HELP - I AM NOT A VICTIM

 

One of my heroes - William Wilberforce
 (Unfinished portrait by Thomas Lawrence)

It seems today that everybody must be a victim of some sort to have any credibility. The adoption of the word ‘queer’ seems a case in point. God forbid, that straight people like me should accept you as part of the mainstream if you are gay. It is important to feel rejected, to be part of a minority as part of your identity. Hence the – slightly desperate, I believe – adoption of ‘queer’ to show that you a part of you remains unconventional. And here was me thinking that gay people would be accepted if they drank sherry and listened to Radio 4.

 

If it is not sexuality, it is race. Last night I listened in as The Guardian explored its links with slavery. It turns that the paper was set up by people in Manchester, a bug cotton city, some of whom owned slaves and even applied for compensation once they gave up their part in this hideous trade in human beings. It also turns out that the British government did not clear the debts of slave-owner compensation until 2015. The slaves themselves were never compensated and are now complaining loudly and asking for their share of reparations.

 

I, incidentally, am not in favour of paying them for being victims. That does not mean that I defend the trade. However, I tend to take a ‘that was then, this is now’ attitude to injustice. Surely it is more important to see that people who have suffered in the past are treated well in our society than try to pay them back for wrongs which were done in the past and which, by definition, cannot be changed now. Giving them money for what was done centuries ago to their ancestors entails locking them into the ghetto, a phrase I use to glorify victimhood.

Despite the evils of slavery, there were benefits to be had from entry into white society, benefits they would probably not have enjoyed if they had remained in an uncolonized country. We are so determined to be victims that it is virtually impossible to admit that there were upsides as well as downsides to being introduced to western ways, even if they were accompanied by unacceptable attitudes of racial superiority. Remove the superiority and accept equality and previous victims can become leaders - as Obama demonstrated.

 

If you perpetuate victimhood – which reparations for slavery would surely do – you prevent people standing on their own feet and pulling themselves up by their bootstraps (and other clichés of self-reliance). You can recognise evils done in the past without locking those whose ancestors suffered from them into a perpetual cycle of grievance and victimhood. As, I have said that was then and this is now. Let’s treat people properly today rather than constantly harping back to historical injustices which may hold them back from success.

 

One of my heroes is William Wilberforce, who recognised the fundamental injustice of slavery and campaigned long and hard to abolish the slave trade in the British Empire. He was not a particularly left wing man and opposed trade unionism and other means of establishing equality for working men in his society, which earned him the enmity of men like the radical writer William Cobbett, who was notably silent on the evils of slavery and allowed his hatred of Wilberforce to hold him back from opposing them. (See here for more on this.)

 

Wilberforce rather became an evangelical Christian and, thinking that condemning people of a different skin colour to being second class citizens was fundamentally evil, saw it as his duty to oppose and try to abolish it. Hagiographic portraits of him ignore or deny his social conservatism because they want to portray him as fundamentally good, while ignoring his faults. Yet he did more than anyone else to destroy one major evil in our society because he was single-minded in his opposition to it, so we can surely forgive him some other mistakes.

 

Forgiveness does not loom large in the attitudes of many people today. I am highly sceptical of those who think that we have got it right while our ancestors had it wrong. Condemn those who come before you and you will surely be condemned in turn by those who come after. Recognise people in the past as flawed but human and you might be better at gaining respect for them. Wilberforce was able to move beyond the attitude that so many of his contemporaries shared – that slavery was inevitable, necessary and, therefore, acceptable.

 

The list of those who benefited from treating people of colour as second class citizens is long and depressing. George Frederick Handel and James Watt are two otherwise admirable men who profited from slavery. The first was distinctly Christian yet still invested in it and the second was a brilliant engineer who lacked Wilberforce’s stubborn humanity. The church itself profited from the institution and encouraged slaves to be obedient and not rebellious. They now accept their responsibility for supporting the trade in human flesh.

 

While I am not against acknowledging the sins of the past, I think that apologies should be reserved for personal mistakes and sins, which most of us are guilty of. The Guardian has insisted on apologising for what its founders did two hundred years ago and they should be congratulated on owning up to this. However, you cannot properly apologise for what they did unless you can show that you as an individual would have acted differently if you had been in their place. And that is, by definition, impossible to do unless you have a time machine handy.

