Richard Millett: Physically attacked at SOAS after anti-Israel event with Roger Waters.
Jonathan Hoffman asked a question and he also interjected when SOAS lecturer Matar claimed outrageously that “anyone who is pro-Palestinian is instantly labelled anti-Semitic”.Why Have Jewish Organizations Been Silent About Otto Warmbier’s Death?
When the event finished I met up with Jonathan inside the auditorium and he was being quickly surrounded by those wanting to speak to him. I jokingly castigated him for asking an “unbiased question”.
A male next to Jonathan then turned to me and asked if I was with him (Jonathan) and I said “yes” presuming he wanted to chat about the film. But he was immediately face-to-face with me and I noticed he was totally drunk. He was a white male, much taller than me and much younger, probably in his mid to late twenties.
I tried to get away but had nowhere to go as the room was very crowded. There was no security around whatsoever. He was facing me very close telling me I was going to be “f#*king mugged off”. I asked him to calm down and back off or I’d call the police and that I just wanted a relaxing evening to which he responded (here’s the audio):
“I’ll give you a relaxing exit. Would you like a relaxing exit? I’ll tell you what, you’ll get a f#*king pasting. You’ll get a f#*king pasting.”
I dialled 999 but he had walked away so I stopped. However, he then immediately returned, tried to slam my phone out of my hand and also punched me on the side of my head.
I had never seen the attacker before at any event. All he knew about me was that I was connected to Jonathan who had, during the Q&A, tried to put forward Israel’s narrative. This attacker, who had just watched a film with multiple scenes of dead and mutilated men, women and children wanted to find someone to take it out on.
Otto Warmbier, an American student at the University of Virginia—who was active in Hillel and who went on Birthright, where he received a Hebrew name—died yesterday after being arrested and tortured by North Korea. You’d think that the cluster of handsomely funded Jewish organizations that fly the banner of promoting and protecting Jewish life in America and abroad would notice and acknowledge Warmbier’s murder. So far, though, American Jewish officialdom has been deafeningly silent.The West should listen to musical giant Yevgeny Kissin
The odious Anne Frank Center, whose disingenuous mission statement blathers on about a kinder and fairer world where Jewish children are safe from the death camps of tyrannical regimes, didn’t bother taking a break from bashing Donald Trump to lament a young Jew put to death by the world’s worst offender of human rights. Nor did the ADL, an organization quick to stand up with Linda Sarsour as she denied Jews their right to self-determination but not so swift when the victim was a young Jewish man whose crime was pulling a silly prank at his hotel while on a college tour of a nation that routinely starves, imprisons, and executes hundreds of thousands of its own citizens. Everywhere you turn today, you hear no one demanding justice for Otto Warmbier.
What you do hear are the howls of the social justice brigades, for whom Warmbier, being white and a man, is mostly to blame for his own murder. When the young college student was arrested last year, the regressive left’s flagships, from Salon to the blessedly defunct Nightly Show, gleefully mocked Warmbier, arguing that white privilege was the real reason for his predicament and suggesting that when it came to oppression, there was really no difference between Portland and Pyongyang. “The hopeless fear Warmbier is now experiencing,” opined a young blogger on the Huffington Post, “is my daily reality living in a country where white men like him are willfully oblivious to my suffering even as they are complicit in maintaining the power structures which ensure their supremacy at my expense.”
This sort of bigoted nonsense is toxic to all Americans, but it’s particularly hazardous to Jews, whose suffering is too often explained away these days as an acceptable byproduct of excessive power and influence. It’s precisely the kind of anti-Semitic bile Jewish organizations were founded to combat. Their silence throughout Warmbier’s ordeal and murder is shameful.
But Kissin is different from other contemporary musicians, musical giants but moral dwarves, like Daniel Barenboim and Gustavo Dudamel. Kissin is publishing a book this week, “Memoirs and Reflections”, edited by Marina Arshinova. “I am a stunch supporter of Western values”, he told the Spectator, “but in recent years I have realized that the Western establishment has often betrayed those same values. And one of the manifestations of this betrayal is the stance against Israel."
This is the diametric opposite of what another music virtuoso has done, Daniel Barenboim, who, in the newspaper Haaretz has just explained that Israel was “given” to the Jewish people by a world with the sense of guilt after the Holocaust, making the Palestinian Arabs pay the price. “Memoirs and reflections” is an act of love for the third country adopted by Kissin, who defines himself as “a citizen of Russia, the West and Israel”. He writes of feeling “like an Israeli soldier in the international arena.”
Never mention Jeremy Corbyn's name in Kissin's presence. “My late uncle, Lord Kissin, must be turning in his grave.” He is referring to his uncle Harry Kissin, a Labout militant who fled Nazism.
Words no less harsh are those Kissin reserves for the European Union. “I certainly don’t like what has become of it,’ he says. ‘Having grown up in the former Soviet Union I am for the independence of states. A common market is one thing but political centralisation is something completely different which I do not like.”
When in London, at the Royal Albert Hall, when anti-Zionists interrupted Zubin Mehta's conducting of the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra, Kissin told them: “When Israel’s enemies try to disrupt concerts of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra or the Jerusalem Quartet, I want them to come and make trouble at my concerts, too, because Israel’s case is my case, Israel’s enemies are my enemies, and I do not want to be spared the troubles which Israeli musicians encounter when they represent the Jewish state beyond its borders.”
Kissin attacked “the anti-Israel hysteria.” Bis, maestro! The Western establishment should go to his concerts and learn how to speak the truth.