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How history informs the present (by Sara Sheridan)

[Sara Sheridan is a historical novelist. She tweets as @sarasheridan. Her new book, Secret of the Sands, is published by HarperCollins at £7.99.]

I decided to write Secret of the Sands on a whim. An archivist at the John Murray Archive at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh showed me three letters from a Murray author – James Raymond Wellsted. Wellsted was a lieutenant in the Indian Navy and travelled extensively around the Arabian Peninsula in the 1830s, while the Indian Navy was employed in surveying the region. In the post-Bonaparte era, Britain was still licking her wounds after losing several ships to a lack of good charts during wartime. In addition, the French were strong in Egypt, which made Britain extremely interested in nearby nations to promote what they considered 'balance in the region'. None of this was what originally grabbed me, of course. Wellsted's voice was fresh and the accounts of his time on the Peninsula were unencumbered by prejudice. In his letters to Murray he sounded almost breathless – like a schoolboy. I went on to read the books that he wrote and again, in a more tempered form, there was that voice – naïve, enthusiastic and open-minded. In particular, there were a couple of intriguing sentences – mentions that made me sit up and take note, not of the actual historical detail, but of ideas that were coming to me. In particular, Wellsted mentioned a slave girl called Zena. Zena was Abyssinian (current day Ethiopia and Eritrea). She was young. And Wellsted spoke to her - in fact, Zena told Wellsted about her Abyssinian home. A few weeks into their journey (for Wellsted travelled disguised as a slave trader) Zena was stolen from his caravan and he never saw the girl again.

I'm accustomed to reading Georgian and Victorian letters and diaries and sometimes you simply know in your gut that a blithe sentence is covering up deeper emotion. In my view Wellsted wouldn't have mentioned Zena if she hadn't been important to him. I felt he'd completely understated how important. I decided that it was Zena who would be my female lead. So I went on and I researched William Wilberforce and the Abolitionists and read the accounts of freed slaves from the period. British history focuses heavily on the slaves of the Middle Passage. When you visit the Slavery Museum in Liverpool, for example, no mention is made of the flourishing slave trade in the opposite direction. But Arab and Turkish slave traders ferried their human cargo around India and Ceylon and all over the Gulf and for those poor souls the conditions were no less appalling than the Ghana to Jamaica route westwards. I decided to make up two Arab slave traders to complete the 'character square' I was creating - Wellsted, Zena, Kasim and Ibn Mohammed.

Then I went to London on a research trip and in between one archive and another I ended up in the offices of Anti-Slavery International. To my mind this was an historical problem, not a current one, but I thought they might have information from the period. I had been researching William Wilberforce and his acolytes and reading up on the legislation that was drafted in the 1830s. When I walked through the door into the office, I realized I was completely naïve. If anything the problems of what we call human trafficking today (rather than slavery) are more acute than at any time before. The route that Zena had taken from Abyssinia to Oman (where Wellsted bought her) is still open – in fact the Arabian Peninsula is one of the world's slavery blackspots to this day. Now the issues are around indentured labour – naïve economic migrants, the poor of eastern Africa, are tempted to make the trip of their own free will by unscrupulous agents who offer them employment in decent conditions. When they arrive in Oman or Dubai or Saudi Arabia or Yemen, their passports are confiscated and they are locked up, treated every bit as much as human vermin as the poor souls who undertook the middle passage in the 1800s. Anti-Slavery International had accounts and pictures. I was horrified.

