Myers? It’s not him… it’s us!

I don’t think there’s much purpose to be served by trawling too much further over the Myers issue. Kathy Sheridan and Fintan O’Toole both had good pieces in the IT which undercut a lot of the pretensions of his defenders – of which there are many. But perhaps one last voice added into the mix from that latter category is illuminating.

There was a two page spread in the SBP at the weekend where various people weighed in with arguably only Gillian Nellis offering an entirely critical account, while Barry J Whyte was more critical than might be expected but perhaps pulled his punches slightly. Tom Lyons by contrast argued that ‘there was an unpleasant visceralness to some of the criticism aimed at the 70 year old. Some will say that he deserves it.. but there is a nastiness to much of the criticism’. Which makes one wonder has Tom actually read any of Myers stuff?

Meanwhile more intriguing is Anne Harris who offers that Myers is clearly not anti-semitic. But the problem is that his pro-Semitism seems to be based on similar enough conceptual ground to others who take a much less benign view. Indeed I’ve noted here previously that there’s something tooth-grindingly condescending about some supposedly pro-Semitic views – with their exaggerated praise and inflation of supposed ‘positive’ traits. As someone else pointed out here it’s analogous to the condescension directed at women by some men.

She then decides that papers hire provocative columnists to provoke… ‘and readers read them in order to enjoy nice warm feelings of righteous indignation’. She continues: “Those commentators who rushed in to excoriate Kevin Myers might remember that they are playing the same game themselves. Fits of morality on a daily basis can damage the health. “

What that means is difficult to discern. But let it be.

Soon we are on to what she describes as the Sunday Independent’s ‘long waltz with the peace process’.

Twenty years ago, John Hume asked the Irish people to accept the IRA’s and Gerry Adams credentials on his say-so. In sometimes furious debate, the Sunday independent subjected those credentials to severe scrutiny. It’s fair to say some of the scepticism still stands today and the near annihilation of the SDLP bears ominous witness to that.

This is so problematic I’m hard pressed to know where to begin. Given the full-blown hostility of the SI to the the peace process the idea it provided ‘scrutiny’ is near-laughable. Not that scrutiny shouldn’t have been provided but outright antagonism and hostility is not the same thing. A good friend has suggested at times the sort of rhetoric emanating from that quarter was potentially very dangerous to people like Hume. Difficult not to agree. And to argue that the political eclipse of the SDLP is somehow equivalent to the train of misery that was the conflict (let alone that it has been annihilated, it’s weaker, much more so, but it prevails) or that political conflict is equivalent to armed conflict, is risible.

We’re on to ‘extreme individualism’ by way of Karl Popper. Apparently Myers et al supply, to quote Popper, ‘originality of thinking, whimsicality, even – if you will – eccentricity, [which] are necessary in the defence against evil’. Some would balk at that description given what was said about children out of wedlock or women or… well Jews. One might wonder what definition of evil is being used here.

She doesn’t hesitate to talk about how ‘Anti-Semitism is one of the great evils the world has know yet seems always to be with us… permanent vigilance against unconscious anti-Semitism is more difficult, as the Myers controversy proves’. She’s right, it is one of the great evils and it is unconscionable, but then she rather undercuts her own argument by the near immediate following:

Because great columnists have a lot in common with great comedians, boundaries are never uppermost in their minds. Does anybody seriously think the writers on SNL – lifeline since Trump’s election – worry about boundaries?

Sheesh. Comedy is one thing, satire another but linked, but a columnist in a paper is the equivalent to that? And it is obtuse to try to argue – having just mentioned the greatest generational challenge this island faced prior to Brexit, and then the fight against anti-Semitism, as a touchstone of the seriousness of endeavour that Myers et al are supposedly engaged in, that it’s all about the lols.

Time then for some finger wagging about how anti-Semitism is the issue exercising those on the other side of the Irish Sea whereas ‘the bulk of the comment on this side of the Irish Sea has been on the misogyny. So our everyday sexism radar is on the button, but our radio frequency on anti-Semitism is clearly lagging behind. Why?’

Well clearly it’s us, not Myers. Yet who wrote the piece? Him, not us. And even taking her point as is, the reason so much comment has been about the sexism is that Myers has form in that regard but has never been called out in quite the way he is in this instance. Actually I don’t think Myers is anti-Semitic, though the comments were as noted above tooth-grindingly condescending and could sound anti-Semitic. I think there’s a laziness there, a sort of – well, ‘virtue-signalling’ of the right, the assumption that saying that Jews have x or y or z characteristics rather than human beings with all the frailties and strengths of same is what has to be said and so it should be said and hitherto he’s never had any pushback on the matter whereas to neutral ears it sounds barmy and ironically one step away from much more noxious rhetorical narratives. But the concern this side is that the misogyny is largely excused, the ST didn’t see fit to mention it. That’s just business as usual. And the problem is reading Kathy Sheridan and O’Toole, being that that that keeps occurring.

But for her it is, predictably, inevitably, us. She concludes…

Myers comments about Jewish women broadcasters and money were repugnant without a shadow of a doubt. But in that frantic triangle of editors, columnists and readers, are any of us whiteout guile? [ I do not think that latter word means what she seems to think it does in this context – was ]. And the carnage around his unconscious anti-Semitic comment exposes one big question. How innocent are any of us?

There now.