While I don't support the action against Ken Loach, Jewish friends and comrades were rightly upset by my tweet, and the tone it took, so it's important I say this.
https://twitter.com/OwenJones84/status/1426535430867066881
In 1987, Loach directed a play called 'Perdition' which he defended on free speech grounds, but which was incredibly distressing to Jewish people on entirely well-founded grounds.
Here is how Jim Allen, the author of Perdition, described the play:
"the most lethal attack on Zionism ever written because it touches at the heart of the most abiding myth of modern history, the Holocaust. Because it says quite plainly that privileged Jewish leaders
"the most lethal attack on Zionism ever written because it touches at the heart of the most abiding myth of modern history, the Holocaust. Because it says quite plainly that privileged Jewish leaders
collaborated in the extermination of their own kind in order to help bring about a Zionist state, Israel, a state which is itself racist.”
I am sure everyone is shocked at the suggestion aspects of the Holocaust are a myth.
I am sure everyone is shocked at the suggestion aspects of the Holocaust are a myth.
It deliberately calls into question the structural power Nazis had over all Jews, thereby placing them on the same moral plain, in a way which is reminiscent of far right arguments.
Why would someone on the left want to make this play? So again, while I do not support the action against Ken Loach, it is important that I properly reflect the justifiable distress caused by this play to Jewish people, and so therefore apologise for the tone of my tweet.
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