Like Wilberforce, I am a straight, white male with a decent background and education and have, therefore, little opportunity to be a victim of any sort. I am quite happy with that and limit my apologies to things that I have done wrong personally - there are plenty of those - rather than to things that have been done wrong by people in my position from a similar background. Am I deprived by lacking qualifications to be a victim? Perhaps that is the ultimate deprivation of all.

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

FAILURE TO LAUNCH

The cover of my book on Jerusalem
Available from Amazon.co.uk: here

My latest projectabout the Parthenon Marbles has been a non-starter. They used to be called the Elgin Marbles after Lord Elgin who saved - or stole - them according to your point of view. My own feeling, for what it is worth, is that Elgin did not act from improper motives and was genuinely trying to preserve these wonderful carvings but also acted in a proprietorial manner which would be unacceptable today. A previous post by me on the Marbles issue is here.

My argument is that, at least when it comes to museums, access is more important than ownership for works of art such as the Parthenon Marbles. Sure, Elgin may have worked under the assumption that he could help himself to these sculptures. But that was then and this is now. Elgin did actually ask permission from the authorities to remove them but he did so from the Turks, who ruled Athens at the time, and not from the Greeks, who now want them back.

 

Whatever his motives were, Elgin’s actions led to the marbles which used to bear his name ending up on public display at the British Museum in London in a gallery especially designed and paid for by Lord Duveen, an art dealer with a good deal of money and possibly a guilty conscience. They remain there and most of the six and a half million visitors who go to the BM every year will see them – and pay nothing to do so, as the museum is free to enter. 

 

The British Museum has wonderful access in the heart of one of the most visited cities in the world. If they go to Athens – and the current Chair of the BM George Osborne seems to be expediting their return – they will end up in a good museum at the Acropolis but one that attracts less than a quarter of the visitors the BM does and which charges an entrance fee. If the marbles stay in London they can act as a great advertisement for ancient Greek culture.

 

This seemed to be a good reason to leave them here. In a sense, the Marbles do not belong to the Greeks of to the British. They really belong to the whole world, so why not display them in a setting that can show them to the world free of charge? It seemed like a strong argument and I was keen to write a book on the subject. Even if it was not published, it would give me something to occupy my time in the winter when I was not working as a tourist guide.

 

That was the theory. However, in practice I have been reluctant to put pen to paper. Why is this? Maybe my heart was not really in it. It might be that an unacknowledged remnant of post-colonial and imperial guilt is holding me back. A part of me thinks that we should keep the Marbles, while a part of me thinks that we should not have taken them away in the first place and maybe they should now be returned to the place that they came from originally.

 

I have always said that I make a decent living from being a tourist guide so that I do not have to worry that writing does not pay much – or at all, if I am being honest as I probably just about break even on writing when I take into account the amount I spend on my computer. Writing gives me something to do and I was proud to get a book published on William Blake’s poem Jerusalem, which was set to music and became a national anthem for England.

 

Researching the book was fairly easy as most of the people connected with it lived in Sussex where I was based. It was interesting to visit the cottage in Felpham where Blake (probably) wrote the words, to meet Parry’s descendants and to see Elgar’s house, where he did the orchestration. I found that Jerusalem had been sung by Labour, Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats at their various party conferences so it covers all political persuasions.

 

While I could stay enthusiastic about Jerusalem, somehow I did not feel the same way about the Parthenon Marbles. My head told me that it was a good idea for them to remain in the British Museum, but maybe my heart said that we ought to return them to Greece. I found, therefore, that writing did not come naturally on this occasion and, if it is forced, it is not something that I feel inclined to do and so I made excuses to do something else instead.

 

What else? I edit a small eight page magazine for tourist guides in London every month and this keeps me reasonably busy. I wonder if many read it properly but the feedback that I do get is usually reasonably good, so I will keep doing that as long as I am asked to do so. I also write a few blog posts for a website and have a few other writing projects on the go. The trouble is that I usually find the writing easy but wonder if anyone does any actual reading.

