“”The covetous, racist, and hated Jew Shylock, who cut the [pound of] flesh from Antonio’s chest with the knife of hatred, invades you with his money, his modern airplanes, his missiles, and his nuclear bombs. You must face a hard question: Do you, Christians and Muslims, wish to live, survive and fulfill your convictions? Or are you Abraham’s bleating lambs on the threshold of the Jewish altar, who are led to be sent to the Hereafter?” – Dr Ali Aqleh Ursan, chairman of the Arab Writers Association, in the Syrian publication Al-Usbu’ Al-Adabi, February 5, 2000, as reported in a terrifying piece in the Guardian.
ONE LAST THING, JONAH: I don’t want to drag this out, so this is really my final small word. Jonah is a wonderful writer, fair-minded, hilarious when he wants to be, and civil to a fault. So I don’t mean this personally. But one sentence he wrote haunts me. It’s this: “By having a single public standard that was inconvenient to everyone, but not tyrannical in its implementation – Oscar Wilde’s gaol time notwithstanding – there was no moral tragedy of the commons.” Jonah is referring to the Victorian standard of everyone adhering to a public norm of marital heterosexuality while doing anything they wanted to in private (Gladstone getting whipped by whores, etc.). Jonah rightly says that this is now a non-starter, but I think he is way, way too blithe about what he’s describing. Gay men and women were not given an easy break in any Anglo-American society until very recently. Thousands were jailed, humiliated, murdered without real recourse, demonized, or subjected to lives of such misery and shame that they could barely function. This was a form of tyranny. Some rose above it – see Oscar Wilde. But many, especially of poorer backgrounds, went through unspeakable private pain. Either forced into sham marriages or into the underground or the Church or education where their public lies each day diminished their dignity and integrity, these men and women were subjected to terrible cruelty. They were denied the saving power of love and the wonder of sex – without fear of exposure, imprisonment, violence or social death. I don’t believe that Jonah would ever countenance such cruelty; but he needs to come to terms with its moral legacy. There was indeed a “moral tragedy of the commons.” And only now, fitfully, is it being addressed and accounted for.
The Dish 