George Orwell once posed the question of
whether we have the right to expect common decency from minor poets. The
prominence of Tom Paulin, whose verse fluctuates between political doggerel and
free verse of the sort that reminded Robert Frost of “playing tennis with the
net down”, in the literary, cultural, and academic life of contemporary Britain,
makes that question as compelling as ever it was. Paulin is a lecturer in
nineteenth and twentieth-century English literature at Oxford University’s
Hertford College, an institution whose famous past members include William
Tyndale, Thomas Hobbes, and Charles James Fox. He is a regular on the BBC2 arts
program Newsnight Review and a nearly inescapable presence on that network’s
literary/cultural programming, including TV criticism and “The Late Show”. (As a
sign of respect for his cultural authority, one British rock band has named
itself “Tompaulin.”) His increasing influence in progressive circles in Britain
– this despite (or perhaps because of) his involvement in IRA politics – helps
to explain why England’s “learned classes” are in the forefront of European
efforts to paint Israel as the devil’s own experiment station, the major
obstacle to world peace.
As a literary critic, Paulin’s chief
distinction has been the aggressive politicizing of literature. He has viewed
the work of D.H. Lawrence through the prism of “post-colonialism”, a
pseudo-scholarly enterprise whose primary aim is the delegitimization of Israel;
he thought Emily Dickinson an important poet because she criticized “mercantile
values”; in an essay on T.S. Eliot he sternly warned that “Hate poems are
offensive” and took it upon himself to accuse a host of critics (including Denis
Donoghue) of “complicity” in Eliot’s anti-Semitism because they had discussed
his poetry without mentioning it. In this failure to recognize that although
politics may be “in” everything, not everything is politics, and that to see
politics everywhere empties politics of meaning, Paulin was not much different
from countless other academic insurrectionaries in the English departments. But
when he found that the excitement of showing oneself politically superior to
writers of the past was transitory, Paulin turned to “action”.
Perpetually intoxicated – by the sound of
his own extremism – Paulin persuaded himself that an Indian student for whom he
served as “moral tutor” at Hertford College had been discriminated against by an
Israeli professor of Islamic philosophy and Arabic at Oxford’s Oriental
Institute. In October 2000 the student, one Nadeem Ahmed, went to court to
charge Fritz Zimmermann (of St. Cross College) with “discouraging” him, calling
him “stupid”, and being “biased”. Since Paulin belongs to that sizable community
of academics who would be rendered virtually speechless if deprived of the
epithet “racist,” he leapt into the fray, making 200 phone calls (none to
Zimmermann) on behalf of his protege, to proctors, deans, and his numerous
friends in the news media. He made a particular point of alleging that
Zimmermann was “bunged off to Israel to get out of the way”. When Judge
Playford, QC, of Reading County Court, dismissed the case on April 23, 2002, he
made a point of saying that “Dr. Zimmermann was not in any way motivated by
race,” that “neither Mr. Ahmed nor Mr. Paulin honestly thought there was any
racial element in the complaint,” and rebuked Paulin for “mischievously” making
“cryptic” phone calls threatening to charge various university officials with
“racism” and to initiate “legal action and unfavourable publicity”. The judge
also pointed out that Paulin’s abstruse research into Zimmermann’s ethnic and
national identity was flawed: Zimmermann was neither Jewish nor Israeli, but a
German Gentile.
The court’s judgment was, as it happened,
handed down about ten days after Paulin made his most ambitious bid for world
fame (and perhaps martyrdom at the hands of the implacable Jews).
He told an interviewer for the Cairo weekly
paper, Al-Ahram, that he abhorred Brooklyn-born Jewish “settlers” and
believed “they should be shot dead. I think they are Nazis, racists, I feel
nothing but hatred for them.” He added, for good measure, that he had quit the
Labor Party because Tony Blair presides over “a Zionist government” and that he
had “never believed that Israel had the right to exist at all”. Since the
preferred form of Arab Jew-killing at the time of the April 2002 interview was
suicide bombing rather than “shooting dead”, Paulin indicated that, of course,
he could “understand how suicide bombers feel”; his only objection to this
particular form of murdering Jews was a strategic one: guerrilla warfare, he
suggested to Palestinian Arabs needful of advice on the subject, would be more
effective because direct attacks on civilians might create a sense of solidarity
among Israelis.
