The Subversive Hebrew Language
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
Alice Walker has joined fellow Hamas flotilla writers, Henning Mankell and Iain Banks in boycotting the Hebrew language and banning their books from being translated into the 4,000-year-old Zionist language. This move has gotten more attention, because, unlike Henning Mankell and Iain Banks, people have actually heard of Walker, if only because they were forced to read her in school.
As punishments go, preventing Israelis from reading The Color Purple seems more like a blessing than a curse. If only Amos Oz and David Grossman could be similarly convinced to follow through on their politics and begin boycotting the Hebrew language, the national IQ would be better for it.
Walker, Mankell and Banks (possibly the world’s worst law firm) have every right to pick up their placards and boycott one of the world’s oldest languages. When Wagner directed the work of Jewish composers, he reportedly immediately discarded the gloves that he wore during the onerous task. Perhaps Walker and the Gaza gang could do likewise, allowing the translation only so long as the laptop and printers that actually transform their words into the cursed Hebraic are swiftly thrown out afterward.
“We have to explain to ourselves the involuntary repellence possessed for us by the nature and personality of the Jews,” Wagner wrote in “Das Judenthum in der Musik”, “so as to vindicate that instinctive dislike which we plainly recognize as stronger and more overpowering than our conscious zeal to rid ourselves thereof.”