Almost a century ago, the Nazis burned books by Jewish authors. Today, the publishing world is reintroducing the exclusion of writers on grounds of faith, nationality, or refusal to conform to new intellectual codes.
Books deemed “un-German” and “degenerate” by the Nazis, especially those written by Jews, were purged from bookstores and libraries on grounds of racial and intellectual superiority. This self-righteous effort to cleanse German thought has targeted Jewish luminaries such as Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Vicky Baum, whose works have been fully published. It was either banned or set on fire by Nazi storm troops.
Almost a century later, new efforts are underway to force Israeli writers into modern ideological obedience. Last week, more than 1,000 authors, including renowned Irish author Sally Rooney and award-winning Indian author Arundhati Roy, signed the letter It calls for a boycott of Israeli writers, publishers, book festival organizers and literary agencies that have not yet publicly condemned the “genocide” in Gaza.
A boycott like this is like licking your own ice cream cone, and if the signatories “the right side of history” is how Iran's Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei aptly described Western protesters defending groups like Hamas and Hezbollah last spring. The fact that such a literary boycott is both hypocritical and blatantly anti-Semitic is, of course, ignored by its supporters.
A statement supported by these writers proudly declared that this was the “largest cultural boycott of Israeli cultural institutions in history” and called on Israeli writers and literary organizations to “condemn Israel's genocidal apartheid regime.” , encouraging people to “keep their distance” and “affirm their fully protected rights.” Palestinian rights under international law, including the right of return. ”
In essence, the signatories of this statement publicly acknowledge to Israelis that the nation has no right to exist, thereby denying a religion that has for centuries desired a return to Zion. I hope that.
In the 1930s, Jewish writers in Germany had just been banned. Today, these Israelis have their religious and national identity denounced and are brutally told to distance themselves from their homeland or risk ostracism and condemnation. .
The hypocrisy of this statement is breathtaking. The most prominent of these authors has no record of similar intervention to protest China's treatment of the Uyghurs, an estimated 1 million of whom have been imprisoned in bona fide concentration camps, not fancy words. It is believed that
They include Russian writers who did not condemn the Kremlin's war in Ukraine, Afghan writers who refused to publicly criticize the Taliban's barbaric rule and policies, and more than 200,000 compatriots under the Assad regime since 2011. did not boycott Syrians who did not condemn the barbaric killing of .
Even more damning, this call for a boycott has nothing to do with improving the lives of innocent Palestinians. Rather, it aims to punish Israelis for being Jewish and send a clear message to Jews in Israel and elsewhere about the signatories' definition of good and bad Jews. Good Jews condemn the government of the Jewish state. Bad Jews believe that followers of the world's oldest religion have the right to self-determination and statehood.
This is a dangerous precedent that cleverly lends logic and respectability to hatred, masking more sinister intentions.
Bruce Hoffman is a senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security at the Council on Foreign Relations and a professor at Georgetown University. Casey Babb is a senior fellow at the National Security Institute in Tel Aviv, a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in Ottawa, and a special advisor at Secure Canada in Toronto.