After London I headed northwards to the Wigtown Book Festival. I was talking about a previous novel there – The Secret Mandarin set in 1840s China – but the questions from the audience came round to the more general subject of history. I was asked about how morally wrong I felt the British Empire was and if personally I suffered from post-Colonial guilt. My mother is Jewish and my father is Catholic, I quipped; there is no form of guilt from which I do not suffer. The audience laughed and I went on to talk about 'standards of the day' and imposing present-day morality on to historical figures. On reflection, what I should have said is that many of our forbears may have ignored the suffering of others. It seems unbelievable to us now that children as young as five worked full days in cloth factories in the most evil conditions or that 200 souls might be crammed aboard a sailing ship and starved and beaten all the way across the Atlantic. That it took so long for anyone to say or do anything about it is shameful. But today we, as a society, are just as bad, if not worse. Most people don't think about indentured labour in the Far East; until recently I certainly didn't. I would often shop in supermarkets or discount stores for clothes that were almost certainly produced in conditions at least as grim as those in early-Victorian Manchester. We are today in a far better position than our forbears to be informed – which is more than can be said of the Georgian and early Victorian middle classes. In fact, as soon as information was generally available the changes were relatively rapid. Today you can watch YouTube videos of the abuse and read government reports readily available online. The question shouldn't be 'are we guilty about our Colonial past'; it should be 'why aren't we more guilty about our corporate present'?

As a novelist it is my job to tell stories that inspire and entertain but I am increasingly mindful that many of these historical tales (which of themselves are fascinating) relate directly to issues in our society today. As I become more experienced I'm learning to keep my eyes open as I look not only backwards in time but also at our world today. (Sara Sheridan)

Why don't we value poetry?

In a column in the Telegraph last week Philip Hensher wondered why, despite the prizes won by poets, despite the publicity it gets, 'poetry is losing its way' and doesn't sell at all well. Poets 'are not at the centre of the culture as Tennyson, Auden, Wordsworth or Pope were'. Hensher's conclusion:

The reason we don't truly value poetry - the reason we don't buy it and share it - is simply this. We're not interested in the art form, only in the seriousness of what it happens to convey, like a magazine article, a newsflash, a tweet. And poetry has other things in mind.

This is not a matter on which I would dare to venture an opinion. However, one person I know who does is the poet and novelist Sophie Hannah. In the comments thread attached to Hensher's article, Sophie writes:

Contemporary poetry does not sell because it doesn't offer enough pleasure/enjoyment to the reader. Rhyme and metre - the things that make poetry musical and memorable - are hardly ever used these days in the way that they were by Housman, Larkin, Tennyson, etc, and so much of contemporary poetry does not stick in the mind in the way that pieces of music we love do. Too often, I read or hear a modern poem and come away remembering nothing about it - it leaves no impression. With novels, we remember and enjoy the stories and the characters - we experience a rush of positive feelings when we're reading a novel we love. Poems also should create positive feelings - and ideally goosebumps! - in readers. A poem ought to please our ears (or our inner ears, if we're reading them to ourselves!) - unless and until they start to do that again, people in general will not bother with them. It is important to remember that contemporary poems do not have to make you want to stop reading them as soon as possible - many modern poets do write musical poems. Read 'Some More Light Verse' by Wendy Cope, 'Everyone Hates the English' by Kit Wright, 'Prayer' by Carol Ann Duffy, or 'Mild Citizen' by Glyn Maxwell - those are great, memorable poems by contemporary poets. Unfortunately, they're the exception.

What's wrong with exploitation?

The question is raised in this post of Chris's. Along the way Chris wonders if exploitation is inherently bad. For my money, the word 'exploitation' when applied to relationships between persons carries a pejorative connotation. We use it to condemn the relation we're highlighting. For this reason, one needs either to avoid a definition of 'exploitation' that makes it neutral, a word to be applied in criticism in some cases and as content with a given state of affairs in others; or to purge the word of its normative content. I think it's easier to do the former than the latter.

Accordingly, the Marxian concept of exploitation should not be used without modification, if it is used at all. This is because Marxian-exploitation is - arguably - sometimes OK. Exploitation occurs in the Marxist sense when the 'fruits' of their labour are appropriated from workers by capitalists. In thinking as he does that this is exploitative and wrong, Marx assumes that the workers have a right to what they produce in the way of new value. However, as Chris notes, we do sometimes think that a proportion of one person's labour product may be used for the benefit of another, whether the first person agrees to this or not. Taxation for the provision of health care to those who need it is a form of appropriating the economic value produced by some and redirecting it towards others. If one thinks that this practice is justified, then it must be something else about the would-be exploitative relation between capitalists and workers that is objectionable than the appropriation, just as such, by some people of the value produced by others.

