Tag Archives: freedom

What We Did

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One of my favorite sites on the Net is Quora. For those of you who do not know, Quora enables anyone to put forward any—well, almost any—question and have it answered by whoever feels like answering it. Perusing the German version some days ago, I came across the following question: As a youth what did you do that would be completely out of the question today and legally subject to all kinds of punishment?

The question was answered by a Herr Christian Campe. All I know about him is that he lives in a small village not far from Muenster and is the father of four children. I tried to look him up, but without success. Hence, in translating and posting his answer (which he wrote in German), I was unable to ask him for permission. My apologies, Herr Campe. I hope you are not offended. In case you are, and in case you insist, I shall of course take my post off line immediately.

*

What we did?

Build shelters on “unoccupied” land. Yes, there used to be such a thing. Later we also built tree houses. With no help from any adults.

Build bonfires. Yes, children love bonfires. That is as true today as it was at the time. We even built them close to houses. Often causing some old gentleman to appear and give us a sack full of old potatoes so we could roast them. Coming home we smelled of smoke. But that is what bathtubs are for.

Each of us used to have a camping knife. We used it to carve our initials into tree trunks, which may have done them some damage.

Aged 12, we already started going on long bicycle trips. Arriving at a lake, we never needed either towel or swimsuits. We stripped and jumped into the water, just as God had made us. When it was over we dried ourselves in the sun before getting dressed and going home.

At that time no one had ever heard of children’s rights. Parents were entitled to spank their offspring and did so quite often. Fortunately for me, my parents were somewhat more progressive in this respect.

Swimming was something we were taught by our older siblings and friends. Looking after us, they wore their swimsuits. The same applied when girls were present and also when we visited a swimming pool. There were not too many pools, either covered or open air. But reaching them with our bikes was never a problem.
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We used to have friends whom we only met during the afternoon, given that they did not attend the same school we did.

We may not have had rights, but we were free. Our parents respected our free time and left us alone. There was a reverse side to the coin: parents did not take much of an interest in what we did between about 2 and 7-8 and, during school vacations, the whole day.

Perhaps one reason why we survived was that there were so few electric railways around. As a result, we could climb parked wagons without running the danger of being electrocuted. Another reason was that there were far fewer cars than there are now. Those we did encounter drove slowly and made more noise. So you could not help but notice them.

So life was dangerous, but perhaps not as dangerous as it is today.

How glad I am not to be a child today. In particular, I miss one thing. The green meadows where we used to roam, but which have since been covered by industrial zones and single family houses. As well as all other empty lots now protected by signs bearing the words, private property, no entry, parents are responsible for their children.

*

As I said, I know nothing about Herr Campe. So I thought it would be amusing to use my imagination to try and conjure him up. Somewhat more than fifty years old, which means that he grew up during the 1980s. Knowing Germany as I do, I can tell you there was lots more nudity then than there is now! Eyes either blue or brown. Blond, clean-shaven, and somewhat stocky. Speaks Low German which, being close to Dutch, is easy for me to understand. Happily married. Excellent family life. By profession, a teacher; his wife, either a nurse or a social worker. Lower middle class. Meaning they are not rich but, as long as they do not splurge (which they do once a year, going on vacation), they have enough to live on. Live in a one- or two family house he or his wife inherited from their parents and look after very well. In the garden, flowers. Approaching the front door, the first thing you see is lots of shoes of all sizes; indoor they wear either socks or slippers. They run a car—perhaps a second-hand one—large enough to hold the six of them plus, probably, a medium-sized dog. However, when moving about in the village where everyone knows them and they know everyone, all of them prefer to use a bike.

In case you, Herr Campe, read this post, will you do me a favor and let me know whether I hit the mark? All in good fun, of course.

My email is mvc.dvc@gmail.com.

And It Is Not the Only One

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Snowden, Permanent Record, Kindle ed., 2019.

Let me confess: I have never been a whistle blower. Let alone a spy. I came to Snowden’s book after reading a review written by Anat Kam. Ms. Kam is a young Israeli woman who, years ago as she was doing her military service, came to the public attention by blowing the whistle on some of the Israeli Army’s illegal activities. She was caught, tried, and paid a price by spending several years in jail.

