This past weekend the Wall Street Journal featured Tunku Varadarajan’s profile of Anthony Daniels (pseudonym Theodore Dalrymple) under the headline “The Psychiatrist to the ‘Underclass’” (“Anthony Daniels is a firsthand observer of the ‘squalor produced by the welfare state’ and by the ‘widespread abdication of personal responsibility’”). He has published brilliant, lucid, and witty essays in City Journal on a quarterly basis over the past 32 years (compiled here). The Journal profile relates that he has written more than two dozen books. His book on Agatha Christie and the Metaphysics of Murder is forthcoming from Encounter Books under his nom de plume in May. He is a man of many parts.
In “Eyeless in Gaza” Dr. Daniels reviews The Eyes of Gaza: A Diary of Resilience, by Plestia Alaqad. The review is published under his own name in the February issue of the New Criterion. This is the opening sentence: “The Eyes of Gaza, which is in diary form, might just as well have been titled Psychobabble Among the Ruins.” He observes:
The author capitalizes her use of [the word “genocide”]: the Genocide, she calls it. She seems to think that if she repeats it often enough, it will become accurate. On one occasion, however, she almost lets a cat out of the bag. She says that she is looking forward to life in Gaza once the genocide, so-called, is over. But if she really believed that it was a genocide (she also believes that the world is doing nothing to stop it, such that there is no reason why it should stop), there would be nothing to look forward to. Her rhetoric gets the better of her. I am afraid she reminded me a little of an adolescent patient of mine who took an overdose and left a suicide note saying, “Goodbye, Mum and Dad. I guess I have a lot of growing up to do.”
Nor is she any better on the causes of the war and the bombardment of Gaza. She manages the remarkable feat of writing a book about contemporary Gaza while mentioning Hamas only once, and that only to deny that she is a member of it. There are three possible explanations of this curious omission. The first is that she is a member of Hamas. The second is that she is stupid. The third is that she is frightened.
I should plump for the third, because I think she would have had good reason to be frightened had she publicly ascribed any part of the blame for the situation in Gaza to Hamas. If she had broadcast criticism of Hamas during the war, I think she would have had much more to fear than the Israeli bombing that, however many people it has killed, has left the majority alive.
The New Criterion has made the review accessible here and it is worth reading in its entirety. What a depressing farce that such a book appears under the imprint of a respectable commercial publisher. Unfortunately, it has a lot of company.
On a happy personal note, “Eyeless in Gaza” reminds me of the course on John Milton that I took as an undergraduate from the late Professor Dain Trafton. Professor Trafton was a wonderful teacher. We read a lot of Milton in that course — not only Paradise Lost, but also Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes as well as shorter poems such as “Lycidas” and “When I Consider How My Light Is Spent.” The famouse phrase “eyeless in Gaza” is drawn from Samson Agonistes.
