Posted on 04/12/2002 5:48:41 PM PDT by dighton
THE Board of Deputies of British Jews is considering making a complaint to the police over a newspaper interview with the poet Tom Paulin in which he is reported as saying that American-born settlers in Israel should be shot dead.
Paulin, who appears regularly on the panel of the BBC2 arts programme Newsnight Review (formerly Late Review), allegedly made the comment in an interview with the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram.
The interviewer wrote that Paulin, a consistent critic of Israeli conduct towards the Palestinians, clearly abhorred "Brooklyn-born" Jewish settlers. Paulin, a lecturer at Hertford College, Oxford, was then quoted as saying: "They should be shot dead.
"I think they are Nazis, racists, I feel nothing but hatred for them." Earlier in the interview, he was quoted as saying: "I never believed that Israel had the right to exist at all."
Yesterday the board said it was consulting its lawyers over the comments with a view to making a complaint to the police under the terms of the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act. This prohibits the making of comments that incite violence against identifiable groups outside the UK.
Mike Whine, a spokesman for the board, said: "The latter part of his [Paulin's] interview where he is quoted as suggesting that Israel has no right to exist and he would like to kill American-Jewish immigrants to Israel is, technically at least, illegal.
"Whether or not the Crown Prosecution Service would prosecute him is a matter for them to decide." Mr Whine said the poet had clearly gone beyond opposition to Zionism and was promoting hatred of Jews.
Neville Nagler, director general of the board, said: "These are the words of a man filled with hate and fanaticism." Paulin was also reported by the newspaper as saying that he had resigned from the Labour Party because the Blair government was a Zionist government.
The Palestinians, he said, had to meet force with force, and needed good anti-tank weapons. On the subject of suicide bombers, the paper quoted him as saying: "I can understand how suicide bombers feel. It is an expression of deep injustice and tragedy.
"I think, though, that it is better to resort to conventional guerrilla warfare. I think that attacks on civilians in fact boost morale. Hitler bombed London into submission, but in fact it created a sense of national solidarity."
Paulin, a respected poet, essayist and critic with a love of controversy, once lost his temper on Late Review when Germaine Greer, a fellow panellist, expressed sympathy for British paratroopers involved in the shootings on Bloody Sunday.
Accusing Miss Greer of talking rubbish, Paulin, the product of a liberal Protestant family from Northern Ireland, went on: "They [the paratroopers] were thugs sent in by public schoolboys to kill innocent Irish people. They were rotten, racist bastards."
He has locked horns with the leaders of Britain's Jewish community before. Last year he published a poem, Killed in Crossfire, in which he likened the Israeli army to a "Zionist SS".
But he vehemently denied allegations that he was anti-semitic, citing his anger at the way the anti-semitism of TS Eliot, addressed in a study by Anthony Julius, had been ignored.
Answering a letter from Mr Nagler published in a national newspaper, Paulin said: "What is so galling is that people like [Neville] Nagler think that they can insinuate anti-semitism and leave it at that.
"I am a philo-semite, and I repudiate his letter with contempt." When contacted by The Telegraph yesterday, Paulin said: "I'm sorry, I've got nothing to say."
© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2002.
Even for their poets these days.
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed ...
The Saudis haven't caught on.
Thanks for setting a clear example of how a Nazi should believe.
I'll bet the little poet-twerp coward would drop a pantload if someone handed him a rifle and took him to Israel to see if his backbone matched has boast.
Brit, my foot. He's a product of American public schools.
In other words, "I get to advocate killing Jews because I am virtuously angry at a great, dead man with stupid prejudices against Jews who never, however, advocated killing them. Of course jealousy because he was a poet in an entirely different class from me has nothing to do with it."
Aren't we getting a lot of sickening looks deep into the mind of the anti-Semitic Left lately, though?
From an article on Tom Paulin, printed in The Guardian:
Paulin, by his own admission, comes from 'a dying breed of old middle-class, Protestant, socialist dissenters'. Born in Leeds in 1949, he grew up on North Parade, off Belfast's tribally divided Ormeau Road, both his parents belonging to the Northern Ireland Labour Party. In that truculent city, his creative and political roots were formed, then their mettle tested by the state's brutal response to the ascendant civil rights movement of 1968. He came of age as part of the new wave of Northern Irish poets in the Sixties,
Mmmmm, yeah...you just love Jews to death, don't you, Paulin?
Or maybe it's those other "semites" you're referring to...?
I don't think they should be shot but I'm all for sending them home. About 8 years ago I saw a female Chicago native - living in a Israeli settlement - shriek about how she was living in "her" land and that "she" had a "right" to it.
I just sat there thinking, "You need to get your butt home, woman".
Jewish refugees from countries like Russia, I can deal with but, American settlers? ...don't come whining to the US when you get shot at.
About says it all, doesn't it? The more impotent they become, the louder the left & the Euro-weenies scream.
Oh sure, you would love to see her "home", I bet. Come on now.. wouldnt you rather she just went away, Psycho ?
And if you mean to insinuate what it seems you're insinuating – go bugger yourself.
And everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction,
While the worst are full of passionate intensity...,
You've said it well, dennis. These are daemons, beings without souls.
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