Somewhat to my surprise. I discovered that the most interesting passages were not those in which the author describes his own path to stealing official secrets and publishing them. Rather, they were those in which he reflects on the world the Net has created. If I quote them at some length then that is because they struck a bell with me.

Locs. 626-55

“One of the greatest joys of those [early] platforms was that on them I didn’t have to be who I was. I could be anybody. The anonymizing or pseudonyimizing features brought equilibriums to all relationship correcting their imbalances. I could take cover under virtually any handle or “nym,” as they were called, and suddenly become an older, taller, manlier version of myself. I could even be multiple selves. I took advantage of this feature by asking what I sensed were my more amateur questions on what seemed to be the more amateur boards under different personas each time…

I am not going to pretend that the competition wasn’t merciless, or ha he population—almost uniformly male heterosexual, and hormonally charged—didn’t occasionally erupt into cruel and petty squabbles. But in the absence of real names, the people who claimed to hate you weren’t real people. They didn’t know anything about you beyond what you argued, and how you argued it. If, or rather when, one of your arguments incurred some online wrath, you could simply drop that screen name and assume another mask, under cover of which you could even join in the mimetic pile-on, beating up on your disowned avatar as if it re a stranger. I can’ tell you what wet relief that sometimes was.

In the 1990s, the Internet had yet to fall victim to the greatest iniquity in digital history: the move by both government and business to link, as intimately as possible, users’ online personas to their offline legal identity. Kids used to be able to go online and say the dumbest things one day without having to be held accountable for them the next. This might not strike you as the healthiest environment in which to grow up, and yet it is precisely the only environment in which you can grow up—by which I mean that the early Internet’s dissociative opportunities actually encouraged me and those of my generation to change our most deeply held opinions, instead of just digging in and defending hem when challenged. This ability to reinvent ourselves meant that we never had to close our minds by picking sides, or close ranks out of fear of doing irrevocable harms to our reputations. Mistakes that were swiftly punished but swiftly rectified allowed both the community and the ‘offender’ to move on. To me, and to many, this felt like freedom.

Imagine, if you will, that you could wake up every morning and pick a new name and a new face by which to be known to the world. Imagine that you could choose a new voice and new words to speak in it, as if the ‘Internet button’ were actually a reset button for your life. In the new millennium, Internet technology would be turned to very different ends; enforcing fidelity to memory, identitarian consistency, and so ideological conformity. But back then, for a while at least, it protected us by forgetting our transgressions and forgiving our sins.”
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Locs. 986-92.

“It’s nearly inconceivable now, but at the time Fort Meade [home of the National Security Agency, MvC] was almost entirely accessible to anyone [the same applied to other sites with which I was familiar, including the Capitol MvC]. I wasn’t all bollards and barricades and checkpoints trapped in barbed wire. I could just drive onto the army base housing the world’s most secretive intelligence agency in my ’92 Civic, windows down, radio up without having to stop at a gate and show ID… That’s just the way it was, in those bygone days when ‘it is a free country, isn’t it?” was a phrase you heard in every schoolyard and sitcom.”

Locs. 3963-73

“It [the NSA) was, simply put, the closest thing to science fiction I’ve ever seen in science fact: an interface that allows you to type in pretty much anyone’s address, telephone number, or IP address, and then basically go through the recent history of their online activity. In some cases you could even play back recordings of their online sessions, so that the screen you’d be looking at was their screen, whatever was on their desktop. You could read their desktop. You could read their emails, their browser history, their search history, their social media postings, everything. You could set up notifications that would pop up when some person or some device you were interested in became active on the Internet for the day. And you could look through the packets of Internet data to see a person’s search queries appear letter by letter, since so many sites transmitted each character as it was typed. It was like watching an autocomplete as letters and words flashed across the screen. But the intelligence behind that typing wasn’t artificial but human: this was a humancomplete.”

End of quotes.

