https://azvsas.blogspot.com/2024/08/gazas-genocide-proves-that-terms.html
29 August 2024
Gaza’s Genocide Proves that the Terms ‘Liberal’ & ‘Right-wing’ Zionist are a Distinction Without a Difference

What Kind of Person Writes a Biography With the Intention of Distorting What Their Subject Said & Justifying their Silencing? Step forward the Guardian’s Freedland


Rudolf Vrba interviewed by Claude Lanzmann about Rudolf Kasztner & Rabbi Weissmandel

In The Art of Biography Virginia Woolf described how the

biographer must ‘detect(ing) falsity,unreality... His sense of truth must be alive and on tiptoe.

By telling us the true facts, by sifting the little from the big, and shaping the whole so that we perceive the outline, the biographer does more to stimulate the imagination than any poet or novelist save the very greatest.

Jonathan Freedland in The Escape Artist, set out to do the exact opposite of what Woolf advised. Freedland was determined that the ‘true facts’ wouldn’t interfere with his narrative.

In a letter to Arnold Zweig, Freud wrote that ‘To be a biographer you must tie yourself up in lies, concealments, hypocrisies.’ It was as if Freud’s prescient passage was written with Freedland in mind!

Freedland’s concern when he wrote his biography was not to explain why Vrba was hostile to Zionism. He sole concern was to appropriate Vrba’s whilst divorcing it from his anti-Zionism. So much so that at one point in his book we are told that Vrba ‘rooted for Israel’

A good biography must do more than just tell a story, it must bring to life the person who is the subject, warts and all. It must delve into what made them tick. Otherwise it is just a recitation of who did what and when.

I confess that when I first learnt that Freedland was bringing out a book on Rudolf Vrba I smelt a rat. Freedland is someone who could see ‘anti-Semitism’ in his grandmother’s grave. It was no surprise therefore when I read his book.

Below is the blog that Jonathan Cook, a prize-winning ex-Guardian journalist wrote about my article in Electronic Intifada and my last blog. Ctd....