More incisive politics from one of the UK’s most fêted writers. 

The good thing that came out of the riots was a renewed sense of community. “How does one put this without sounding gross … it was terrific to see the Asian communities on telly and not to have to think about terrorism, and not to have to think about the thing I’m always thinking about… do they want to kill Jews?”

Kudos indeed by the way for not sounding gross, &, yes, what about our pain? Which of us White Folk has not long been strung out by our obligation to wonder whether brown people want to ostentatiously kill Jews? 

(Jacobson does always speak for victims. Recall his wise intervention about the flotilla hellbent & merciless in its intent to deliver letters to Gaza. With Alice Walker yammering on about Palestinian children, what, insisted Jacobson, of the real victims, the heavily armed Israeli soldiers? Bringing mail, or in Jacobsonian idiom, ‘a cargo of intention … freighted with political sympathy and attitude’, would have been ‘a provocation’, the flotilla ‘half inviting a violence’. They were, to put it another way, asking for it.  How refreshingly Jacobson cut through the cant, Walker’s ‘language of outraged moral purity’, her delight in ‘feeling good about herself’. & snap to you too, Hedy Epstein! You & Hajo Meyer. All Holocaust-survivor this, unarmed-civilian-that, solidarity-against-oppression the other. Such fucking drama queens.)

Anyway, you know Asians? Isn’t it brilliant that we’re not forced to assume they’re terrorist Jew-killers any more? That was some tiring shit right there.