 

I am fairly strict in not reading during the day and like to keep busy. Money is not a big problem for me but boredom can be and it is good to have a project on the go to stave it off. Yet I need to feel enthusiasm for what I am writing about and I just do not have that when it comes to the Parthenon Marbles. It has simply failed to launch properly. I do have another idea, however, and that is to write about tipping, which I have some personal experience in. Let's see if it works.

Edwin Lerner

PRINCE HARRY - SPARE PART

Prince Harry's book cover

I have not read – and almost certainly will not read – Shame, the memoir by Prince William’s younger brother. The title refers to Prince Harry’s role as the ‘spare’ in case the heir to the throne dies or stands down, probably with a nod to the idea of 'going spare' or losing your cool referencing the prince's well-publicised struggles with mental health.

The spare succeeded to the throne twice in the early twentieth century when the elder brother of King George the Fifth, Eddie the Duke of Clarence, died suddenly and again in 1936 when George’s son King Edward the Eighth gave up the throne in order to marry Wallis Simpson, whom he was told would not be suitable as a queen. Harry has often been compared to Edward, both men having a personal agenda that superseded their loyalty to the concept of royalty.

 

Times have changed since Edward married Wallis Simpson and Harry married divorcee Meghan Markle, at Saint George’s Chapel inside Windsor Castle a few years ago. She seemed like a breath of fresh air coming into the royal family at first but later complained about the racism she claims to have experienced at the hands of the British media and the royal establishment. Their popularity quickly went down and the couple moved to California where they have tried to establish a kind of alternative court five thousand miles away from the main one.

 

I have always said that the royal family will die not when we grow tired of them but when they grow tired of us. When the pressures of being in the public eye all the time become too much, the monarchy might effectively abolish itself. There is little prospect of that happening now with William seeming like an ideal heir to the throne, having an impeccable family life with his wife Kate and their three children. They have all superseded Harry in the line of succession, making him fifth in line to the throne, very much a spare part who is unlikely ever to become king now.

 

That leaves him in a difficult position. Being the dutiful younger brother, standing behind his elder sibling and being content with a subsidiary hardly seen role does not fit in with the demands the media makes of people in a modern monarchy. Harry’s wife Meghan has an American sense of marketability about their role and has helped to monetise it by breaking away to establish a separate identity. Harry's book has now become the best-selling non-fiction title ever printed and is ubiquitous on the shelves of shops and he appears eager to promote his viewpoint. 

 

In order to sell so many copies, he had to exaggerate – or at least tell the truth about – the extent of the falling out with his brother and father. Juicy details about their rows were pushed out in advance of publication, just as details of his fairly unheroic killing exploits as a soldier in Afghanistan appeared. It presumably makes for interesting reading and helps to move piles of books to satisfy the insatiable curiosity of the public about the royal family.

 

The trouble is that Harry is not really that important in the scheme of things. He and his offspring would soon be relegated to relative obscurity as he is the younger brother (the spare as opposed to the heir) and he faces a lifetime of stolid but boring duty, with the knowledge that, if he puts a foot wrong, he faces life in the wilderness like his uncle Prince Andrew does, having given into the temptation of easy sex on offer. 

 

The alternative is to have people feel sorry for him as a victim. This necessitates a good deal of sharing, which may sell books but is not part of the royal tradition, where keeping a stiff upper lip and not washing your dirty linen in public are part of the requirement for being a good dutiful royal. Faced with the choice of being a loyal but quiet supporter of the institution or being a privileged victim, Harry signed the contract, took the money and went to California. 

 

However, he would not be an important player if it was not for the institution they are now effectively undermining. Just as no-one would care much about his mother Lady Diana Spencer if she had not married Prince Charles, so no-one would care about Harry if he was not a royal. He and Meghan obviously felt like there was enough life left in the royal family for it to survive a bit of buffeting from a salacious memoir by a minor royal out for revenge.

 

The question is how much longer can this go on before the royal family is permanently disabled by the revelations in his book? His mother Diana enjoyed enormous popularity and had an undoubted charisma but her independence could not survive for long under the pressure of fame and she was hounded to death by paparazzi, whom she sought to exploit but could not control. There may be something to be said for remaining behind those castle walls.  