Paulin’s unambiguous incitement to raw
murder was clearly in violation of British law. The Terrorism Act 2000, section
59, states: “A person commits an offence if he incites another person to commit
an act of terrorism wholly or partly outside the United Kingdom...it is
immaterial whether or not the person incited is in the United Kingdom at the
time of the incitement.” Once upon a time – and this long before there was such
a thing as the Terrorism Act – incitement to murder was a serious offense in
England. For example, in 1881 Johann Most was tried in Britain merely because
his newspaper, Freiheit, exulted (after the fact) in the assassination of
the Czar. Most was found guilty of libel and incitement to murder, and sentenced
to 16 months of hard labor – a sentence deemed “merciful” because Most was a
foreigner and “might be suffering violent wrong”. (The episode lurks in the
background of Henry James’ novel, The Princess Casamassima [1885-86].) In
fact, Most should have been kept in jail much longer; after finishing his term,
he moved to America, where he was imprisoned for inciting the assassin of
President McKinley.
But Paulin uttered his call for the murder
of Jews living in Judea and Samaria with complete impunity. Oxford University
said it was launching an investigation into his comments; and the Board of
Deputies of British Jews threatened to prosecute Paulin in accord with the
provisions of the Terrorism Act. Exactly why the British Home Secretary left the
matter to be pursued (not very tenaciously, as it turned out) by private parties
remains a mystery. Can one imagine a prominent British figure calling for the
shooting “dead” of any other ethnic or national group – Pakistani Muslims, let
us say, or Palestinian Arabs – and escaping prosecution, to say nothing of
dismissal by his assorted employers, ranging from Oxford University to the
“respected” (but not very respectable) BBC?
For decades, and especially since the June
1967 war, it has been a necessary if wearisome task to point out that a person
need not directly advocate the murder of Jews in order to qualify as an
anti-Semite. Yet here was somebody explicitly advocating that certain Jews be
shot dead; and endless foolish debates ensued, on both sides of the Atlantic,
about whether it was permissible to label the advocate an antisemite, or whether
incitement to murder constituted “hate speech”, or whether Paulin should be
invited (or disinvited or reinvited) to deliver a lecture or to recite his
wretched poems.
Indeed, Paulin himself made it clear that
he was not to be labelled an anti-Semite merely because he had advocated killing
Jews and denying Israel the “right to exist”, as if it were his privilege to
decide whether the Jews or the Jewish state had a “right” to exist. Paulin not
only declared himself a “philo-Semite”, thereby confusing those who do not know
that in Paulin’s circles this is far more likely to mean love of everything Arab
than of anything Jewish. He also took to the welcoming pages of the venomously
anti-Israel London Review of Books in January 2003 with a 133-line poem
called “On Being Dealt the Anti-Semitic Card”. Here he spews forth, along with
numerous incoherent and apoplectic utterances on the Crusades, on Joseph de
Maistre, on the Enlightenment, on Christian fundamentalism, his extreme
dissatisfaction with being called an anti-Semite: “the program though / of
saying Israel’s critics / are tout court anti-Semitic / is designed daily
by some schmuck / to make you shut the fuck up.” Without quite intending to do
so, the terminally obtuse Paulin, in his most touching and beautiful language,
thus confirms the assertion that “criticism of Israeli policy” is almost always
a leftist euphemism for “advocating destruction of Israel and murder of its
citizens”.