A Marxian-style concept of exploitation needs to be refomulated in terms of differential efforts and rewards, the unequal sacrifice of potentially free time, unequal suffering and enjoyment more generally - and, as Chris indicates, the way in which unequal wealth and power enable some people to take unjust advantage of others.

Forever Younge

We might as well get both of Monday morning's conceptual gems out of the way without more ado. We've had terrorism as not terrorism even when it is; here, now, is contention as not contention even when it is. This one is a case study in how a man can say something when he knows it not to be true and - more - even while alluding to the evidence that he knows this. Enter Mr Gary Younge:

Globally speaking, opposing the war in Iraq was not even remotely contentious. Significant majorities in almost every country, with the exception of the US, were against it. Before it was inept it was already illegal, and before it was illegal it was already illogical. It was wrong on its own terms, and its own terms were rooted in a lie.

Forget the stuff at the end here about illegal, illogical and a lie. Either you're already convinced by this or you're not (as I'm not). But 'not even remotely contentious' globally? Contentious is 'likely to cause disagreement or argument', or - from my New Shorter Oxford - 'characterized by, involving, or subject to contention; disputed'. Opposing, or supporting, the war in Iraq was one of the most divisive issues of the last two decades, if not the most divisive, radically splitting opinion across the planet. But for Gary it wasn't remotely contentious; this despite the fact that by evoking majorities he shows signs of knowing there were also minorities. He omits to mention how closely split opinion was in this country; but never mind. What's interesting is how the contentiousness has been levelled. Presumably this is because the issue wasn't contentious in the 'right circles', those in which Younge himself moves. But you want some backing for the claim repeatedly made on this blog that for Younge and the rest of that crowd there was only one viable point of view on the war? You got it right here.

'Terrorism' hidden by editorial sleight of hand

Today the Guardian readers' editor, Chris Elliott, attempts to explain, and thereby defend, the decision to print that letter from Ted Honderich last week justifying 'the moral right [of Palestinians] to their terrorism'. With one thing Elliott says about this it is possible to agree: 'suggesting that a defence may be offered for an argument should not imply it is the attitude or position of the Guardian'. Indeed not. A paper doesn't endorse every view expressed in every letter printed in its pages. But the rest of what Elliott writes is confusion.

First, he says that the classic definition of terrorism is 'violence in the pursuit of political aims'. This isn't so: otherwise war would usually be assimilated to terrorism and it mostly isn't. In addition, a popular uprising against tyranny that defends itself with arms and doesn't target non-combatants is not - or at any rate not universally - regarded as terrorism. No, terrorism in its dominant meaning involves - as touched on in a letter to Elliott from which he quotes - deliberate, and often random, violence against civilians.

The second confusion is one which totally upends Elliott's defence of the decision to print the Honderich letter. The confusion is perpetrated by the Guardian's letters editor:

The letters editor defended the publication of Honderich's letter on the basis that it was about the way language is used: "What he is questioning is how things are defined - and how they might be defined as something else. It seems to me legitimate to debate (at least, by someone who perhaps has credentials to do so) – he is not advocating suicide bombing, he is questioning how it is regarded by most people in the west, and how it might be seen as something other than terrorism by people in other places and circumstances."

This is a manifest subterfuge. Honderich justifies the Palestinians' 'moral right to their terrorism' (my italics), calling the thing by its proper name. The letters editor defends him by saying he's debating the definition of terrorism. But Honderich wasn't; he was saying terrorism can be OK as self-defence, in the context of a freedom struggle, and so forth.

