Amira Hass has an interview in Haaretz with writer/activist Arundhati Roy, whose hard-left politics I’ve critiqued a number of times on this blog.
What can I say … For someone so famously tough-minded, given to speaking out on the need for critical, hard-hitting journalism, Hass sure can throw softballs when she wants to. Reporting on Roy’s recent appearance in Italy, Hass writes: “The audience was thrilled by her words and the cameras delighted in her beauty.” You have got to be kidding.
The piece begins:
A month ago, as she faced a roomful of journalists in Italy, writer Arundhati Roy was asked what it is like to be an icon of peace-seekers around the world. “First of all,” she advised her audience, “always be suspicious of icons.”
On it goes, an avalanche of phony modesty from Roy. “Sometimes I think that there are two kinds of people, one that is comfortable with power and one that has a genetically antagonistic relationship to it,” she says, neatly summarizing her comically black-and-white view of the world.
Obviously, Roy’s opposition to injustice in India is not without merit. But Hass practically congratulates her for refusing to be a pacifist. Indeed, Roy has made her support for violent thugs posing as liberators abundantly clear, and she continues to do so:
… [Roy] tends to joke with her friends about how in “all the battles that we fight, if the people that we are supporting end up winning, we will be the first ones to be hanged from the nearest tree. The Maoists, the Islamic movement in Kashmir. Sometimes you are fighting on the side of people who have no space for you in their imagination. But that’s okay.”[…]
Good luck finding a political statement more cavalier than this. Roy, of course, would never have to live in a Maoist-controlled jungle, or a Kashmir under Sharia law, so yes, of course it’s okay.
Incredibly, Hass gives Roy a pass on supporting the fine work of the Islamic movement in Kashmir, which very probably includes this.
Now, there will be those who ask: why beat up on Roy when the Cheneyites are plotting to bomb Iran? Bigger fish to fry, no? Actually, we have even centrists like Fareed Zakaria making a very forceful case against striking Iran. Whether his arguments will prevail is another question. But there is no need at all to rally defensively behind a nutcase like Roy. There is, however, a need to acknowledge that Roy is indeed an icon, and to question how the bar came to be set so low on the left.
Not incidentally, Roy is a fawning acolyte of Noam Chomsky. Read this appreciation of the man and ask yourself if it bears any resemblance to critical thinking:
Even a quarter of the evidence he had compiled would have been enough to convince me. I used to wonder why he needed to do so much work. But now I understand that the magnitude and intensity of Chomsky’s work is a barometer of the magnitude, scope, and relentlessness of the propaganda machine that he’s up against. He’s like the wood-borer who lives inside the third rack of my bookshelf. Day and night, I hear his jaws crunching through the wood, grinding it to a fine dust. It’s as though he disagrees with the literature and wants to destroy the very structure on which it rests. I call him Chompsky. [via.]
What to make of this bathos, except that it is part and parcel of Chomsky’s cultish reception over a great many years.
Thom Yorke, the immensely talented lead singer of Radiohead, said this in the August ’06 issue of Paste:
A big, formative thing for me, having left college, was reading Manufacturing Consent by [Chomsky and Ed Herman]. All these issues that were being knocked around at college and then someone just going, ‘boom — It’s like this!’ You’re never the same again because a light has been turned on and you’re like, ‘OK, I get it, now I get it.’…
Herman, by the way, has now turned from Srebrenica genocide revisionism to Rwanda genocide revisionism. In passing, he also argues that Ahmadinejad’s stated wish to have Israel wiped off the map “has been shown to have been a mistranslation of an expressed position favoring regime change from racist to non-racist state.” No such thing has been “shown.” According to scholar Fred Halliday, who speaks Persian, “[Ahmadinejad] … heartened many by his calls for the destruction of Israel (something he did indeed call for, despite claims by some inside and outside Iran that he was mistranslated: the words mahv bayad bashad [must be wiped out] leave no room for doubt).”
In the end, Thom Yorke’s quasi-religious belief in the veracity of Chomsky and Herman is not merely naïve but insidious. And so is Amira Hass’s adulatory portrait of Roy.
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