July 16, 2002

"...along with everybody else..."

Here's an article based on an interview with Mona Baker's husband, Ken, in which he says:  "we are just ordinary people. Neither of us has any real political allegiances, we have no religion, no creed, nothing at all...  We didn't intend it to happen this way. We thought we were making a token gesture. We were joining a boycott along with everyone else."

The Little Green Footballs comment section has been buzzing with talk about "good Germans," as you might imagine. And, clearly, as the Bakers ought to have been able to imagine. The astonishing thing is that the reaction and controversy really does seem to have taken these people completely by surprise. Europeans who are critical of Israel often don't realize just how bad their rhetoric can sound; but this transgression wasn't just rhetorical. The Bakers take this kind of "cluelessness" to a previously unattained level. Baker's ideology appears to have blinded her to reality, and it's certainly not the first time that such a thing has occurred. But can it really be that there was not a single soul in her professional circle with enough sense to have pointed out the folly, if not the reprehensible nature, of her "token gesture"?

According to this, Baker may lose her job if she refuses to re-instate the sacked Israeli scholars. (What you're hearing is the sound of the world's smallest violin...)

Patrick Bateson, the eminently fiskable King's College provost, has cleaned up his public relations act a bit since telling the New York Times that Mona's purge was akin to refusing to cooperate with Mengele's perverse experiments on children: "[Prof Baker] decided to take a unilateral action," he now says, "not thinking very clearly about what the original boycott was about. Her understanding of its principles is muddled." I suppose Bateson's understanding of the boycott's "principles" has deepened considerably in the last couple of days; or perhaps he realized (none too soon) that he had backed a bad pony. No indication is given of what these principles might be. What's the boycott-compliant Bateson-approved method of harrassing Israeli academics in order to send a message to the Sharon government? Perhaps, like many such "open letters" that end up being published in the Guardian, it is only legitimate and coherent to the degree that it is disregarded? This defense of the academic boycott by its original authors fails to clear it up. Any way you slice it, "muddled" is indeed the mot juste.

Posted by Dr. Frank at July 16, 2002 11:51 AM | TrackBack