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.
Archive
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.
Update: more from Solomonia here.
From the moment he became the international community’s envoy to the Middle East, there was common agreement that Tony Blair was in for a tough challenge, with the distinct risk of a thankless result.
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.
The urge to draw analogies, many of them of dubious merit, between the present situation of the Palestinian people and the past one of the Jewish people seems to be too strong for many commentators to resist. A case in point is Gustavo Faverón Patriau, a Peruvian academic and literary critic who teaches in the United States. His blog focuses on literature and culture and is reputed to be one of the most widely read on these topics in the Spanish-speaking world.
José Pablo Feinmann is a philosopher. He is also an enthusiastic supporter of the present government of Argentina, just as he was of the previous one, and writes articles about its activities and policies for the newspaper Pagina/12. He has also written several novels, plays and collections of film criticism and is a regular on television programmes dealing with cultural matters. A better example of the term “public intellectual” you’d look hard to find.