The consequence for Elliott of going along with this subterfuge is to disguise from himself the difficulty for his newspaper. For he says: 'It is the policy of the Guardian not to publish letters advocating violence against others...' Honderich's letter may not exactly 'advocate' violence against others but it endorses it in the case in question. I repeat the point I made in my earlier post: 'I'd wager that a letter justifying murder on the streets of Britain from a correspondent of the far right wouldn't have found space on the Guardian letters page.' Elliott has now confirmed that I'm right about this. He gets round the Guardian's difficulty over the printing of Honderich's letter by doing exactly what torture apologists do when they rename torture they consider to be justified 'enhanced interrogation' and such. The letters editor and the readers' editor are playing the same game, though Honderich himself in that letter didn't do so: we can print a letter justifying the murder of Israeli Jews because... directed against them, it ain't terrorism.

Values in Egypt

Egyptians have been urged to come out after Friday prayers tomorrow and demand the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak's government, along with freedom, justice and a democratic regime.

Hey, not just Western values then.

"The international community must understand we are being denied every human right day by day," he [Mohamed ElBaradei] said. "Egypt today is one big prison. If the international community does not speak out it will have a lot of implications. We are fighting for universal values here. If the west is not going to speak out now, then when?"

Like the man said: you don't have to live in Hampstead to prefer not to inhabit a big prison.

Take Sally's word for it

My friend Sally Prue (winner of the normblog Boxing Day literary quiz this year) has taken to blogging. Pay her a visit at The Word Den. Sally's plan is to focus on a word each day and give us, or prompt, some thoughts about it. Here's a post that especially appeals to me: it defends the use of 'and' or 'but' at the beginning of a sentence. I wrote an essay in the early 1970s, in which I had a paragraph starting with 'And'. It was eliminated by the person who prepared the text for publication. To this day I feel the rhythm of the thing is no good at that point. The 'And' was needed there, damn it!

This house believes in the spread of Western liberal democracy, by force where necessary

[That was the motion last night in a debate at the Cambridge Union. I was speaking in support of it. Each speaker had approximately 10 minutes. The occasion was most enjoyable and the hospitality splendid. In the event, the motion was defeated by a ratio of approximately 2 to 1. I give below the text of what I said in arguing for it. The paragraph numbers are for my own benefit and were not spoken.]

1.1 The motion before you is not the one you may think is before you.

1.2 This house believes in the spread of Western liberal democracy, by force where necessary.

1.3 It may not be the motion you think, because you may understand it as meaning that this house should favour the widespread and/or reckless attempt to impose liberal democracy by force, without regard to the conditions prevailing in the countries in which it is to be imposed.

1.4 Not so. The proposition has a main clause, stating support for the spread of Western liberal democracy, and this is followed by a qualifying phrase specifying the use of force in some circumstances but (by implication) not in others.

2.1 Here's an analogy. This house believes one should take a daily walk, if necessary in the rain.

2.2 That doesn't call for walking in the rain as often as possible, walking in the rain when you don't have to, walking in the rain regardless.

2.3 Or... This house believes in the maintenance of peaceful civic order, if necessary by deploying the police.

2.4 That, in turn, is not a call for heavy-handed policing, much less for a police state; it is merely an acceptance that there are circumstances in which some policing may be necessary to maintain civil peace. It doesn't call for policing where policing is unnecessary.

3.1 Accordingly, in order to persuade you to support the motion, I need to persuade you of two things.

3.2 First, that we should be in favour of the spread of Western liberal democracy.

3.3 And second, that where necessary to achieve this, we should support the use of force.

3.4 Note that, with respect to the second point, everything hinges on the interpretation of 'where necessary'. I ask you to postpone judgement on what that means.

4.1 To persuade you, first, that we should support the spread of Western liberal democracy, I begin by asking: how could we not?

4.2 That is: not favour a polity in which (cutting a long story short) government is by consent of the governed; in which those who govern are chosen through freely contested elections; in which fundamental human rights are by and large respected and protected; in which there is freedom of speech and opinion; and so on?

