Image: English TV personality Larry Grayson kicks up his legs with some Scottish lassies. My Scots gran would’ve been proud of them, and him. (By Screenshot from [1], Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14505889.)
My gran used to tell me that her Church of Scotland minister once said there is no more awful thing to say to another person than “Shut up!” She very much liked Larry Grayson, whose catch phrase was “Shut that door!” She could laugh at Larry Grayson, but not at “Shut up.”
Well, if she were here now, God bless her, I think she’d agree that “I hope your daughter dies” beats “Shut up” into a cocked hat for awfulness. The circumstances are surely as good as irrelevant, but here they are, for what they’re worth: on October 16th, a right-wing passer-by attacked Eli Albag, the father of a 19-year-old hostage, Liri, while he was at the hostage protest tent in Tel Aviv, calling him a “traitor” and saying[1] the words in question. An ardent backer of the Israeli government’s stance on attacking Gaza despite Hamas’s holding of hostages hopes that one of the hostages dies. That’s what he said.
The Israeli government wants to unite its people against Gaza. One of its members wants to wipe Gaza off the face of the Earth. Instead of uniting its people behind its project, Israel is dividing its people down the middle. Gil Dikman, whose cousins are hostages, lambasted Likud Member of Knesset Galit Distel Atbaryan for her calls to “erase Gaza from the face of the earth.” Dikman responded, “To hear you speak in such slogans . . . ‘to erase, to annihilate, to flatten [Gaza].’ Who are you flattening? Human beings who you’ve abandoned is who you’re flattening.”[2]
Meanwhile, in England, a university rabbi received a direct message that said: “You massacred innocent Muslims, I hope you die too.”[3]
Does I hope you die too top I hope your daughter dies? Can intolerance ever top intolerance? Not who’s the wronged and who’s the wronger, but who’s the least wrong of the wrongers?
Many assaults (words aimed to create fear are an assault) which are noted against Jews seem to be inflicted by groups of people. Anonymously, or shouted from windows of cars that then speed off. Is anti-semitism the chosen weapon of the craven? First disarm the Jew and then frog-march them off to concentration camps, before they can defend themselves. That’s how it was once done. Now, insults are spat at lonely figures by groups of three and four, emblems and symbols either ripped down in the dark of night or spray-tagged furtively and surreptitiously by moonlight. Perhaps we still should be glad of that, that they’re not posted up in broad, defiant daylight. Maybe we still have that one, last shred of decency, still hanging on, by the skins of our teeth. If cowardice is decency, that is.
We hear this from Celia Johnson in scene 2 of David Lean’s film Brief Encounter, and it strikes an odd chord:
I wish I could trust you, I wish you were a kind, wise friend instead of a gossipy acquaintance I’ve known for years and never particularly cared for. I wish ... I wish ... I wish you’d stop talking. I wish you would stop prying and trying to find things out. I wish you were dead—no I don’t mean that. That was silly and unkind. But I wish you’d stop talking. This can’t last, this misery can’t last. I must remember that and try to control myself. Nothing lasts really. Neither happiness nor despair. Not even life lasts very long. There’ll come a time in the future when I shan’t mind about this any more. When I can look back and say quite peacefully and cheerfully how silly I was.
When Larry Grayson passed away in 1995, The Guardian newspaper wrote this about him:
His camp, deliciously naughty humour was never crude or vulgar. The gentle ambivalence of his humour made him attractive to an extraordinarily diverse range of people. But his real appeal was that of a valued neighbour perceptively observing the details of everyday life and commenting on it across the garden fence, creating an emotional intimacy in a society starting to fragment.
That’s why my gran liked “Shut that door.” And found “Shut up” awful. At “I hope you die too,” she’d have reeled in shock and outrage.
And so should we.
[1] https://jewishcurrents.org/newsletter/hostages-families-fight-to-be-heard-newsletter. Retrieved 2023-11-16.
[2] op. cit.
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/16/antisemitism-uk-universities-jewish-students. Citing https://cst.org.uk/news/blog/2023/10/20/antisemitic-incidents-20-october-update. Both retrieved 2023-11-16.
I wonder when’s that moment when you simply give up? When you say: all options have been exhausted, there’s nothing to do anymore.