 

This brings up the wider question of victimhood generally. Most of us like to feel sorry for the underdog, who has been given a bad break by circumstances and contemporaries. Harry has chosen to play the martyr rather than the dutiful son and brother, standing four square with his family – which he did before his marriage. He – with a little prodding no doubt from his wife – now comes over as a victim, having lost his mother and, more recently, the rest of his family, the first to a sudden accident in Paris and the second to a lucrative book deal.   

 

People generally do not buy books by those who dutifully wait in line and do their duty. They want to hear about suffering and conflict from the victims. This has led to the growth of ‘misery memoir’ in which people make a fortune from their misfortune. The trouble is that it is difficult to feel much sympathy for a man who has millions in the bank, a flashy website and an Instagram account. He might make a good deal of money from being the ‘spare’ but it is hardly good for the royals. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.    

___________

Edwin Lerner 

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

 

  

DEADLINES AND TO DO LISTS

DEADLINE!

I am writing this early in the morning of New Year’s Eve as 2022 draws to a close. It is often in the early mornings that I write best, with a cup of tea by my side before I have eaten breakfast. The mind seems freshest then as I get out of bed, slowly and sometimes reluctantly, but knowing that there are things to do before the sun comes up and the day proper begins. My to do list is next to me and the first item reads ‘Write and post blogs’. 

So I start the day at the computer and will tick off the above item before the more mundane ones beneath it. I have a self-imposed deadline of the first day of the week for my blog post about tourist guiding (link) and the last day of the month for an essay on some subject of interest to me. I make good money from my continuing career in tourism and my house in London. Writing is just about break-even but it keeps my brain alive, if not my bank account.

 

In the past I made a little money from freelance writing and I still occasionally pitch an idea to an editor but writing is an overcrowded profession and I do not have the chutzpah to stand out from the crowd or the contacts to inveigle my way into writing jobs. So I write for pleasure and do not worry about the money I might make from publication – even though I am convinced that a lot of what I write is better than what I read (said he modestly).

 

Occasionally I idly dream that in future times there will be a profession of e-archaeology and, instead of looking for physical objects buried underground, future archaeologists will surf the web looking for undiscovered treasures and writers who are obscure and unknown today will enjoy fifteen minutes of fame in the future, when people realise that they had talent but not the contacts or chutzpah to get published in their own lifetimes.

 

Not that we will be around to enjoy it, even from heaven above. I have never been able to believe in an afterlife in which our disembodied souls survive, while our physical bodies have ceased to work. When you go, that is it. I do not deny the importance or power of religion but, if God exists, he does so as much as a concept as a being. Not that human beings are worse for inventing a creator. It seems to fill a need and should not be despised.

 

Apart from anything else, an afterlife might be a bit dull – being stuck in a place where we are not able to enjoy the physical things which are so important in our lives – a decent meal, a drink in the evening after a day’s work, sex (frankly) and a good night’s sleep among other things. Even just buying clothes, as I did today in the sales, or warming up after being stuck in the rain are pleasures denied in an afterlife which presumably does not have weather.   

 

With only one life, it is important to make the most of it and deadlines and to do lists are one way I find of doing so. Once I no longer have a list of things to do, life will no longer be worth living and it will be time to stop. I may have more of my life behind me than in front but that stage has not been reached yet and so I will start ticking off items on the list as soon as I have uploaded this and written my other blog: diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

Edwin Lerner

 

SHOULD WE GIVEW THE MARBLES BACK TO GREECE?

 

The Duveen Gallery at the British Museum

I have been doing some writing – and thinking – recently about the Parthenon Marbles at the British Museum (BM) which Greece wants returned. We used to call them the Elgin Marbles after the seventh Earl of Elgin who brought them to London. The legality of their removal from Greece was a little dubious and, even if it was properly, authorised, it was done so by the Turks not the Greeks themselves. Greece at the time was part of the Ottoman Empire, which Elgin was ambassador to and they may – or may not – have allowed him to take them to London, where they ended up and can be seen in the Duveen Gallery of the BM.

 

As a young tourist guide, I mentioned the Marbles on a tour of London, knowing that there were a few Greeks on board. “Ah, those are the ones you stole,” said one of them, thus immediately puncturing my attempt to be inclusive. I have long since learned to get my retaliation in first and, if I go to the British Museum with a group, am not afraid to bring up the subject myself. My argument for keeping the Marbles in London is that they do not belong to the British, any more than to the Greeks. They belong to the whole world and they just happen to be in London.

