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Kevin Myers and J. K. Rowling |
Welcome to the world you created, J.K. Rowling
Online mobs are a threat to everyone’s freedoms
[ QUOTE: But perhaps the most damning contribution came from J.K. Rowling, whose global influence is tectonic. She tweeted to her 13 million followers an utterly foul distortion of what I had said, namely: ‘Women and Jews deserve what they get. This filth was published in @thesundaytimes. Let that sink in for a moment.’ ]
Why does the most important writer in English, J.K. Rowling, haunt the sewers of the Twittersphere? Why try to deal with the many complexities of transgenderism in a medium that has bizarrely reinvented the brevity of the telegram, but without its Victorian culture of complexity, courtesy and calm? Indeed, Twitter prizes a quite different Victorian moral order, namely that of Jack the Ripper, as the baying muezzins of social media hourly pronounce the end of someone’s reputation in the merciless perpetuity of the internet.
This time three years ago, I was a well-known journalist in Ireland, with a modest profile in Britain. On the last weekend of July, on the basis of a poorly written column in the Irish edition of the Sunday Times about the pay differentials in the BBC, London social media vilified me. I was then denounced worldwide as a misogynistic, anti-Semitic Holocaust-denier. One of my most successful accusers was J.K. Rowling. And now it is her turn, as her entirely justifiable scepticism over the dogmas of transgenderism have rendered her into what she is clearly not, that mythical beast, a ‘transphobe’. So welcome to the world you helped create, J.K.
In Ireland, I had long been recognised for my unremitting hostility to the IRA, support for Israel and my many articles about the horrors of the Holocaust. Yet these easily verifiable points were ignored as some foul internet charlatan with my name but none of my beliefs briefly entered the global imagination. A tsunami of smears from other publications obliterated protestations from the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland that I had told the Irish people truths about the Holocaust that they would not otherwise have known.
But perhaps the most damning contribution came from J.K. Rowling, whose global influence is tectonic. She tweeted to her 13 million followers an utterly foul distortion of what I had said, namely: ‘Women and Jews deserve what they get. This filth was published in @thesundaytimes. Let that sink in for a moment.’
Deserve what they get? So women deserve to be paid less than men, and Jews merited the Holocaust? The former is bad enough, but the latter assertion is the most wicked representation even by Twitter’s sordid standards. Despite the proclaimed support for me from Jewish groups, plus two Israeli ambassadors as well as numerous women, their voices could not be heard above the cacophony of my enemies. When the fangs of Rowling’s Twitter followers close on their prey, there is only one outcome.
This was in 2017, and the personal lunacies foreshadowed the solar storms of 2020, as the Black Lives Matter and associated mobs revealed their enormous power in riots, sackings, cancellations and boycotts across the Anglophone world. In response to this madness, some 150 literary luminaries (including Rowling) last week signed a letter to Harper’s Magazine defending free speech, stating: ‘As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes.’
Mistakes, J.K.? As in forgiving yours, but never mine? But the courage of the signatories then left them — for the letter did not mention BLM, ‘left’ nor ‘liberal’, but managed to denounce President Trump, ‘the radical right’ and ‘right-wing demagogues’. Perish the thought that anyone on their side of the debate would be engaging in smears and character assassination.
Such cowardly equivocation is of course to be expected from mere scriveners. The great Thomas Sowell reported in his Intellectuals and Society that Bertrand Russell thought Britain should placate Hitler by disbanding all her armed forces, while George Bernard Shaw said of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact: ‘Herr Hitler is under the powerful thumb of Stalin, whose interest in peace is overwhelming.’ A week later, the state of Poland was extinguished, duly followed by most of its Jewish population. As the Nobel Laureate George Stigler said of his fellow intellectuals: ‘They issue stern ultimata to the public on almost a monthly basis, and sometimes no other basis.’
As then, so today. For J.K. Rowling accepts that online mobs (of the kind that did for me) are a threat to everyone’s freedoms, including those of the supine intelligentsia who seek refuge in cowardly equivalence. Unique duties come with her unique global status. These oblige her to warn her millions of followers of the totalitarian threats besetting our civilisation — not through the infantile telegraphy of tweets, but through the prose that conquered the world.
WRITTEN BY
Kevin Myers
MY NOTES
[1] According to the Irish Times Sunday Times drops Kevin Myers and apologises for offensive article : In his 30 July 2017 column in The Sunday Times (Irish edition) headlined “Sorry, ladies - equal pay has to be earned”,
Myers hit out at the “tiresome monotone consensus of the commentariat, all wailing and shrieking as one about how hard done by are the women of the BBC”
The article said: “I note that two of the best-paid women presenters in the BBC - Claudia Winkleman and Vanessa Feltz, with whose, no doubt, sterling work I am tragically unacquainted - are Jewish. Good for them. Jews are not generally noted for their insistence on selling their talent for the lowest possible price, which is the most useful measure there is of inveterate, lost-with-all-hands stupidity. I wonder, who are their agents?”
[2] Regarding the role of Vanessa Feltz in this strange affair see my previous blog article "Kevin Myers, Vanessa Feltz and Anti-Semitism" The companion article "Kevin Myers, Jews and False Allegations of Anti-Semitism" is also relevant even though it doesn't mention Vanessa Feltz by name. I suggested that "Jews and Circular Firing Squads" could be an alternative title for the latter article!
[B] J. K. Rowling Writes regarding Online Mobs!
[I'm quoting extracts from the above article dated 10 June 2020]
For people who don’t know: last December I tweeted my support for Maya Forstater, a tax specialist who’d lost her job for what were deemed ‘transphobic’ tweets. She took her case to an employment tribunal, asking the judge to rule on whether a philosophical belief that sex is determined by biology is protected in law. Judge Tayler ruled that it wasn’t.
