Python mistakes Palestinians for Buddhists
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Last week at the Palestine Literature Festival, Michael Palin produced some of his funniest material since his Monty Python heyday. However, he probably didn’t intend it to be funny.
Palin told an audience that was rather lacking in actual Palestinians – mainly locally based international aid workers, diplomats and heaven knows who else – that he had seen how Israeli checkpoints worked. He thought it’d be a good idea to “always look on the bright side of life” and see the checkpoints as an opportunity for Palestinians to slow down. It saves them, he suggested, from the kind of frenetic pace that drives people crazy in other places, where there are no checkpoints.
A few attendees were perturbed by Palin’s comments. After all, the point of the checkpoints is less to slow down Palestinians and, more frequently, to prevent them moving about at all. Still he got off lightly. In Palestine, everybody expects the Spanish Inquisition…
I think Palin’s remarks were delightful. He’s trying to find something good about an aspect of life which most people only see as wicked and frustrating. Always look on the bright side of life, right?
It’s not his fault if he mistook the Palestinians for Buddhists.
About Matt Beynon
Matt Beynon Rees is an award-winning crime novelist who lives in Jerusalem. Major authors have compared him to Graham Greene and John Le Carre. The French magazine L'Express called him "the Dashiell Hammett of the Middle East." Born in Wales, Rees...
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I can kind of understand why
I can kind of understand why comments like that might've rubbed some people the wrong way. Wounds in the region run deep. And babies have been born, people have died at those checkpoints waiting for permission to move on.
That said, I do love the Pythons, and Palin was wonderful in a PBS travel series he hosted some years ago. I'm quite sure he didn't mean for his comments to be hurtful.
Exactly. The winning thing
Exactly. The winning thing about what he said is that he revealed how absolutely positive he is about life. In the Middle East, as one can see from the largely negative response to Obama's speech in which he frankly only asked people not to be afraid of each other, there's a sore lack of positive thinking, and its result is violence and hatred.
Amen to that, Matt. I've
Amen to that, Matt.
I've been fortunate to be able to travel the world for decades now. One thing I've heard over and over in my travels is an admiration of the optimism most Americans have. Being a product of American culture, I never really understood this, nor did I see it in myself.
But when I lived in the Middle East, where even good news can somehow be twisted and manipulated to become bad, I finally realized, yes, we do tend to look at the bright side of life. If there's a problem, quite a bit of the time we turn it into an opportunity. We are action and results oriented (for better or worse!).
I think a little of that might go a long way in the region. But people just seem so wedded to their victimhood that they don't even realize that they aren't always impotent. . .there are things they could be doing to help themselves along, as well as things they could stop doing to improve their prospects. What's that saying? There is none so blind as he who will not see.
Just today I attended a very interesting presentation by a Zambian-born, Oxford-trained economist named Dambisa Moyo, author of the NY Times bestseller Dead Aid. So many of the problems of and proposed solutions for Africa are true for the Middle East, too. She said until the citizens of these developing countries begin to hold their leaders to account and insist on new strategies, new thinking, aid to the region is only a Band-Aid. Old strategies have failed; new ones that include mechanisms for sustainable development and clear timelines for weaning countries from the aid teat are needed. Those strategies must come from within. According to her, donor countries can help by telling the leaders of these developing nations that the aid faucet will be shut off by such-and-such a date, so the interim funds must be used for creating an infrastructure that fosters and supports entrepreneurialism, economic growth, and sustainability.
She's a product of a challenged nation, but she said she's the rare optimist. It's self defeating to assume nothing can change. That mindset will only ensure that nothing, in fact, will change.