Lee Heidhues 10.14.2023
This is intellectual terrorism.
Why are the Germans censoring a Palestinian award winning author? Her writing is far removed from the terror inflicted by Hamas and the resultant catastrophe Israel is inflicting on the men, women and children of Gaza?
The wanton terror Hamas inflicted on Israel, murdering over 1000 of its citizens, is now being repaid in a horrific manner by the Jewish State.
The Frankfurt Book Fair is engaging in a form of intellectual terrorism.
The unintended consequence of this intellectual terrorism will be that the work of Adania Shibli will be more widely read.
It is ironic that Ms. Shibli’s work is being censored “due to the war in Israel.” One of the first things the Nazis did after coming to power in 1933 was to engage in book burnings of work that did not comport with their warped philosophy.
Excerpted from The New York Times 10.13.2023
An award ceremony that was set to honor a novel by a Palestinian author at the Frankfurt Book Fair next week was canceled on Friday “due to the war in Israel,” according to Litprom, the German literary association that organizes the prize.
The novel, by Adania Shibli, is titled “Minor Detail” in English and tells the true story of the 1949 rape and murder of a Palestinian Bedouin girl by Israeli soldiers, according to its German publisher, Berenberg Verlag.
The controversy in Germany surrounding the novel began this summer when Ulrich Noller, a journalist on the Litprom jury, resigned over the decision to give the literature prize to Ms. Shibli’s novel. A literary critic with Die Tageszeitung, a left-leaning German newspaper, reignited the debate this week, accusing the book of portraying “the State of Israel as a murder machine,” though other German critics have praised the novel.
A German-language version translated from the original Arabic was published in 2022, and a previous English translation was nominated for a National Book Award in 2020 and the International Booker Prize in 2021.
The ceremony was intended to celebrate the novel for winning the 2023 LiBeraturpreis, a German literature prize awarded annually to an author from Africa, Asia, Latin America or the Arab world and presented at the Frankfurt Book Fair, one of the global publishing industry’s largest gatherings.
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