4.3 Are we to say instead, 'No, actually, we prefer tyranny, military dictatorship, totalitarian single-party rule – with fewer restraints on power, the punishing of dissent, freedom for the state to engage in arbitrary arrest, the "disappearing" of dissidents and what have you'?

4.4 I put it to you that there's no contest.

5.1 And I interject at this point, so as to clear away an irrelevance, that to favour a liberal-democratic polity over these grim alternatives is to favour Western liberal democracy only in the sense that this liberal democracy is a form of governance now common in Western countries.

5.2 However, the proper designation is not 'Western liberal democracy' but 'liberal democracy' tout court, 'liberal democracy' without the geographical qualifier.

5.3 The central principles underlying this form of polity are universal ones, codified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

5.4 Similarly, the benefits of liberal democracy are universal. Pretty well everywhere that it is absent there are people yearning for it and fighting for it.

6.1 I repeat, therefore: how could we not support the spread of liberal democracy?

6.2 The suggestion might be offered: we don't support its spread, not because we prefer one or other variant of political tyranny, but because we favour something better than liberal democracy – be it socialist democracy, or radical democracy, or whatever.

6.3 My response to that is: for the alternative polity suggested to be in fact better than liberal democracy, it would have (at least) to incorporate standard liberal and democratic principles, procedures and mechanisms; and so it would remain, itself, a form of liberal democracy.

7.1 So much in support of the motion's main clause. I turn now to the qualifying conditional – 'where necessary, by force'.

7.2 The whole issue turns on the meaning of necessity here, on what kind of necessity we're talking about. What could 'where necessary' mean?

7.3 I contend that only one meaning is plausible.

7.4 For 'necessary' is both a context-dependent and a purpose-dependent term.

7.5 Is it necessary to have a ladder? Well, if we're going to scale that wall, yes. If we're going to carry on sitting around in the sun, no.

7.6 Is it necessary to obtain explosives? If we're going to blow a hole through the wall, so as (say) to help the people in danger on the other side, yes. If, on the other hand, the wall is part of a building housing the offices of Amnesty International, and we want access so as to rob the organization, then no. The explosives are unnecessary; indeed their use for this purpose would be morally wrong; it would be despicable of us to rob Amnesty International.

8.1 On the basis of these examples, I distinguish what I shall call functional necessity from moral necessity. If the purpose is to scale the wall, the ladder may be necessary; if the purpose is to blast a hole through the wall, the explosives may be necessary. But such means, though functionally necessary (when they are) for securing some given aim or objective, are not morally necessary if the aim in question is morally wrong, if it cannot be compellingly justified.

8.2 And I contend that this – moral necessity – is the only credible sense in which the motion before the house can be interpreted. Believing in the spread of liberal democracy 'by force where necessary' has to mean by force when force is morally justified, morally legitimate.

8.3 Because, just as hardly anybody (save for absolute pacifists) believes that the use of force is never justified, nobody at all believes that the use of force is always justified.

8.4 Consequently, those who think that the use of force in trying to spread liberal democracy will sometimes be justified, won't believe that force is necessary, in a moral sense, in all circumstances.

8.5 I urge upon you, therefore, that what the motion is most sensibly interpreted as meaning is: this house believes in the spread of liberal democracy, by force where force is justified. And these qualifying conditional words about force are practically tautological. If you support the main clause, you can hardly fail to support the motion as a whole.

9.1 The use of force in the hope of securing the spread of liberal democracy will often – even mostly – not be justified. I don't have time to spell out the reasons it won't be when it isn't, but these are a few of them.

9.2 The principles of national sovereignty and the right of peoples to self-determination rule out the imposition of liberal democracy by force, even could that be brought off.

9.3 To put the underlying assumption here in other terms, the nation or people concerned must be willing to take the democracy upon themselves; this can't legitimately be forced on them.