By now, in addition to reading everything, they can see and hear everything. Too often, even when your computer or smartphone are turned off. If some scientists are to be believed, soon enough they will be able to reach into your thoughts as well as your dreams.

All this, in a country that has long claimed to be the land of the free and the home of the brave. And it is not the only one.

Should Sex Change Operations Also Be Banned?

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To this day, following thousands upon thousands of years of human history, no one knows whether God (or the gods, but in the present context that does not matter) “really” exists. Witness Immanuel Kant, no less. Raised in a Pietist household, for years he tried to prove the existence of God. Only to conclude that the question could not be settled either way and was, therefore, a matter of pure belief. However, that has not prevented billions of people, probably the majority of those who have ever lived, from believing that He does; nor from using their belief, real or pretended, as a basis on which to expand their own political and military power by rewarding those who agreed with them and persecuting those who did not. As Mao Zedong might very well have said, often religion grew out of the barrel of a gun. As I myself like to say, a religion is a sect that has acquired cannon. In quite some places around the world that remains true to the present day.

Similarly, after thousands upon thousands of years of history no one knows whether homosexuality is or isn’t “natural” to humankind. In the Christian West at any rate, following the book of Leviticus, it was long considered a deadly sin. As a result, those who practiced it were often subject to some of the cruelest available punishments from being burnt at the stake down. If this is no longer the case today, then that is not because modern science, breaking with Kant, has finally discovered “the truth” about the matter. But simply because a greater number of people are prepared to support, or at any rate tolerate, homosexuality than are not. As Napoleon said, victory goes to the big battalions. Particularly in modern democratic countries where most issues are ultimately settled by counting noses either during elections or with the aid of public opinion surveys. And particularly if, like the early Christians, using means fair or foul they succeed in getting the media on their side.

And why am I writing about this? Because, reflecting the situation in many other countries as well, currently in Israel a great debate—if “debate” is the right term to describe a rather ugly process whereby both sides do what they can to shut up the other—is going on. The person who triggered it is Netanyahu’s new minister of education, Rafi Peretz. Peretz is a practicing Jew as well as a rabbi who takes his religion seriously. No sooner was he appointed to his post then he suggested that gays might want to undergo conversion treatment and benefit from it. How dare he! What chutzpa!

He provides effective and best cheap levitra generic recommended for you ED treatment is available in different forms of consumption like tablets, jellies, and soft tablets. The particular filters are generic viagra germany as follows: Culligan WSH-C125, one of the best tips to cure aging effects is through managing stress. You will find, soon after all, cruises to be taken, many old friends to be visited, and plenty sildenafil online purchase of beaches to be walked hand-in-hand at sunset/sunrise. Kamagra is one of the best medicines available generic super viagra in the market but only few of them 1- In order to ensure yourself that the quality and quantity; both are critical from the pregnancy point of view. The response to Peretz was immediate and strong. Any number of psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists, educationalists and other learned worms crawled out of the woodworks and hurried to the printed page, the microphone, and the TV camera. So, of course, did leaders and activists of the Gay Liberation Movement; aware that their power depends largely on numbers, they do what they can to prevent people from deserting them. Peretz was a racist. He was a bigot. He was a “dark” figure emerging out of the equally “dark” middle ages. He was unfit to hold any public post, let alone one in which he was in charge of educating hundreds of thousands of young people. He should be denounced. He should be fired. He should be ostracized. He should, if the appropriate legal paragraph could be found (thankfully, as of the present, it could not) be put on trial and convicted and punished.

As to conversion treatment, it was carried out by quacks as if there were no quacks in other fields where consults are involved, from housing agents to e(con)omics. It was useless (as if no other forms of psychological treatment were). It was unscientific (as if any kind of psychological treatment is or can be “scientific”). It might make those who tried it develop all kinds of psychological problems (as if it were not psychological problems that made people turn to the treatment in the first place). The  practice should be prohibited (as, in quite a few countries and states, it is), and those who engage in it, if they did so on a professional basis, disqualified.