 

In London they can be seen free of charge by over six million visitors a year to the Museum, most of whom will go into the Duveen Gallery (Room 18) where they are on display. In Athens you would have to pay to go to the new gallery in the Acropolis Museum where they have a space pointedly waiting for their eventual return. This will probably not happen in my lifetime as the Museum authorities say that, to return the Marbles, will effectively bring about the end of the BM as other countries queue up to reclaim “their” treasures from it.

 

The Greeks claim that returning the Marbles to Athens will not necessarily set a precedent for other countries to follow and should be considered in isolation. This is a born yesterday type of attitude in my view. You can just hear the other countries saying, “You gave the Marbles back to Greece. Now it is our turn.” The line will stretch around Russell Square and reach the British Library, which used to be inside the Museum, and will next on the list for repatriation of the various volumes they have “acquired” over the centuries. Take this process to its logical conclusion and people living in Britain will only ever be able to see British works of art, in Italy Italian works of art and in Finland Finnish works of art – which is surely the exact opposites of what museums are meant to be and will bring to an end the international flavour of these institutions which are supposed to bring people together.

 

The movement to return the Marbles to Greece puts ownership above accessibility. It says that it is more important that they are in the right place than that people should be able to see them. London is one of the most visited cities in the world and the rather badly named British Museum – most of its exhibits come from outside Britain – is right in the centre of the city, available for millions of people to visit. The Greeks cannot afford free admission to their museums and attract less than a quarter of the number of people who go to the BM. The Marbles are not only more accessible in London, but they are a great advertisement for Greece’s ancient culture and achievements. Why remove them in order to prove a point?

 

It would not be possible for Lord Elgin to act in the way he did today. He did not, incidentally, make a profit from bringing the Marbles to London, where he sold them to the British government for less than half of what it had cost him to bring them here. (If he did “steal” them, he was not a very smart thief.) His attitude was that, by removing the Marbles, he was saving them for civilisation, as they had been badly damaged while they were in Greece and needed to be looked after properly, which could only happen in a museum environment in London. They were originally destined for his home but he had to sell them to recoup some of the considerable amount he had spent to bring them here – not least as he was tied up in an expensive divorce at the time and had money problems.

 

Elgin’s approach – and that of others who filled the Museum with the treasures it displays – was shot through with racial assumptions that would not be considered acceptable today. It assumes that white British men should look after the treasures of the ancient world because darker-skinned locals were not willing or able to do so themselves. I always thought that Elgin had been given an unfairly bad press for his role and feel that he acted from a genuine desire to preserve them for posterity. This does not alter the sense that he felt entitled to do so using methods alien to current attitudes, when it is necessary to show respect to local cultures instead of looting them for the benefit of so-called superior ones who know better.

 

Would the Marbles still exist if Elgin had left them alone and merely had pictures drawn of them to show the world what they were like, as he had originally intended? I doubt it. He acted in a way that conserved them for future generations and prevented their eventual destruction. At least, in that sense, he was acting in a way that led them to being preserved. This at least is in tune with current trends and, instead of being condemned as a thief, his reputation should be rehabilitated as a preserver of some of the world’s greatest treasures.

 

My conclusion: the Marbles should stay in London and not be sent back to Greece. 

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

NEW NAMES FOR OLD ILLS

Churchill who suffered from 'depression'

When I went to school, you could either spell or you could not. (I write as one who has sometimes misspelled words and relies on Word to tell me when I have got it wrong.) Then something called dyslexia appeared and, before long, what had once seemed mere incompetence had a fancy medical name attached to it and was nobody’s fault. 

Likewise, if you ran away from combat in the First or Second World Wars, you were considered a coward and were often shot for desertion. (Again, I write as someone who has never fought in a military conflict and am aware that I have little right to judge others.) Then we introduced shell-shock which meant that cowardice no longer existed. By giving something a medical name, we effectively stopped judging people for lack of moral fibre.

