid of his usual irreverent contrariness.
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