Does Anti-Israel = Anti-Semitism?

By the time I got on the train to Boston on Friday I had received 27 "Gotcha!" emails adjusting my trivial misquotation of Dorothy Parker. The good news of course was that I have 27 readers; the less good news is that they are all nitpickers. The really bad news was Amtrak. If Lincoln could write the immortal "Gettysburg Address" while traveling to Pennsylvania on the back of an envelope, surely I ought to be able to write a 'Prince' column, with its half-life of 12 minutes, while traveling to Boston on a yellow pad. Mrs. White, my high-school English teacher, who was ferocious in her antipathy towards misplaced modifiers of all kinds, seemed to think that the principal if not sole obstacle to successful railroad authorship was the misplaced adverbial phrase; but she had never actually been on an Amtrak train. Misplaced modifiers are not even vaguely competitive with uneven tracks, squalling babies and the continuous though spasmodic 12-tone dysphony of a hundred cell phones.

I went to Boston to conduct some business of the Medieval Academy of America, housed in quaint offices on Harvard Square just around the corner from the gilded sign of Dewey, Cheatham and Howe of NPR fame. Thus does life imitate art! The Medieval Academy is not a political organization, and my own field of expertise is not international relations. I was quite surprised, therefore, when some Harvard folks tracked me down in the middle of my medieval meeting to ask my opinion of "the Tom Paulin brouhaha." My fame as the President of the Medieval Academy meant nothing to them; they were interested in Fleming the infamous right-wing philosemite columnist of The Daily Princetonian! I suppose it is better to discover one's calling late in life than never to discover it at all. But it meant that I had to chuck out my illegible yellow pages on Princetonian intellectuality and start out all over on the return trip.

I was unaware of the "brouhaha" but all too aware of Tom Paulin. He is an Oxford English don, an agile literary critic, a poet of repute, and a gadfly "public intellectual" who often appears on British television to enunciate "controversial" (a code word for "outrageous") political opinions having nothing to do with English literature or the art of poetry. He is recently a visitor at Columbia. Among his published opinions are his denial "that Israel had the right to exist at all" an opinion incoherently competing with another, that he is a believer in "the two-state solution." He says that he feels "nothing but hatred" for "American born" Jewish settlers on the West Bank, who, being "Nazis" and "racists" all "should be shot dead." You may want to keep in mind, as my story progresses, that quite a few of these people have in fact recently been shot dead, including a 10-month-old baby and various others whose Nazi credentials might be regarded as questionable. I have not seen Mr. Paulin's appraisal of this slaughter, but he did write a celebrated poem ("Killed in the Crossfire") about the famously photographed 12-year-old Mohammed al-Durra, a civilian killed in crossfire at the Nazirim Junction in Gaza. This horrible death he unequivocally identifies as work of "the Zionist SS," the claim of its unintentional nature a cynical ruse designed to hoodwink us "dumb goys."

Now the "brouhaha." The Department of English at Harvard had invited Mr. Paulin to deliver a prestigious "Morris Gray Lecture" (actually a reading). This was to have taken place on Thursday, a few days after an assassin snuck into Kibbutz Metzer in northern Israel and murdered five people, including a young mother and her two infants. Some Harvard students and faculty who (unlike me) regard the category of "hate speech" as of probative weight thought one might consider its applicability to a statement that expresses "hatred" for a whole group of people, adding the advice that they should be "shot dead." They asked Harvard's president what he thought about the invitation. Harvard's president in turn asked Prof. Lawrence Buell, '61, chair of the English Department, what he thought about it. The result of his professorial cogitation was a negotiated disinvitation to a nonevent "by mutual consent of the poet and the English department." Enough egg to go around for several faces, and now a visiting Princeton medievalist was being asked what he thought about "the silencing of Paulin" given the fact that Paulin very recently enjoyed the hospitality and largesse of both the Princeton English department and its Program in Creative Writing!

What I had to say on this subject was that I was disappointed that friends and colleagues, consulting about as widely as Louis XIV might have done, had in the name of my university and even my department issued an invitation that I knew for a fact (but only long after the fait accompli) was offensive not only to me but to numerous other Princeton faculty and students. But the discourtesy or myopia of a maladroit administrator does not trump the Constitution, which should protect the speech of the devil Beëlzebub himself should he legitimately mount an academic podium. Strong anti-Israeli views are by no means necessarily anti-Semitic; but they deserve a prudential scrutiny given the fact that culturally sanctioned anti-Semitism of the vilest kind is now endemic among intellectuals throughout the Muslim world. (Egyptian television is offering as a Ramadan "special" an historical soap based in part on the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion"!) Secular European intellectuals of Paulin's stripe vehemently deny anti-Semitism, but they can speak its language without accent. A common attitude among British leftists may be suggested by the following quotation from Oliver Burkeman's account of this affair in what is ostensibly a news story, not an editorial, in last Thursday's "Guardian." He attributes all the fuss to Paulin's "style," which "has ruffled feathers in the U.S., where the Jewish question is notoriously sensitive." Yes, the Jewish question! Still sensitive, still no final solution, even after all these years.

John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu.

Correction by Professor John V. Fleming, appended Nov. 25.

On Friday Nov. 22 I learned that I had accidentally made an error of misattribution in the column I had published on this page the day before ("Does Anti-Israel = Anti-Semitism?," Nov. 21). The column dealt in part with a controversy surrounding Harvard's invitation to the British poet Tom Paulin. At the end of my column I alluded to and briefly quoted a recent article in the British press concerning this controversy, erroneously attributing it, in a critical context, to Oliver Burkeman, a writer for the "Guardian." But Mr. Burkeman did not write the article, nor did it appear in the "Guardian." Neither Mr. Burkeman nor the "Guardian" has the least thing to do with it. I quite simply made in haste a bibliographical blunder of which I here repent at leisure. The article to which I was alluding, and which I accurately characterized and fairly quoted, was written by Andrew Walker of BBC's "In Depth" ("Tom Paulin: Poetic polemicist," http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/in_depth/uk/2000/newsmakers/2481623.stm.) My regret is the greater in light of the fact that, unbeknownst to me, my column was circulated outside the Princeton community through blogging at instapundit.com. I have apologized privately to Mr. Burkeman and now wish to do so publicly at the first opportunity since learning of an error which while wholly inadvertent was also wholly of my own making. I hope that anyone who saw the original column sees this correction.