All this, in the name of choice, equality, openness, toleration, and similar concepts held sacred by the politically correct crowd both in Israel and a great many other countries. All this, at least partly in order to prevent people from developing doubts and ceasing to support the Gay Rights Movement. And all this makes me ask: If this kind of conversion, voluntarily undertaken of course, is banned, shouldn’t the same apply to the much more problematic, much more dangerous, sex change operations as well?

The Fourth Reich is Rising

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The Fourth Reich is rising. Not in Germany where, in spite of the recent elections, most people seem to have has learnt their lesson. But in Israel. The country which claims to be the only one in the Middle East which is democratic and in which free speech is allowed (nice of the authorities to allow free speech, isn’t it?). The country where my parents, having narrowly escaped the Holocaust, (see on this my post, “How My Family Survived the Holocaust,” 17.12.2015) immigrated. The country in whose military four of my five children have served. The country for which several of my relatives, acquaintances and students have died. The one in which I have spent practically all my life and which I have always loved.

No longer. For almost two years now a 33-year old Arab-Israeli (and self-proclaimed Palestinian) poet, Ms. Dareen Tatour, has been under house arrest. Far from home and relatives, with electronic cuffs on her leg, and without access to either a computer or a cellphone. Her trial got under way in April 2016, and has still not come to an end.

Did she kill an Israeli? No. Did she try to kill an Israeli? No. Did she assist terrorists or fail to betray them to the Israeli authorities, as those authorities, in their infinite wisdom and compassion, demand? No. Did she engage in any other out of God knows how many activities Israel has prohibited? No. So what why did the police knock on her door at 0400 in the morning, and what are the charges which could cost her eight years in jail?

Saying what she thinks. As by putting the following poem, originally written in Arabic, on Facebook.

Resist, My People, Resist Them

Resist, my people, resist them.

In Jerusalem, I dressed my wounds and breathed my sorrows

And carried the soul in my palm

For an Arab Palestine.

I will not succumb to the “peaceful solution,”

Never lower my flags

Until I evict them from my land.

I cast them aside for a coming time.

Resist, my people, resist them.

Resist the settler’s robbery

And follow the caravan of martyrs.

Shred the disgraceful constitution

Which imposed degradation and humiliation

And deterred us from restoring justice.

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They burned blameless children;

As for Hadil,* they sniped her in public,

Killed her in broad daylight.

Resist, my people, resist them.

Resist the colonialist’s onslaught.

Pay no mind to his agents among us

Who chain us with the peaceful illusion.

Do not fear doubtful tongues;

The truth in your heart is stronger,

As long as you resist in a land

That has lived through raids and victory.

So Ali** called from his grave:

Resist, my rebellious people.

Write me as prose on the agarwood;

My remains have you as a response.

Resist, my people, resist them.

Resist, my people, resist them.

 

* Hadil al Haslamon, a 18-year old Palestinian girl who attacked—so the Israelis claim—a group of bullet-proof wearing, heavily armed, heroic Israeli soldiers with a kitchen knife and, like so many others, somehow managed to die after being shot “in the legs.”

** Ali Kosba, a Palestinian teenager who threw rocks at an Israeli military jeep, shattering its windshield. Trying to run away, he was shot in the back and killed by a heroic Israeli colonel who, according to the military spokesman, “felt in mortal danger” of his life.

Two Articles Caught my Attention Last Week

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Last week being international women’s day, two articles caught my attention and drove me to do a little more research. One dealt with the fact that, as of the early years of the twenty-first century, in only a handful of fields do women make more than men. The other argued that most women—between two thirds and three quarters of them, in fact—prefer men who are taller than themselves. How to explain these facts, and what do they mean for the present and the future?

lioness-and-lion-love-i12First things first. In a previous post (“Women Outperforming Men,” 10.12.2015) I noted that, in most of today’s “advanced” countries, women make about two thirds as much as men do. As best we can calculate, that figure has not changed much since at least the time of ancient Rome. Indeed it has been claimed that, should present trends continue, women will need another 177 years to draw level with men. The article that caught my attention claimed that men out-earn women not just in general but also in almost all professions separately. Out of three hundred professions on one list, only in ten do women make as much as, or more than, men. That applies even to fields that are overwhelmingly dominated by women, such as teaching.

