Saturday, May 22, 2010

Amardeep Singh on Atwood-Ghosh

I did not pay much attention to the controversy since prizes do not seem important to me and what little I read seemed obtuse to me except some like this In Support of Amitav Ghosh and Margaret Atwood:
"But for me the most compelling argument against this way of reacting to Israeli cultural institutions is that, as bad as things are for the Palestinians, what the U.S. itself has engaged in over the past decade — especially the debacle of an unjustifiable and badly executed war in Iraq — is far worse. By any reasonable standard, if we’re boycotting Israel, we should be boycotting ourselves! (And similar kind of accusations could be made against India or Pakistan, for any number of reasons.) In short, this kind of thing doesn’t get us anywhere. Structurally, if we pay taxes and receive benefits from a government, we are all “complicit” in what that government does."
Having said that I did once stopp attending a conference in UK when they marched in to Iraq, but later visited USA to colloborate with a colleague. So, I am not particularly consistent.

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