Please Give Me Your Thoughts - Favourite Essays for a Book. (Note: My Essays. I Will Not Plagiarise Orwell.)
If you could tell me your favourite essay (please note: if your opinion is that they all sucked, it may be true to you, but it is not constructive). Haha.
I am putting together a short book of my essays on Israel, antisemitism, and what happens when moral clarity becomes socially punishable. I will do the same query for the group of essays that are not related to Israel or Judaism.
This isn’t a victory lap, and it’s not a manifesto. It’s a record. A witness statement. A collection of pieces written at moments when saying obvious things suddenly became controversial.
I have my own instincts about which essays belong in this book—but before I trust them completely, I want to check my sanity.
So I’m asking a simple question:
Which essay I wrote on Israel or antisemitism stayed with you?
Not the one you agreed with most.
Not the one that got the most likes.
The one that lodged itself in your head and refused to leave.
How to respond (keep it easy):
Comment below with the title of the essay
Or just describe it: “the one about X” is enough
Or reply by email if you’d rather be private, pfinlayson30@gmail.com
One essay is plenty. Two if you’re feeling generous. No explanations required.
I’m not crowdsourcing my conscience. I’m just making sure I don’t accidentally leave out the piece that mattered most to the people who were actually reading. I am far from objective - but at least I know it.
I agree the BIBAS babies is one that should be included. Also, the Desecration of Truth. All your essays on Israel are clear, fact based and persuasive although I always agree with your points of view 100%.
I hope it’s ok if I share the paragraphs I saved from your article on the Bibas babies and the nature of evil - one of your best:
“There are moments in history when the world is forced to stare into the abyss to confront, without equivocation, the existence of true and undiluted evil.
The murder of the Bibas babies was such a moment. No longer can we speak in the comfortable abstractions of politics and policy. No longer can we entertain the empty rhetoric of peace processes or the delusions of coexistence. The depravity we witnessed—the strangling of infants in their coffins, the jeering of the mob, the stamping feet of those who have surrendered every shred of humanity—has revealed the soul of the beast.
The murder of the Bibas children was not a tragedy.
It was a choice.
A choice made by a people whose hearts are shrivelled husks, whose souls are tumours of poison, whose very existence is defined by negation and destruction. The blood-drunk mobs that stomped upon the earth, crazed with ecstasy at the murder of infants, were not victims of circumstance. They were willing participants in a society that feeds on darkness, gorges itself on blood and bile, and cannot be satiated, only extinguished.”