This is strange. Normally being a minority means being discriminated against, which in turn leads to lesser earnings. So why do men, who in the teaching profession are outnumbered by about two to one (U.S figures), earn more than their female colleagues? A mystery—or perhaps, given the physical advantage men enjoy even in the most sedentary professions such as being a professor of history, not so great a mystery after all.

That brings me to the second article. Women’s preference for tall men is easy to explain. As I also pointed out in a previous post (“The Indispensable Sex,” 11.2.2016), among many mammalian species, primates included, it is the task of the males to defend the females and their young. Even at the cost of their lives, if necessary. The fact that it is lionesses which do the hunting does not contradict this arrangement. If male lions do not leave the home but stay with the kids, then that is because they alone can protect them against predators. To enable male mammalians to carry out their appointed task, nature has made most of them considerably larger and stronger than their female counterparts. In the case of lions it has also given them their powerful roar. The larger and more powerful a lion, the more attractive he is to females and the better his chances of having multiple offspring.

The difference in size, known as dimorphism, is easily visible among humans as well. Only a small minority of women are as large as the average man. True, humans are less dimorphic than many other mammalians. But the difference between the sexes is sufficiently large to put most women at the mercy of most men. That, incidentally, is why much of the advice that tells women to practice “self-defense” is misguided. Should they try, then usually the outcome will be injuries. It also explains why, starting when they are toddlers, boys are always warned against hitting girls. Even if, as often happens in early puberty, they are larger and heavier than them. Doing so is considered “not nice” at best and can lead to serious consequences at worst.

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Part-HKG-Hkg10109760-1-1-0But there are other repercussions as well. Many “less advanced” societies do not have strong police forces. Instead it is the task of the male members of each clan to protect their own womenfolk. That is why women are subjected to so many restrictions. Such as prohibitions on leaving the home, taking up work outside it, and, in Saudi Arabia, driving. When they do these things they are obliged to cover their bodies and faces and/or take on a male escort. A woman who stays inside, or who is escorted when she goes out, is less vulnerable to sexual assault and the consequences it may bring. So is one who instead of wearing provocative clothing, hides her face behind a veil.

Against the prevailing social and cultural background, all these measures make excellent sense. Thanks partly to the police, partly to what a famous twentieth-century scholar used to call “the civilizing process,” life in the West today is relatively secure. As many researchers have pointed out, the number of crimes per 100,000 of population has been declining for the last two centuries or so. That, incidentally, is one reason why the death penalty is being reserved for more serious crimes, and used much less often, than was the case before 1800. Still women before they need anything else need security. Something tall men, big men, strong men, can normally provide better than weak men, small men, short men can.

Let’s assume, as I, on the basis of the research I did for a number of my books do, that the best days of Western liberal democracy are behind it. And that, as a result, the future is likely to see civil society upset by growing crime, terrorism, and various combinations of the two. In that case women will need protection more than ever. In Europe, where wave after wave of Muslim immigrants are arriving, this is already happening. No doubt men will do their best to provide that protection. But they will do so at a price: to wit, obedience and the inequality it implies. Not necessarily because they are oppressive by nature, as so many feminists have foolishly claimed. But because you can only protect those whom you control.

To put it in different words, were feminism and women’s lib spawned by a relatively peaceful world that is even now coming to an end? If so, what a pity. It was a nice try.

On Blogging*

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bloggingThe opposite is also true. I blog, therefore I think. It is now almost two years since I started doing this. Except for one five-week period when technical problems prevented me from posting, I have done so week in, week out. The present piece is No. 94. A good time, it seems to me, to stand still and look back.

First, has blogging taught me anything? No and yes. No, in the sense that, over the years, I have published enough opinion pieces in enough papers and magazines around the world to know how to do it. Or so I hope, at any rate. For those of you with no experience in the field, here are a few simple rules.

