anti-semitism | Pandaemonium

IF ONLY SHE HAD READ MY ESSAY FIRST…

March 27, 2014 by Kenan Malik

On Monday my essay ‘In Defence of Diversity’ – which exposes the hollowness of contemporary anti-immigration rhetoric, and places it in historical context – won the 3 Quarks Daily 2014 essay prize. And on Monday, the Times’ new columnist Melanie Phillips – my old colleague from the days when I was a panelist on BBC Radio 4’s The Moral Maze – published a polemic trying to claim the progressive ground for critics of mass immigration. Her arguments are familiar – […]

Categories: Britain, Race & Immigration • Tags: anti-semitism, british politics, david goodhart, fortress europe, immigration, liberalism, melanie phillips, muslims, racism, working class

DIEUDONNÉ: THE CLOWN OF THE ANTI AGE

January 15, 2014 by Kenan Malik

Let’s be clear: The French comedian Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala, at the heart of a contemporary storm about anti-Semitism, is a bigot. But the fact that he is a bigot does not mean that all his supporters are, nor that he should be banned. The debate about Dieudonné exposes much of the confusion and blindness that pervades contemporary politics. The latest controversy over the comedian began after the footballer Nicolas Anelka celebrated a goal with the ‘quenelle’, a hand gesture popularised […]

Categories: Free Speech, International, Politics • Tags: anti-semitism, bernard-henri levy, dieudonne, france, free speech, racism

THE FACTS, THE MYTHS AND THE FRAMING OF IMMIGRATION

March 30, 2013 by Kenan Malik

At the heart of the current debate about immigration are two issues: the first is about the facts of immigration, the second about public perception of immigration. The facts are relatively straightforward. Immigration is a good and the idea that immigrants come to Britain to live off benefits laughable. Immigrants put more money into the economy than they take out and have negligible impact on jobs or wages. An independent report on the impact of immigration commissioned by the Home Office […]

Categories: Britain, Race & Immigration • Tags: anti-semitism, british politics, david goodhart, immigration, muslims, racism

GERALD SCARFE, ANTI-SEMITISM AND THE DANISH CARTOONS

January 30, 2013 by Kenan Malik

How should we respond to the controversy over the Gerald Scarfe cartoon? Last Sunday – Holocaust Memorial Day – the Sunday Times published a cartoon by Scarfe, its regular cartoonist, depicting the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu building a wall with blood-red coloured cement, in which were trapped Palestinians. The cartoon instantly created international outrage. The Board of Deputies of British Jews, which has complained to the Press Complaints Commission, denounced the cartoon as ‘shockingly reminiscent of the blood libel […]

Categories: Free Speech • Tags: anti-semitism, danish cartoons, free speech, gerald scarce, israel, liberal hypocrisy, offence, racism

INTELLECTUAL CHARLATANS & ACADEMIC WITCH-HUNTERS

September 3, 2012 by Kenan Malik

Judith Butler is a queen, perhaps the queen, of poststructuralist philosophy. A pioneer of queer theory and one of the world’s leading feminist philosophers, she made her name with her 1990 book, Gender Trouble, which dismisses the idea of sex and gender as fixed categories, viewing them instead as forms of social artifice. Butler introduced in the book the concept of gender as ‘performativity’: by behaving as if there were male and female ‘natures’ we create the social fiction that these natures […]

Categories: Academia, Free Speech • Tags: academic freedom, adorno prize, anti-semitism, cultural boycott, free speech, israel, judith butler, martha nussbaum, michel foucault, palestine, post-structuralism, postmodernism