Kapuscinski: Lies, lies, glorious lies
Filed under: Culture, Notebook | Tags: History, journalism, Kapuscinski
Leave a Comment This week it became apparent that Ryszard Kapuscinski has been dead long enough for his reputation to start taking a bit of a kicking. About time. If things had gone on as they had any longer, he would have got the sainthood ahead of John Paul II.
A new biography has been published, by Artur Domoslawski, which (I hear, because it’s only in Polish so far) says that Ryszard, as he went about Africa and South America in the good old days of the Cold War as PAP’s only foreign correspondent, made things up.
Horror. How could this most lucid of men, a man voted the greatest journalist of the 20th Century have committed the only cardinal sin left in the business?
Because we’ve been kidding ourselves.
Israel: It’s 1938, and Ahmadinejad is Hitler
Filed under: Politics, Security & Defence | Tags: Holocaust, Iran, Israel
Leave a Comment | Berlin (dpa) – The message couldn‘t be any clearer: The world is now in danger of failing to stop a murderous regime in the same way it did in 1938, before Hitler unleashed war on Europe.
That at least is the view that has been delivered by Israel‘s representatives abroad, on the occasion of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, falling on Wednesday 65 years after the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. In Berlin, Israeli President Shimon Peres addressed the German parliament, or Bundestag, and drew a clear line between the “racist doctrine” of Nazi Germany and what Israel sees as its most clear and present threat: Iran. |
Read full article here
Fury from the free-speech trenches!
Filed under: Culture, Notebook | Tags: Freedom of Speech, Islamism
Leave a Comment …And indignance amongst the Islamist apologists.
Over past couple of weeks a sort of debate-by-columns has been going on in the feuilletons of the German newspapers. A feuilleton, by the way, is where weighty but yet somehow too-hurriedly-written articles on culture get published, every single day. It never ceases to amaze me how this can go on, considering that you need the concentration of a racing driver to get through one of these articles, never mind three large sheets before breakfast. But anyway.
The debate has been about whether Europeans are entitled to defend the right to offend – especially when, like Danish “Mohammed Cartoonist” Kurt Westergaard, one can be attacked in one’s own home – or whether We (capital intended) ought not to “abuse” free speech and offend in the first place.
I would like to get involved in this debate, perhaps even piss a few people off, but I can’t help thinking that while we are waffling about it, some loony somewhere is planning how to knock Salman Rushdie off.
Statues
Statues, real and imagined. Pergamon Museum, Berlin.
The Met and the Pergamon – Two approaches to representing Mohammed
Filed under: Culture, Notebook, Society | Tags: Islam, Islamic Art, Museums
Leave a Comment An interview with Stefan Weber, the newish director of the Berlin Museum of Islamic Art (part of the Pergamon complex, to be refurbished) appeared yesterday, in which he says he will not censor any images in the collection which represent the prophet Mohammed. Last week the Metropolitan Museum in New York “pulled” some of its Mohammed images, apparently in response to pressure from Muslim conservatives.
“We shouldn’t start censoring the past,” Weber says.
I remember when I worked at the Chester Beatty Museum in Dublin, they had one or two things that might “offend” in this way. I wonder if they are still there.
