William Dalrymple is among those non-Muslims who accuse Israel of “genocide.” Dalrymple, whom I once described at this site as an “upmarket Barbara Cartland,” took a break from writing treacly tales of star-crossed lovers in Mughal India to make a series of unhinged charges against Israel. More on Dalrymple’s charges about Israel can be found here.
Like a number of ‘anti-colonialists’, William Dalrymple lives in colonial splendour on the outskirts of Delhi. The writer often opens the doors of his estate to slavering architectural magazines. A few years ago, one described his pool, pool house, vast family rooms, animals, cockatoo ‘and the usual entourage of servants that attends any successful man in India’s capital city’.
I hasten to remind readers that I first posted “A Tribute to William Dalrymple” in 2006, and Robert Spencer kindly republished it just a few weeks ago. Here’s a bit about Dalrymple that I think worth quoting yet again:
William Dalrymple, described here long ago, quite accurately, as an up-market Barbara Cartland, whose tales of trans-racial passion at the Mughal Court, or at this or that princely court in the time of the Mughals, has it all: star-crossed lovers, and of course the Splendor That Was India, or rather the India of the Muslim rulers who lived off of their Hindu subjects, the subjects who were killed by the Muslims in numbers without any historical parallel. (The historian K. S. Lal and others estimate that 60-70 million Hindus were killed by the Muslim conquerors and masters). Now a love of luxe, and of luxe combined with heaving breasts, is the kind of thing that the Barbara-Cartlands of this world love, including even the plausible sort who put in a bit more history and a little less of the Romance-novelette lord or duke or Arab prince (see “The Sheik”), who picks up the girl in her swoon at the very end (the promise of sex has always been just beyond what Nabokov calls “the skyline of the page”) — that is, William Dalrymple. He’s as vulgar and stupid and arrogant as they come, all behind the plummy voice and the pretense of being a historian.
And what is funniest about the Dalrymples and their admirers is that these are the same people who find nothing wrong with the late Edward Said’s complaint about Jane Austen in Mansfield Park, the complaint that she does not specify that a main character lives off his revenues from his West Indian plantation, a plantation with slaves.
But here is Dalrymple singing the tale of Mughal India, and its luxe and volupté if not its calme [“luxe, calme, et volupté is from Baudelaire’s Invitation au voyage], all of it based on the ruthless enslavement and oppression of the Hindu masses by their cruel Muslim masters. Of course, there were a few exceptions, such as syncretistic Akbar, his memory revered by Hindus for his temporarily lifting the Jizyah, and his memory despised by the Muslims, for his softness toward Hindus.
Now back to Dalrymple’s latest claims about Israel:
I only mention Dalrymple because he is one of a large number of people who have lost their senses by going rampaging online about the alleged genocide in Gaza. He recently tweeted at a young Jewish woman who said she was afraid to travel into London during the Palestinian protests: ‘Forget 30,000 dead in Gaza, tens of thousands more in prison without charge, five MILLION in stateless serfdom, forget 75 years of torture, rape, dispossession, humiliation and occupation, IT’S ALL ABOUT YOU.’ It is one thing when a street rabble loses their minds. But when people who had minds start to lose them, that is another thing altogether.
Let’s take a look at Dalrymple’s rant. First, he not only has no sympathy for the Jewish girl who said she was now afraid to travel to London while these mass pro-Palestinian protests, calling for the destruction of the Jewish state and its replacement by a twenty-third Arab one (“From the river to the sea/Palestine shall be free”), while some also scream “Intifada Now” and “Gas the Jews,” but he lets loose with a barrage of unhinged hate aimed right at her.
Let’s respond to Dalrymple’s claims :
He asks rhetorically that she “forget 30,000 dead in Gaza.” But of the 28,000 — not 30,000 — dead in Gaza that Hamas claims have been killed in Gaza, how many were Hamas terrorists? The IDF now estimates it has killed as of late February, 12,000 Hamas members, not including the 1,000 terrorists killed inside Israel on October 7. That would mean that 16,000 civilians have died, and 12,000 combatants, giving a civilian-to-combatant ratio of 16:12, or 4:3. That ratio is unheard-of in the annals of modern warfare. The UN has said that in all the wars fought since World War II, the civilian-to-combatant ratio was 9:1. In Afghanistan, the Americans and British managed to bring it down to 4:1. In Iraq the Americans achieved a 3:1 ratio. But no other army has come close to that number — 4:3 — achieved by Israel in Gaza, that is, of four civilian deaths for every three combatants killed. No wonder the commander of British forces in Afghanistan, Colonel Richard Kemp, has described the IDF “as the most moral army in the history of warfare.”
Dalrymple claims that there are “tens of thousands” of Palestinians in Israeli prisons “without charge.” In fact, there are fewer than 7,000 Palestinians held by Israel, 2,500 of whom are being held In “administrative detention” as security risks, “without charge.”
He then writes about “five MILLION in stateless serfdom.” There are two million Palestinians in Gaza and three million more in the West Bank, none of whom are being held by Israel in “stateless servitude.” There are also two million Israeli Arabs who as citizens have exactly the same political and civil rights as Israeli Jews. The Palestinians who are enduring “stateless servitude” are those who are still being confined in refugee camps in Arab countries — mainly Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq — where they are denied both the right to practice such professions as medicine, law, and engineering, and also denied the possibility (with the sole exception of Jordan) of becoming citizens. They are kept in this limbo so that their wretched condition can be blamed on Israel, when it is the Palestinians’ “Arab brothers” who refuse to provide them with citizenship and access to the professions.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
William who?
aum says
Muslim lover with a plummy voice lives in India.
bill van der ford says
Strange character, In From The Holly Mountain he writes about his travels following in foot steps of Byzantine monks and his first hand accounts thru Middle East witnessing the systematic destruction of Armenian and Ancient Christian churches still ongoing to this day. He writes how this land we speak about was the birth place of Christianity and not the other way around. He writes about travels to towns like Constantinople, Antioch and Edesa and bearing witness to Armenian churches being plastered over and converted to mosques or used for frivolous activities like fashion shows. He even mentions his detailed notes on grave stones of Armenians and Christians having been intentionally removed to erase any past that anyone other than Muslim’s ever lived in these places and a local population in fear of talking about it when approached.
He strangely then sprinkles in and ends each chapter with some sympathetic statement towards appeasing those who commit these acts. Each time they deal forced and make you want to put the book down, but you have to ignore them to move on to the next town.. so kinda like this article… Just another appeasement piece to be ignored.. part of his psyche for how he manages with reality when he sees it that allows him to move along.