Make sure you know exactly what you want to say, and say it. Keep it short and, if you can, snappy. Use short sentences and short paragraphs. For heaven’s sake, don’t use jargon. Above all, don’t go for academic, especially social science, writing with its endless strings of abstract, not seldom incomprehensible, nouns following each other like beads on a string. Don’t try to impress people with your learning—usually, doing so all you will achieve is bore them and make them stop reading. It is in knowing where to stop that true mastery reveals itself. Always try and find a nice picture to illustrate what you have to say.

Yes, in the sense that I have discovered that there is no knowing which of your pieces is going to be the most successful. You leave your desk, or close your laptop, thinking that you have written a particularly interesting piece. But the stats, which I look at from time to time, show you that you have missed the boat and that no one cares. You think that you have written a so-so piece—perhaps because you were not feeling very well, perhaps because you just did not have the time. But all of a sudden the stats explode. After two years it seems to me there is just one remedy. Keep typing away. Maybe you’ll hit the jackpot one day. Or not.

When I say jackpot, I do not mean money. Except that some readers have gone to Amazon.com in order to take a look at my books, so far I have not made a penny on my blog. Given the restrictions on free expression that are sure to follow if you allow advertising a foot in the door, I am not even certain I would like to do so.

Unlike many other bloggers, and contrary to the advice of some, I have not restricted my posts to a single topic or field. Many of the topics I address I get from the daily press. Others reflect issues I have been contemplating for some time past and wanted to get off my chest. A few, notably the ones about nuclear proliferation, resource wars, Russia and China reflect the things I have discussed with my students in class. For making me think, I thank them.

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As I have written more than once, I get quite some feedback. A few of the emails are offensive, even obscene. Pay attention, you yahoos out there: I ignore them and will continue to do so in the future. The rest fall into two main categories. Some readers like my pieces and ask permission to re-post them, either in the original language or in translation. Usually I go along; but not before asking my correspondent whether he (so far, no she) would like to reciprocate by posting something on my site in return. Several have.

Then there are those who want to argue, usually over some point linked to my views concerning women and feminism. Those I provide with brief answers; brief they have to be, or otherwise I won’t have time for anything else. Here and there a critique is sufficiently interesting to catch my attention and make me engage in a little more research. Whatever others may feel or think, for me the feedback is very important. Quite often it makes me think of things that have never occurred to me before; so let me take this opportunity to thank those who provide it.

Finally, why do I do it? Being a fairly well known academic, over my lifetime I have published dozens of books in twenty different languages. I have also been interviewed by numerous TV stations, radio station, magazines and newspapers around the world—so many that I have long stopped counting. Not to mention articles I myself wrote.

Generally I enjoyed doing all this. Yet nothing gives me the sense of freedom which, sitting down week by week, I have when working on my blogs. Freedom from the kind of control many editors will impose on your work. Freedom to say what I want, on any subject that comes to my mind, in the way, and at the time; and freedom to do so regardless of the laws Israeli ministers and MKs, to their eternal shame, are trying to pass.

To abuse a famous quote, give me freedom, or give me death.

* I wish to thank my stepson, Jonathan Lewy, who not only takes care of all the technical arrangements but has provided the idea behind this particular piece.

Lest We Forget

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1_wa

Amir between two jailors

In Israel these days, a big debate is raging about Yigal Amir. Amir, for those of you who don’t know or have forgotten, was the guy who assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin back in November 1995. Sentenced to life imprisonment, since then he has been in jail. As, by law, he deserves be. To avoid misunderstandings, let me repeat the last sentence: as, by law, he deserves to be.

The occasion for the debate is a newly produced documentary about his life. Should it, or should it not, be subsidized? Should it, or should it not, be shown? Is it, or is it not, “educational” (as Voltaire might have said, “education” is the last refuge of the scoundrel)? In my view, the fact that Amir has committed a crime and is being punished for it does not mean that he should not be allowed to have his say. Let alone that others should not be allowed to think, say and write about him. Just as they please.