9.4 There are limits to the principle of sovereignty, though not everybody agrees where precisely these lie. But if a state massacres its own people, commits genocide, or crimes against humanity on a vast scale, brings about or presides over a humanitarian crisis – that sort of thing – then there's an old doctrine of humanitarian intervention, according to which the barrier of sovereignty may be overridden.

9.5 Even then, there are further moral requirements for external intervention. The force used must be 'proportional'; the intervening power must have a good prospect of success, not make the situation worse; it must act with the 'right intention'. I can't go into these points further.

9.6 Suffice to say that unless you believe that respect for state sovereignty must be absolute – in face of whatever horrors – there will be some circumstances in which you regard forceful intervention as morally justified. In other circumstances not, but in some circumstances, yes.

9.7 Whatever the 'yes-circumstances' happen to be in your eyes, you have your own way of applying the condition 'by force where necessary'.

10.1 Now take one further step: the intervening power or powers cannot effectively save the country they intervene in from further horrors, from dislocation, social collapse, civil war, without taking steps to establish a successor polity. For the reasons I've already given, they should opt for helping to build some form of liberal democracy if they can.

10.2 What could be the objection unless tyranny is to be preferred?

10.3 You surely cannot fail to support the motion.

The normblog profile 381: Tom Addison

Tom Addison was born in Wythenshawe, Manchester, on 4 March 1987. One of seven children (father twice married), he grew up in Knutsford, Cheshire, before going to Nottingham Trent University and graduating with a degree in Economics (BA) in 2008. He has lived in Salford since April 2010 and worked as an auditor at a large accountancy firm since October 2009, studying towards his ACA qualification. Tom writes for Truly Reds, a Manchester United fans blog, and is season ticket holder at the club.

Why do you blog? > To raise awareness of, and bring together other people's ideas, philosophies and opinions about, football in order to stimulate intelligent debate about the sport, thus improving my and other people's understanding, appreciation and enjoyment of the game.

What has been your best blogging experience? > Managing to put together an article that applied many of the ideas proposed in Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics to football.

What has been your worst blogging experience? > Writing a rather stern (and purposefully biased) anti-Liverpool article that had a sizeable factual error in it that many critics pounced upon and tried to use to invalidate my entire argument. Got loads of hits for the site though!

What would be your main blogging advice to a novice blogger? > Know what your area of expertise is and who your target audience are. Appreciate the limits of your own knowledge and the possible extent of other people's. Do plenty of research and planning for each article you write, trying to anticipate what readers' criticisms and responses will be. Network and make friends and contacts, helping one another out.

What are your favourite blogs? > Chris Dillow's Stumbling and Mumbling, In Bed With Maradona and The Run of Play.

Who are your intellectual heroes? > John Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, Nassim Taleb and Johan Cruyff.

What are you reading at the moment? > Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life by Alex Bellos.

What is the best novel you've ever read? > Even though I studied it at school, To Kill a Mockingbird.

What is your favourite movie? > It's a close call between The Godfather, The Lives of Others, Casablanca... and Rocky II.

Can you name a major moral, political or intellectual issue on which you've ever changed your mind? > That the less and more fortunate in life may be the victims and beneficiaries of circumstance and luck, rather than being directly responsible for the situation they find themselves in.

Can you name a work of non-fiction which has had a major and lasting influence on how you think about the world? > The Black Swan, as it helped me appreciate the significance of luck and our inability to predict the future in life, and also how our cognitive biases and inherent psychological characteristics try to prevent us from realizing and appreciating this.

What is your favourite piece of political wisdom? > 'The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.' (Bertrand Russell)

If you could effect one major policy change in the governing of your country, what would it be? > Make investment in science, technology and R&D as big a priority as healthcare, education and defence.

If you could choose anyone, from any walk of life, to be Prime Minister, who would you choose? > Brian Cox (the physicist).

What do you consider to be the main threat to the future peace and security of the world? > Religious fundamentalism and the lust for success and status. As Ben Okri said, success justifies greed, and greed justifies indifference to our fellow man.

