ince accusations of racism are so often a way of
unfairly discrediting an opponent, I tend to be very sceptical of them, but cannot avoid feeling that antiSemitism is in the air. The form it commonly takes at present was expressed in the famous indiscretion of Daniel Bernard, the former French ambassador to London, who died last week. He was naughtily `outed' (though not by name) by his host, Barbara Amiel. Having described Israel as 'a shifty little country', M. Bernard went on to exclaim, 'Why should the world be in danger of World War Three because of those people?' This is a modern version of one of the key features of anti-Semitism — that Jews, small in number but great in power, cause all the trouble. If only they weren't 'in the way', everything would be peaceful. The fact that a Jew says something is thus taken to discount what he says. I have seen excellent writers like David Aaronovitch and Nick Cohn dismissed for this reason. And I was so bugged by something in Richard Ingrams's Observer column last summer that I cut it out. Ingrams wrote: 'I have developed a habit when confronted by letters to the editor in support of the Israeli government to look at the signature to see if the writer has a Jewish name. If so, I tend not to read it.' It is a strange principle. Would one discount a letter about pregnancy from a woman, or an article from an Englishman in favour of England? And what of a writer with a Jewish name who criticises the Israeli government? Is he too to be discounted by his race, or is he, like the 'good German' under Hitler, somehow a 'good' Jew?
I'ye just spent three months in Iraq,' said the woman sitting next to me on the platform of our country railway station in Sussex. She turned out to be the feminist Lesley Abdela, and she is, to use the phrase I invented to tease her, a mercenary for democracy. Working for an American university project, she was funded by the Coalition to help to build civil society in the South Central province, the most populous of Iraq. She has worked in about 40 countries, and says she has never before found such an intense interest in what democracy is and how to get it. Her organisation helped run elections for neighbourhood councils (glorified parish councils) right across the province, and these were popular and peaceful. The main religious leader in Hilla, ancient Babylon, has a following of about half a million
people, and attracted crowds of 1.000 or so for each of his many pro-democracy talks. Though religious, most people she met opposed the extremists' demand for the Sharia imposed by Shiites in Shiite areas and Sunnis in Sunni ones, preferring the rule of secular law throughout. She was 'incredibly impressed', she said, by the dedication of the Americans with whom she worked, from the 'visionary' head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in the province to the laundry manager who gave jobs to a deaf and dumb couple who needed help. She is not very optimistic, believing that democracy needs at least 20 years before it can become a 'homegrown tomato', and that the West won't have the patience. But she bridles at the idea of the famous 52 exambassadors that it is 'naive' to help build democracy in the country. Before a country has democracy, its coming must always seem improbable, but without some outside help, it must surely be impossible.
Ir is a critical cliché to say that a book 'tells us more about what it is to be human', hut it seems exactly apposite for George and Sam, published this week by Viking. The author, to declare my interest at once, is my sister Charlotte Moore, and the book is the story of her two autistic boys, whose names give the book its title. Articles — all true — have already drawn attention to her sense of humour and courage in the face of the difficulties involved, and to the book's usefulness for those acquainted with similar situations. But the book is also fascinating in the new way it makes one look at the human mind. George, the elder of the two autistic boys,
is the more verbal, with a good vocabulary. This can mislead one into supposing that he thinks as a `neurotypicar person does, but in fact he is different. Once, in his hearing, someone said, If George Best has one more drink he'll die.' George began to weep silently, and Charlotte eventually realised that because he had heard his name, and always applies what he hears in a literal way, he thought that he might die when he drank his tumbler of water. The disadvantages of such a way of thinking are obvious, but part of the subtlety of Charlotte's book is its capacity to look at 'normal' people, as it were, autistically. Once one does so, it becomes clear not only that the autist is profoundly different (as opposed to defective-but-curable) but also that our customary way of looking at things has its own limitations. There is an obsession, particularly in modern life, with end results — study only in order to qualify, earn only in order to spend, don't waste time on the detail unless it is 'relevant' to a future goal. Yet much scientific discovery, perhaps much artistic achievement, is related to an exclusive, repetitive focus on the detail which ordinary people regard as mad. Charlotte is not putting the sentimental argument that autistic people are geniuses (very few of them are); it is rather that circumstances have forced her to study the grammar of the human mind, learning much more about its rules by living with their exceptions.
Jane Bonham Carter, the outstanding television producer, was made a Liberal Democrat peer last week. Her father, Mark Bonham Carter, was also a Liberal life peer; so was his mother. Lady Violet Bonham Carter. And her father, H.H. Asquith, was prime minister. He was therefore made an earl, but none of the above inherited his title. Is this a unique example of the hereditary principle surviving all formal attempts to remove it? It is fitting that this should happen to the family whose party became, after Asquith, unelectable.
Idon't feel qualified to judge whether or not Susan Greenfield should be a Fellow of the Royal Society, but I thought the following paragraph in the Daily Telegraph was the funniest thing to appear in the press last week: 'Lady Greenfield, who will become Thinker in Residence for the government of South Australia in June, staying in Adelaide for nine weeks, declined to comment.'
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