How when the world appears to be falling apart around you, do you concentrate on the lighter things in life? Or is that the best time to do it. We’re so good at this, humans. Overthinking, obsessing and then closing our minds of.
Women often accuse men of compartmentalising their lives, and it is true that it helps them with transgressions of a sort. But all of us do it. Survival tactics.
So when I started writing this column, it was about being judgmental about younger people and their fashion choices. I wrote over 600 words and then deleted it. Because, who cares? Or maybe some people care, maybe even I care sometimes, but I could not bring myself to expand on the matter.
Instead, my mind got embroiled in a discussion about prejudice and bigotry of a more current, urgent and longstanding manner. I read a letter that the German Photographic Society wrote to a photographer that they decided to award an annual prize, the Iranian-German Shirin Abedi. At the awards ceremony, Abedi spoke for Free Palestine, and also wore a keffiyeh and a watermelon clip in her hair, all symbols for Palestine.
The letter is remarkable in its arrogant tone. It mocks the idea of the “liberation of Palestine” and completely ignores the genocide which Israel has unleashed on Palestinians. We all understand German guilt, whether internal or imposed, over the Holocaust and the torture and killing of over six million Jews by the Nazis.
The rest of the world also knows how Christian Europe treated J.