Pankaj Mishra Told, “Don’t Mention Israel”
JVL Introduction
Pankaj Mishra is both a noted Indian novelist and an outspoken critic of human rights abuses. For the former he gets awards for the latter he gets banned and censored.
In February his invitation to lecture at the Barbican in London was withdrawn because he wished article to talk about ‘The Shoah after Gaza’; his talk was later published in the London Review of Books
Now the leading Canadian newspaper, The Globe and Mail, has tried to remove every reference to Israel from its publication of his lecture made on receiving the Weston International Award. Part of what was deemed too provocative for Canadian eyes was his description of having his writings on Israel suppressed.
Mishra was interviewed by Martin Lukacs on how his encounter with The Globe and Mail—“a very minor episode in a long list of atrocities both literal and intellectual”—was reflective of a broader crisis of western journalism and intellectual culture.
MC
This article was originally published by The Breach on Mon 16 Sep 2024. Read the original here.
Globe and Mail censored criticism of Israel by award-winning Indian author
Pankaj Mishra’s lecture tracked two decades of media cheerleading for western wars, but its criticisms of Israel were edited out by newspaper
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This reminds me of Orwell’s journalism in the 1930s and during WWII, when it was very hard to criticise the Soviet Union, at least for British intellectuals, who were almost all on the left in those days. Homage to Catalonia, which told the truth about malign Soviet influence in the Republical government, was heavily criticised. He found it very difficult to get Animal Farm published in the pro-Soviet atmosphere of 1945; his own publisher, Victor Gollancz, rejected it. Israel is the Soviet Union of today.