 

A mother once excused her child’s rowdy behaviour by saying that he was on the autism spectrum and had little self-control. It was not really his fault that he was behaving badly - and spoiling things for other people – because of a medical name for his condition. Pretty soon nobody will bear any responsibility for what they do because you can attach a medical name to what used to be a moral fault and thus remove the element of blame from it.

Similarly, nobody is ever in a bad mood now. Instead they suffer from depression, which never used to exist - although Winston Churchill did admit to being afflicted by the 'black dog'. Bruce Springsteen forgave his father for his bad moods because he was able to attach a medical definition to the process. He was not surly or bad tempered but suffered from 'depression'. 

 

I am, as those who have read this far may be aware, dubious about this whole process. We eventually won the First World War because of a variety of factors, not least American involvement, but also because men were expected to go ‘over the top’, sometimes to almost certain death from enemy fire. Being unwilling to do so meant that you were considered a coward and dealt with accordingly, which usually meant the firing squad.

 

This was the harsh reality of a war that cost the lives of nearly a million men in the British forces, less than a tenth of the total military casualties. And this does not include civilian deaths which brought the figure up to fourteen or fifteen million altogether. This is an unimaginable amount of death in today’s terms and begs the question of whether it was worth it in the end. Many parents were keen to send their sons into the conflict, not least Rudyard Kipling, whose only son Jack was killed in his first taste of combat, one that left a shadow over the life of the poet and short story writer, one that never really lifted. 

 

Kipling effectively sacrificed his own son who, like his father, suffered from poor eyesight and could easily have escaped military service. Yet both father and son were keen that Jack should ‘do his bit’ rather than be stained by the suggestion that he was a coward and could not face up to his responsibilities as a soldier. On such determination was victory eventually achieved against the might of a militaristic Germany that needed to be stopped from taking over Europe – and eventually the whole world – completely. Contempt for what soldiers called cowardice and the willingness to shoot deserters was sadly an essential part of this.

 

Do we lose something by being understanding of the causes of what used to be called cowardice but is now known as shell shock, what used to be called bad spelling but is now diagnosed as dyslexia and was once bad behaviour but is not called being on the autism spectrum? The inevitable end result of this is that nobody has to take responsibility for anything they do with their hands because they are suffering from a medical – rather than a moral – condition which affects what is going on in their heads.  

The end result of this was seen in an American trial when the perpetrator’s lawyers claimed that he had a gene that determined his actions – which were not disputed and involved killing a woman who was unable to defend herself. Yet what is a gene but a determinant of the actions by which we are judged. ‘Use every man after his deserts and who shall ‘scape whipping?’ asks Hamlet in Shakespeare’s plays. (He is talking about the players and Polonius’s promise to do just that.) We all have a lot to be ashamed about – not least this writer – and we should be grateful that we are not always judged too harshly.

 

This begs the question of who a human being is: a moral being who takes responsibility for his or her actions or a collection of genes who cannot be held responsible for such actions. Not only do I believe that we are the former but I think that we have to treat ourselves as such or else nobody can ever do anything simply bad and thus can never be judged.  

 

Yet, at a certain point, we have to subject ourselves to judgement or society ceases to function. Just as the British side would not have own the First World War if they had recognised the concept of shell shock rather than labelling it simply as cowardice, so no justice system could survive if the argument that we should be excused out actions because of our genes was allowed to hold sway. It did not in the end but it did allow the plaintiff to receive a life rather than a death sentence. He was white, incidentally, and I doubt if he would have been shown such understanding if his skin had been of a darker colour. 

 

By all means, use a person’s medical condition to extend understanding towards them. But there comes a time when you have to stop excusing people and start judging them. 

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

 

ANTI-SEMITISM AND ISLAMOPHOBIA - WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE?

Crudely anti-Semitic - Mear One's cartoon...

  

 yet Charlie Hebdo was a hero

For people who just want to raise a quick laugh, cartoonists get into a lot of trouble. Mear One is a Californian street artist who drew a satirical anti-banker mural in Brick Lane in 2012. Many Jewish people found it offensive because it portrayed at least two of the bankers as Jewish and would not have looked out of place in Nazi Germany. The mural was defended by Jeremy Corbyn (who later removed his support for it) and taken down – not because it was considered offensive but because another artist was due to fill the spot. 

