Posted by gabriele In his latest pearl of wisdom, published by the Los Angeles Times and the Irish Times, Theodore Dalrymple writes, “my prejudice developed late in response to events.” http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-dalrymple8jul08,1,3219734.story?ctrack=2&cset=true and http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/opinion/2007/0713/1184196342439.html I’m sure he’s too modest; it’s in fact impossible that much ignorance, racism, stupidity and prejudice can develop in so little time and much more training is required to make Dalrymple so blind to not understand his own words: “History is full of the most terrible examples of what happens when governments and peoples ascribe undesirable traits to minorities, yet it would also be folly to ignore sociological reality. All that is needed, then, to deal with the present situation is the wisdom of Solomon.” Solomon with all his wisdom would laugh at Dalrymple‘s ignorance of “sociological reality”. He writes: “The perpetrators do not bomb because of personal grievance but because they have allowed themselves to be gripped by a stupid, though apparently quite popular, ideology: radical Islam.” Robert Fisk wrote in 2005: "To go on pretending that Britain's enemies want to destroy "what we hold dear" encourages racism; what we are confronting here is a specific, direct, centralized attack on London as a result of a "war on terror" that Blair has locked us into. Just before the U.S. presidential elections, bin Laden asked: "Why do we not attack Sweden?" Lucky Sweden. No Osama bin Laden there. And no Tony Blair." Does Dalrymple think there's any link between what the UK and US’ governments have been doing in Afghanistan and Iraq (among other places) and terrorist acts in New York, London, Madrid, etc.? Does he think there is any link between what Israel (with the help of the US and UK) has been doing to Palestinians since the late '40s and those suicide bombers we always read in our newspapers? Not trying to justify violence but to understand, the only way rational beings can try to solve problems. Dalrymple’s racist rhetoric is used as a smokescreen serving the sick purposes of those responsible for this madness which killed already one million Iraqis, tens of thousands Afghanis and oppresses the Palestinian People with genocidal policies for more than fifty years. Dalrymple writes: “A friend who met me at the airport said something that must by now be true of many ordinary British people. Just as we used to wonder, on meeting Germans of a certain age, what they had done during the second World War, so she wondered, when she found herself next to a young Muslim on a bus or a train, what he thought of the various bombings perpetrated by his co-religionists and whether he might be a bomber. She found herself looking for the nearest exit...” Do Dalrymple and his friend ever wonder what that young Muslim could think of the “various bombings” in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine “perpetrated by” Dalrymple and his friend’s “co-religionists”? But of course it’s not the same, because while that young Muslim has nothing to do with those bombings in London, Dalrymple and his friend (as we all!) are surely morally responsible for our own government’s actions, paid for by our tax money. The great American writer James Baldwin wrote many years ago: "[T]his is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it. One can be, indeed one must strive to become, tough and philosophical concerning destruction and death, for this is what most of mankind has been best at since we have heard of man. (But remember: most of mankind is not all of mankind.) But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime." I am sure that the Los Angeles Times and the Irish Times that found space for Dalrymple’s hate pornography will be so gracious to accommodate this short letter. Thank you. Kind regards,
on July 13, 2007, 1:55 pm
86.143.158.116
Dear Editor,
Gabriele Zamparini
London
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