Questioned after the deed, Amir maintained that there was nothing personal in it. He had never hated Rabin. To the contrary, he rather liked the man. They did in fact have some things in common. To wit, honesty and a certain kind of shyness. The reason why he acted, so Amir, was because he feared the Prime Minister would follow up on the Oslo Agreements and allow the Palestinians to establish a State in the West Bank and Gaza. That, in Amir’s view, was against God’s Law as well as a mortal danger to Israel.

I do not know anything about God’s Law. However, in this belief, about Rabin allowing the Palestinians to set up a State Amir was probably wrong. When Rabin died he no longer had a majority in Parliament. Chances are that he would have had to call new elections. And that he would have lost them to Likud. Which, at the time, was headed, for the first time, by a young leader by the name of Benjamin Netanyahu.

The documentary shows how Amir was brought up in a national-religious family (his father was a Torah student, his mother ran a kindergarten). He did his military service in an elite infantry unit and went on to study law at Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv. He chose it because its official ideological stance resembled, and sill resembles, his own. It holds that Israel should be a religious state and that it should never, ever, surrender the Occupied Territories. At the university he came into contact with a group of similarly-minded young people. Though just how much they knew about his intentions remains moot.

Since then Amir has been in jail. Allegedly for fear he would “influence” other prisoners—an idiotic idea, if you ask me—he spent the first seventeen years of his sentence in an isolation cell. His every move was monitored by CCTV. In other ways, too, he was being tormented and, in comparison with other murderers, discriminated against. I have seen a clip; you might think he was some kind of cockroach. It made me gag. Not at the man, but at the way he was being treated.

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As a practicing Jew, Amir believes that it is his duty to leave offspring, preferably a boy, behind him. Making use of some peculiarities of Jewish Law and exploiting the stupidity of his jailors who did everything they could to stop him, he succeeded in marrying Larisa Trembovler, a doctor of philosophy. They had met when he was teaching Judaism in Moscow; later she divorced her husband for his sake. He even succeeded in forcing the State to allow them to have intercourse. She became pregnant and gave him a son.

The film also shows his life in prison. Particularly moving is a section where, using the phone, he reads his son a story. When the child asks why he is in jail, Amir answers that it is because he had done something that is prohibited by law. That, in my view, is a hero. A man who does not allow the force of circumstances to break him but copes with them as best he can. All the time, thinking not just about himself but about others as well.

But this is not about Amir alone. It is about freedom. If not outer freedom, which Amir does not have and probably will never again have, then inner freedom. Never once in the entire twenty years that have passed since 1995 did Amir say that he regretted what he had done. Never once did he apologize, never once did he grovel, never once did he ask for mercy. In so doing he kept the most important thing in life. To wit, his inner freedom; the right to be what he is without asking anyone or anything for permission.

Of Stalin’s USSR, the Nobel-Prize winning writer Aleksander Solzhenitsyn wrote that the only ones who enjoyed freedom in it were the inhabitants of the GULAG. Modern Israel (and not just Israel, but that is another matter) is, thank God, not quite as bad. However, as the debate about the film shows, it is bad enough. What really makes people mad at Amir is not what he did. It is the fact that, by his courageous behavior, he is showing his jailers, the police, the security services, the justice system, the State, most Israeli politicians, and large parts of the Israeli public that they have no power over him.

I myself am neither religious nor a supporter of “Greater Israel.” I most certainly do not condone Amir’s deed. But I do think that the petty abuse to which the State, by way of its justice- and prison system, has been and is subjecting Amir on a daily basis should stop. After all, Rabin’s blood was no redder than that of anyone else. Hence Amir should be treated like any other convicted murderer. And that should include the possibility of an early release. Which, in Israel, is usually granted after twenty years.  

Last not least, I believe that, in a certain way, the fact that people like Yigal (the name, incidentally, means “he who will redeem”) Amir exist is a blessing for society. And not just for Israeli society either. That is because, in a world where freedom of speech, the most elementary there is, is being increasingly limited day by day, he is one person who, amidst all his suffering, still has what it takes to be free and hold it up for the rest of us to see.