Talking of pianos, a very poignant piece about moving home by Anne Fine in Saturday's Times. Their piano didn't fit into their new house so they had to sell it:
The day they took it out of the flat was the worst ever. That piano had been there since the month we moved in and Kit had played every night. I remember sitting curled in a ball against the wall in the hall, howling my eyes out for hours.... The end of a huge part of my life.
And that is how Les feels about our piano: a family heirloom, as well as all the volumes of the Encylopedia Judaica which are accompanying me to Israel and which have left an empty patch in our lovely old oak book case, a wedding present from my parents. Well, he gets to keep the Talmud, so fair's fair.
More good articles in The Times. Tuesday had Libby Purves on the idiocy of the new Secretary-General of the Muslim Council of Britain, Dr. Muhammad Abdul Bari. He was also on Radio 4's Sunday Programme offering arranged marriages as the only thing that Islam could offer the West: even though other cultures have arranged marriages too. As Libby says:
he considers Muslims as missionaries full of pompous Victorian self-confidence, come to tell us how to live... his remarks will actually encourage some of his co-religionists to think of their native hosts as less worthy, less human than they.
And she actually cites Rear-Amiral Chris Parry on 'reverse colonisation' with approval.
Makes up for all those cheap gibes at Pharisees that she gave us in the past. Maybe Melanie Phillips is actually getting through to people like Libby at last. Not to mention fellow Times journalist, Ruth Gledhill's blog: because although the strictly Orthodox Jews around here also have arranged marriages, I would be very surprised if they went on national radio and told the rest of the country to follow suit.
And another article on the next page by David Aaronovitch, pointing out the folly of not taking the Islamicists seriously when they say they want to blow up Israel. He ends with David Edgar's play, Albert Speer, in which a dead Hitler speaks to the dying Speer:
Why ... did you insist that anti-Semitism was 'a vulgar incidental'? I said it - clearly time and time again. I didn't say 'resettlement' or 'cleaning efforts'. I did not speak of 'special handling'. And yet you all insist that when I said the Jews must be destroyed, I only meant 'defeated'. That when I said 'eliminate' I didn't mean 'exterminate'. I only meant 'exclude'. That when I said 'purge' and 'perish' and 'annihilate' it was, of a course a metaphor. Why was I cursed with never being taken literally? How could the world have been so blind? And how could you?'
And Aaronovitch ends with 'Well?'
Which is why the BBC have got it so wrong again in their 1.00 pm news bulletin yesterday about our 350th. They admit that anti-semitism is still here, but they comfort themselves by suggesting that this is only to do with the Middle East. And the Chief Rabbi reinforces this view by saying that all religions should contribute their religion to the public forum. What on earth does this mean?
Repeats of 7/7? And that we should export friendships made in Britain to the Middle East. Again, what nonsense. Some of the greatest Muslim-Jewish and Jewish-Christian friendships are those forged in Israel. And what friendships in Britain is he talking about: are any friendships possible when Israel stands in the equation? Does he mean Revd Steven Sizer at Liverpool's Anglican Cathedral, by any chance? Or those who apparently want to twin Manchester with Tehran?
I suppose he has to justify his existence, but it seems to me that he has just reverted to his old platitudinous self: making the right noises in his plummy tones, which end up meaning nothing at all and giving people false hope that things are hunky dory, when, to judge by Libby Purves and David Aaronovitch, they are anything but.
But to end on a high, just had a phone call from Andrew White in Haifa (he knew that would impress me), on his way to some major conference. And he says he understands why I would want to move to Haifa. And I ask who is that yelling at him: and he says, 'No-one: it is Israel'. And he asks me to carry with his work in Haifa and to coordinate the northern Israel part of FRME.
What an honour!
And Michael Gove in today's Times is right as usual: those responsible for the popularity of history tend not to be academics. We all know the reason for this: academic historians are too busy boycotting better historians than themselves.
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