Three years later the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris was attacked by two heavily-armed Moslem terrorists who took offence at the depictions of the prophet Mohammed in the magazine and randomly killed twelve people and injured eleven others working there. The two killers, who were brothers, were killed by the police but not until after another piece of random anti-Semitism – the shooting of four innocent Jewish people in a supermarket.

 

Even the use of the word ‘innocent’ in this context causes problems because it implies that those who are active in producing images that some people find offensive are somehow ‘guilty’ of racist or offensive behaviour. The so-called crime of the French cartoonists was to show images of Mohammed which depicted him in a particularly offensive light. I have not seen them but understand that one showed him having sex with a thirteen year old girl.

 

Where do you draw the line between freedom of speech and religious hatred? Our society does not permit virulently racists to hide behind a freedom of speech defence. You are simply not allowed to stir up hatred against ethnic groups and then claim that you were exercising this right, just as you are not allowed to slander or libel someone and claim free speech protection. You have to justify your words by saying they were necessary - or true.

 

Although Mear One was not prosecuted for his alleged anti-Semitism (which he denied) he was heavily criticised and I think that he overstepped the mark by showing the bankers with obvious and unnecessary Jewish features like hooked noses. He was right to be challenged in this way and may have lost a case in court if it had been brought. Yet if Mear One was guilty of anti-Semitism were the Hebdo cartoonists also guilty - of Islamophobia?

 

Instead they were shot. Obviously, you cannot support those who use guns against writers. Being Moslem does not in itself give you a right to censor work you find offensive. If we went that way, then it is a power we would have to extend to all religions and even noted atheists might find themselves silenced. Then would come liberals and free-thinkers of all hues. Questioning religion is part of our civic right, even duty, and one we should preserve.

 

Where the line should be drawn between freedom of expression and inciting religious or ethnic hatred is a tricky question. However, one thing I have learned about discrimination is that the attitude of the person subject to prejudice is important. When someone says that he ‘does not have a racist bone in his body’ and is therefore entitled to make jokes about people from ethnic minorities, my immediate attitude is one of extreme scepticism.

 

You are judging (and acquitting) yourself with a phrase like that but it is the person with a darker skin colour who is the victim, not the one who is white, and it is he or she who gets to say whether he has been discriminated against. France is a secular country and has tried to ban head coverings burkinis (a kind of modest bikini) that Moslems regard as important. Surely it is they who should have the final say on whether a law or an image is insulting.

 

However, we do not promise in a western society to protect everyone from perceived insult. You have to roll with the punches sometimes and fighting back by killing unarmed people is obviously not acceptable in a law-abiding society. The action of the gunmen was counter- productive in any case as millions of people supported the cartoonists by wearing ‘Je suis Charlie’ t-shirts after the massacre and by buying future copies of the magazine.

 

Would they have worn those shirts if the cartoons had been perceived as anti-Semitic as Mear One’s mural was? Jewish people are good at spotting anti-Semitism, which is sometimes hidden behind innocent sounding notions such as ‘clubbability’. The person who does not suffer from discrimination is often the worst at spotting it. They think that if they help the child of a friend or mix with their own sort then they are not being discriminatory.

Sometimes they are, however, and are exercising their privileges by subtly excluding people from a different ethnic or religious background from their circle. It is often hard for the discriminator to spot this and he sometimes needs the help of the discriminated to do so. 

 

Jews tend to be more successful than Moslems in our society because they work hard and know how to open doors, while Moslems might go to the mosque and lick their wounds. This, incidentally, is why anti-Semitism is considered an acceptable discrimination by some on the left. It is looked on as punching up rather than punching down – although it is hard to be much farther down than if you are in a gas chamber with the taps about to be turned on.

 

I am still troubled by the lionisation of people who are perceived to be Islamophobic and the demonisation of those seen to be anti-Semitic. I know there is a difference between satirising obvious Jewish bankers and making fun of Mohammed. Yet Moslems say that, if you insult my prophet, you insult me. And one thing that I have learned about prejudice is that it is the person who is discriminated against who should have the final say.

My other blog is diaryofatouristguideblogspot.com - with lots of posts about royalty.

Edwin Lerner