Reading that soppy Sally Rooney op-ed in Saturday’s Irish Times, it suddenly struck me: the UK government’s proscription of Palestine Action is one of the best things that’s happened to her. And to all the other keffiyeh-adorned poseurs in the bourgeois cult of Israelophobia. For at last, these people get to disguise their morally conformist abhorrence for the Jewish State as something radical. As something daring, sexy, possibly illegal, a thing you might even be arrested for. Courtesy of Keir Starmer’s clampdown on Palestine Action, these privileged spouters of the conventional wisdom of blind hatred for Israel have been gifted the thing they so sorely lacked – a frisson of revolutionary defiance.
Rooney’s piece has got the digital left squealing into their keffiyehs with delight. Puffing herself like some Boudicca of the anti-Israel set, she says she will continue to cheer and even fund Palestine Action. That’s the middle-class movement that loved making a spectacle of its virtuous animus for the Jewish State by carrying out infantile and sometimes dangerous stunts. It was proscribed as a ‘terrorist’ organisation in July, meaning you can get 14 years in the clink just for expressing support for it, never mind funding it with some of the royalties from your naff novels. Our hero Sally doesn’t care, though: I’ll still back them, she says, and ‘if this makes me a “supporter of terror” under UK law, so be it’.
Is anyone else dying from second-hand embarrassment? Here we have a rich novelist, the darling of the literary establishment, cosplaying as a modern-day Bernadette Devlin. It’s giving radical chic, to borrow Tom Wolfe’s phrase, where the patrician classes cosy up to ‘street politics’ in the hope that some of its hustle and glamour might rub off on their otherwise plain, bourgeois lives. My favourite bit is when Rooney says she even intends to fund Palestine Action using the ‘residual fees’ she gets from the BBC for its ‘two fine [TV] adaptations’ of her novels. Shorter version: I’m successful and moral! She thinks she’s getting one over on the BBC, blissfully unaware that it is packed with Israel-haters like her who’ll be clinking their Prosecco glasses when they hear that their favourite novelist plans to give Beeb money to Palestine ponces.
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Ruth King
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, http://www.ruthfullyyours.com and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.