Not a few readers now returned to Paulin’s
February 2001 scribblings on Israel, quoted above, and noticed that their key
phrase of ironically flattering self-mockery about being deceived by the wily
Zionists came from none other than Hitler himself. In a passage from Mein
Kampf familiar to every student of this subject, Hitler wrote: “While the
Zionists try to make the rest of the world believe that the national
consciousness of the Jew finds its satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian
state, the Jews again slyly dupe the dumb Goyim.” Did Paulin write “dumb goys”
out of genuine illiteracy or out of a desire to conceal his source?
The publicity generated by the two British
scandals in which Paulin became embroiled was, however, as nothing compared with
what followed in America. In November 2002, Paulin, by this time a visiting
professor in the English Department of Columbia University, was invited to be
the Morris Gray lecturer at Harvard by its English department. At about the same
time, rumors circulated that Columbia was considering a permanent appointment
for him there – perhaps because its English department’s most famous member, the
late Edward Said, had lauded Paulin for being a “reader of almost fanatical
scrupulosity”.
Just how Paulin got himself invited to
Harvard or Columbia in the first place remains a mystery. John Bradley, writing
for the Arab News (November 18, 2002) suggested that “it was almost
certainly [Seamus] Heaney himself who invited Paulin to give the lecture [at
Harvard].” According to one student of Irish literary culture whom I consulted,
“Heaney may have owed Paulin a large debt of gratitude: an old rumor had it that
Heaney was in some sort of trouble with the IRA (for distancing himself from
Irish politics) and needed a friend with bona-fide Irish credentials.”
But then English departments are
notoriously susceptible to the lure of extremist political views, especially if
they have the leftist stamp of approval on them.
At Harvard the dispute over Paulin became one about free
speech or hate speech or (perhaps) the constitutional right of a British subject
to have an endowed lectureship bestowed on him.
After a storm of criticism, the English
faculty, with the blessing of Harvard president Lawrence Summers, rescinded its
invitation to Paulin. But then Harvard’s civil liberties absolutists weighed in
on behalf of Paulin’s “right” to lecture, and the English faculty reinvited him.
Some urged that he should be encouraged to speak because they were confident
that his egregious stupidity would expose him to deserved ridicule and keep him
from wallowing in the (painless) martyrdom he sought.
The deeper significance of the Paulin
affair was revealed, unintentionally to be sure, by Columbia’s James Shapiro, a
professor of English, the author of a book on Shakespeare and the Jews, and one
of the most ardent defenders of Columbia’s decision to embrace Paulin. Casting
his mind’s eye over Paulin’s oral and written remarks about shooting Jews dead
and destroying their country, Shapiro declared that these remarks “did not step
over the line”. Apparently Shapiro’s dividing line is like the receding horizon;
he walks towards it, but can never reach it. And so the real question – which
was not whether or not Paulin should be reciting poems at Harvard or tutoring
students (morally or academically) at Columbia but whether or not he should be
in prison – was almost entirely ignored. Public discourse about Jews and Israel
has now crossed a threshhold; the dividing line between the permissible and the
possible has been erased. In the months following the Paulin affair,
publications that had long been hostile to Israel did, in more “civilized” and
literate form, what Paulin had already done in his unkempt Yahoo style: they
moved from strident criticism of Israel to apologias for anti-Semitic violence
and calls for the dissolution of the country. The liberal Berkeley historian
Martin Jay in Salmagundi (Winter/Spring 2003) merely blamed Jews for “causing”
the “new” anti-Semitism; the liberal journalist Paul Krugman in The New York
Times (October 21, 2003) went a step further by “explaining” (away) the
Malaysian Mahathir Mohamad’s regurgitation of The Protocols of the Elders of
Zion as “anti-Semitism with a Purpose”; and then the liberal historian Tony
Judt outdid both of them in The New York Review of Books (October 23,
2003) by calling – no doubt to the general satisfaction of the readers of that
Women’s Wear Daily of the American left – for the end of the State of
Israel as the panacea for the world’s ills. Tom Paulin may have failed to get
himself a permanent academic appointment in America, but he helped American
liberalism to redefine itself, in this age of suicide bombing, as an accessory
to murder.
