RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/12/20/the-cult-of-the-keffiyeh/

This is an extract from Brendan O’Neill’s book, After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation. You can buy it on Amazon now.

Whatever happened to the sin of cultural appropriation? This ideology of rebuke held sway on university campuses for years. The idea was that no member of the majority group should ever appropriate the cultural habits of a minority group. It’s offensive, apparently. It’s racial theft. It’s parody disguised as authenticity. White men wearing their hair in dreadlocks, white women in kimonos, gay men twerking or using black slang – all of it was damned as ‘stealing’, the co-option of the culture of the powerless by the powerful. And yet today, visit any campus in the West and everywhere you look you’ll see white youths dressed as Arabs.

Keffiyeh chic is all the rage. You’re no one unless you have one of these black-and-white scarves that are widely worn in the Palestinian territories. Student radicals, celebrities, Guardian-reading dads on their way for a macchiato – everyone has a keffiyeh draped over their shoulders. It has become the uniform of the politically enlightened, the must-have of the socially aware. They’re ‘all over Europe’, as one writer says; every time there’s a ‘pro-Palestine’ demo you’ll be confronted by ‘a sea of these garments’. Even the mega-rich are getting in on the act – Balenciaga once made a high-end keffiyeh that will set you back £3,000. But then, you can’t put a price on virtue-signalling.

Is this cultural appropriation? If Beyoncé wearing a sari and Kim Kardashian styling her hair in braids can induce a frenzy of censure among social-justice warriors – as both of those things bizarrely did – then why not bourgeois Westerners pulling on a scarf that has its origins among the nomadic Bedouin tribes of the Arab peninsula? If a student who dons a Mexican sombrero can be branded ‘culturally indifferent’, then why not a student who wraps himself in Arab cloth? As Julie Burchill has wondered, ‘In an age when putting on a sombrero for 60 seconds during a drunken night out at an all-you-can-eat taco bar can be taken as proof of conquistador-level evil… why do these same students swan around wearing the keffiyeh?’.

The keffiyeh wearers will say their scarves are about solidarity, not stealing. They’re showing their support for a political cause, not purloining Palestinian culture. The reason this scarf is ‘worn by non-Palestinians across the world’ is ‘as a sign of solidarity and allyship’, insists Salon. But since when did solidarity involve fancy dress? The 1960s students who protested against the Vietnam War did not wear bamboo conical hats in mimicry of the Vietnamese peasants who so often felt the heat of America’s bombs and napalm. Western supporters of the Quit India movement were not known for wearing white dhotis in the style of Mahatma Gandhi. Solidarity was expressed with words and actions, not imitation of style.

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https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/12/15/how-the-left-fell-to-authoritarianism/

We all know what authoritarians are when it comes to politics, don’t we? They are the people who enjoy telling others what they can and can’t do or say. They are reactionaries, the ‘hang ’em and flog ’em’ types. At worst, they are ‘fascists’, a word deployed to describe the most heinous authoritarians. This epithet accords with the long-standing assumption that the nastiest folk in politics are right wing.

Anyone who’s been paying attention to the news since the ‘great awokening’ of nearly 10 years ago will appreciate that this stereotype is now hopelessly outdated. As the recent inquisition of the Telegraph journalist Allison Pearson (regarding a reputedly ‘offensive’ post on social media) has laid bare, the forces of authoritarianism today have their origins most assuredly in the ‘progressive’ or ‘woke’ left. The urge to bully wrongthinkers and silence the views of others now invariably comes from those who think of themselves as most compassionate.

American psychologist and sociologist Luke Conway has been observing this development for some time. Like countless others who write about this topic, he is of the traditional centre left. While he hasn’t so much moved to the right, he has seen how the left in the US and beyond has drifted to the extreme. Seduced by voguish and outlandish narratives about race and gender, it has adopted an absolutist mindset that has little patience for disagreement. Conway’s new book, Liberal Bullies: Inside the Mind of the Authoritarian Left, does exactly as it says on the tin, so to speak. It explains how today’s autocratic spirit derives from erstwhile liberals.

‘You will see authoritarian leftists censor, bully, silence, harass and destroy their enemies’, says Conway. Conway points to the example of Mumford & Sons co-founder Winston Marshall, whose decision to speak out against Antifa in 2021 led to his social ostracism and eventual departure from the band.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-civilized-world-seems-tired-of-its-civilization

“Israel is pressed, it is a suffering country,” a sympathetic visitor says with a sigh. International organizations, the intellectual Left, and much of Europe are arrayed against it. American support is shaky. The Israelis are fighting for their existence, perhaps for liberal democracy itself, but “at this uneasy hour,” our pilgrim laments, “the civilized world seems tired of its civilization, and tired also of the Jews. It wants to hear no more about survival.”

The traveler was Saul Bellow, the year 1975. A few months later, Bellow published a diary of his visit, To Jerusalem and Back (1976), his only full-dress performance of nonfiction. He took a stand for civilization in that book and elsewhere, and his claim to lasting literary fame has suffered for it. But the link between Israel and civilization is real, and Bellow’s account of his journey to the Holy Land resonates today.

In this book, as in Bellow’s novels, what strikes you first are the character sketches. On the flight east, Bellow sits next to “a young Hasid” (“his neck is thin, his blue eyes goggle, his underlip extrudes”) who offers to pay him $15 a week, for life, to eat kosher. Bellow befriends a masseur, “both priestlike and boyish,” whose hands “have the strength that purity of purpose can give.” He marvels at how a scholar whom he knows, “a vegetarian, a pacifist, a Quaker—most odd, most unhappy, a quirky charmer,” could “fall in love with militant Islam.” Though Bellow’s run-ins with the likes of Yitzhak Rabin and Henry Kissinger may be of some historical interest, his portraits of humbler men are where his talent shines.

To Jerusalem and Back is structured—if that’s the word—around walks and conversations, drop-ins and dinners, stray thoughts and sense impressions. The book is unruly and disjointed. A review in the New York Times called it “spotty” as a travelogue: “a sharp if patched-together picture of contemporary Israel.” Sometimes, Bellow the tourist is a sedate creature: “The Valley of Jehoshaphat, with its tombs. A narrow road, and on the slopes acres and acres of stone.” Sometimes he almost seems to suffer from the syndrome for which his destination is famous: “The light of Jerusalem has purifying powers . . . I don’t forbid myself the reflection that light may be the outer garment of God.” In all events, the sights and sounds are just a backdrop. Bellow’s attention returns to politics—to the existential dread of an Israel unsettled by the Yom Kippur War.

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

In 1970 the novelist Saul Bellow, a titan of American letters, published his masterpiece Mr Sammler’s Planet.

Its eponymous hero is a Holocaust survivor who, in a decaying New York City, sees into the heart of things. A calculated attack on a range of liberal pieties, the novel caused intense controversy. Sammler, and thus Bellow himself, was accused of being misanthropic, racist, sexist, and reactionary.

Not surprisingly, liberal literary America was outraged and affronted. Equally unsurprisingly, the book was brandished as proof that Bellow had “moved to the right”. This is, of course, the standard denunciation of irredeemable evil that has sunk countless reputations and careers on the jagged rocks of elite disgust — but is so often instead proof positive of the denounced individual’s clarity of vision and moral purpose.

So it was with Saul Bellow. Sammler is a latter-day prophet, seeing with his one functioning eye straight through liberal hypocrisy to call out civilisational decay.

What now seems all too familiar was all there in the novel — racial prejudice, sexual violence, civil disobedience and a no-holds-barred capacity to give offence, it seemed, to as many hyper-sensitive groups as possible. The premonition of today’s culture wars is striking.