Do you think the world (human civilization) has already passed its best point, or is that yet to come? > Because of the seemingly relentless march of technological innovation and liberalization of the attitudes of society, I believe the best is yet to come. The human race seems to possess a canny ability for solving any problem that is placed in front of it.

What would be your most important piece of advice about life? > 'An individual cannot start living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.' (Martin Luther King Jr)

Do you think you could ever be married to, or in a long-term relationship with, someone with radically different political views from your own? > Yes, because I think what's more important is how the person has reached those views. Have they reached their beliefs out of a desire to help others, or a desire to help themselves? Did they embark upon open-minded inquisitiveness, or close-minded prejudice?

What do you consider the most important personal quality? > Compassion for the welfare of other people, and the ability to appreciate our individual insignificance.

What personal fault do you most dislike? > Pride and ignorance.

What commonly enjoyed activities do you regard as a waste of time? > Crosswords.

Where would you most like to live (other than where you do)? > Above a pub around the Old Trafford area.

What would your ideal holiday be? > Travelling around Europe and South America, experiencing numerous iconic football matches with the local supporters.

What is your most treasured possession? > My computer, the gateway to so much knowledge.

What talent would you most like to have? > Hendrix-like guitar skills.

What would be your ideal choice of alternative profession or job? > If I had the brains, theoretical physicist. Seeing as I think I don't, football writer (no offence to football writers).

Who are your sporting heroes? > Football: Eric Cantona, Peter Schmeichel, Paul Scholes, Zinedine Zidane, Dimitar Berbatov, Ruud van Nistelrooy, Andrés Iniesta. Non-Football: Boris Becker, Damon Hill, Roger Federer, Steve Redgrave.

If you could have one (more or less realistic) wish come true, what would you wish for? > For the Glazers to leave Manchester United and be replaced by morally responsible owners who appreciate and set out to fulfil the wants and needs of the fans, understanding the social responsibility of the local institution that is a football club.

If you could have any three guests, past or present, to dinner who would they be? > John Maynard Keynes, Karl Marx and Milton Friedman. Don't think I'd get much of a word in though.

If you had to change your first name, what would you change it to? > Lance-Uppercut.

[The normblog profile is a Friday morning feature. A list of all the profiles to date, and the links to them, can be found here.]

Shrug today but not every day

Just Journalism carries an interview with Gadi Taub. Here is one of the questions and Gadi's answer to it:

At times it seems that the bulk of Israeli society has written off Europe, and Great Britain in particular, as being beyond reach. A certain strand of thinking goes that the argument was had and won here - by the Palestinians and almost exclusively on their terms... What's your assessment of Europe when it comes to Israel? Is it even worth caring about?

GT: I think that it's true that Israelis have given up on the argument in the UK. And they are more or less right, I think.

When you read all this one-sided coverage, you just shrug and go read something else. But this is mostly true of the press, and academia. I don't think that foreign policy had turned its back on Europe or that European politicians buy the line of the anti-Israeli press. So that cooperation with most EU countries goes on.

Of course, if Israel doesn't extricate itself from the occupation - which would have been over had the Palestinians agreed to partition offered them by Rabin, Barak, or Olmert, or by the Clinton Paper which went even further - it will gradually turn into a pariah state. But quite apart from that we must still insist on the difference between a critique of Israel's policies [and] a denial of its right to exist. If you say that the club of political self-determination is open to all peoples, except Jews, then this is not a critique of policy. This is anti-Semitism. It also often blends with another sentiment. British guilt over its own colonial history, and the feeling that it has created this mess at the expense of the Palestinians.

Yes, there is that difference between criticizing Israeli policies and excluding the Jews from 'the club of political self-determination'. And yes, often you 'shrug and go read something else'. But if the battle for opinion is already lost in this country, it still has to be fought. Because sometimes you persuade one person, or a few people, or more than a few, and that can end up mattering. I doubt that Gadi would disagree. (Via Yaacov.)