My interest in trans issues pre-dated Maya’s case by almost two years, during which I followed the debate around the concept of gender identity closely. I’ve met trans people, and read sundry books, blogs and articles by trans people, gender specialists, intersex people, psychologists, safeguarding experts, social workers and doctors, and followed the discourse online and in traditional media. On one level, my interest in this issue has been professional, because I’m writing a crime series, set in the present day, and my fictional female detective is of an age to be interested in, and affected by, these issues herself, but on another, it’s intensely personal, as I’m about to explain.
All the time I’ve been researching and learning, accusations and threats from trans activists have been bubbling in my Twitter timeline. This was initially triggered by a ‘like’. When I started taking an interest in gender identity and transgender matters, I began screenshotting comments that interested me, as a way of reminding myself what I might want to research later. On one occasion, I absent-mindedly ‘liked’ instead of screenshotting. That single ‘like’ was deemed evidence of wrongthink, and a persistent low level of harassment began.
Months later, I compounded my accidental ‘like’ crime by following Magdalen Berns on Twitter. Magdalen was an immensely brave young feminist and lesbian who was dying of an aggressive brain tumour. I followed her because I wanted to contact her directly, which I succeeded in doing. However, as Magdalen was a great believer in the importance of biological sex, and didn’t believe lesbians should be called bigots for not dating trans women with penises, dots were joined in the heads of twitter trans activists, and the level of social media abuse increased.
I mention all this only to explain that I knew perfectly well what was going to happen when I supported Maya. I must have been on my fourth or fifth cancellation by then. I expected the threats of violence, to be told I was literally killing trans people with my hate, to be called cunt and bitch and, of course, for my books to be burned, although one particularly abusive man told me he’d composted them.
What I didn’t expect in the aftermath of my cancellation was the avalanche of emails and letters that came showering down upon me, the overwhelming majority of which were positive, grateful and supportive. They came from a cross-section of kind, empathetic and intelligent people, some of them working in fields dealing with gender dysphoria and trans people, who’re all deeply concerned about the way a socio-political concept is influencing politics, medical practice and safeguarding. They’re worried about the dangers to young people, gay people and about the erosion of women’s and girl’s rights. Above all, they’re worried about a climate of fear that serves nobody – least of all trans youth – well...........
The fourth [reason for worry about new Trans activism] is where things start to get truly personal. I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning (returning to their original sex), because they regret taking steps that have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably, and taken away their fertility. Some say they decided to transition after realising they were same-sex attracted, and that transitioning was partly driven by homophobia, either in society or in their families.
Most people probably aren’t aware – I certainly wasn’t, until I started researching this issue properly – that ten years ago, the majority of people wanting to transition to the opposite sex were male. That ratio has now reversed. The UK has experienced a 4400% increase in girls being referred for transitioning treatment. Autistic girls are hugely overrepresented in their numbers.
The same phenomenon has been seen in the US. In 2018, American physician and researcher Lisa Littman set out to explore it. In an interview, she said:
‘Parents online were describing a very unusual pattern of transgender-identification where multiple friends and even entire friend groups became transgender-identified at the same time. I would have been remiss had I not considered social contagion and peer influences as potential factors.’
Littman mentioned Tumblr, Reddit, Instagram and YouTube as contributing factors to Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, where she believes that in the realm of transgender identification ‘youth have created particularly insular echo chambers.’
Her paper caused a furore. She was accused of bias and of spreading misinformation about transgender people, subjected to a tsunami of abuse and a concerted campaign to discredit both her and her work. The journal took the paper offline and re-reviewed it before republishing it. However, her career took a similar hit to that suffered by Maya Forstater. Lisa Littman had dared challenge one of the central tenets of trans activism, which is that a person’s gender identity is innate, like sexual orientation. Nobody, the activists insisted, could ever be persuaded into being trans.........
[C] Dictionary Definition of 'Woman is 'Hate Speech' (and JK Rowling)
The site’s owners have been accused of breaching its own terms and conditions as well as infringing the right to freedom of speech
The Telegraph, by Camilla Turner, EDUCATION EDITOR
30 October 2020
Within hours of publishing her petition on the site, Kellie-Jay Keen received an email from Change.org
Change.org is facing legal action after removing a “hate speech” petition that defended the dictionary definition of a woman.
The site’s owners have been accused of breaching its own terms and conditions as well as infringing the right to freedom of speech.
Within hours of publishing her petition on the site, Kellie-Jay Keen received an email from Change.org saying that it had been “identified as hate speech” and taken down from the site.
Her petition had stated that the “dictionary definition of the word ‘woman’ to mean ‘adult human female’ is under threat”.
It went on to say: “We would like to send a clear message to the Oxford English Dictionary that the word woman means Adult Human Female, and will never include men, males or boys. The very minimum a woman has to be is female.”
Her petition added that activists are “seeing to include men in the definition of women” and said that preserving the definition of the word woman was important because is “allows us to be protected in law and in our communities”.
Mrs Keen said she had published her petition in response to a separate petition – also published on Change.org – which called on the Oxford English Dictionary to update its definition of “woman” to include “examples of representative minorities, for example, a transgender woman, a lesbian woman, etc”.
Mrs Keen, a 40-year-old mother of four from Wiltshire who founded an organisation called Standing for Women, said she believed Change.org was enforcing a partisan approach.
“I didn’t say anything offensive or inflammatory,” she said. “Time and time again, what I have recognised is that the word ‘woman’ is in itself seen as offensive.”
Earlier this year, Mrs Keen paid for an advertising poster which said "I love JK Rowling" at Edinburgh's main railway station which was removed for being too "political" and potentially offensive.
Rowling, 54, was accused of being transphobic after writing on Twitter that she was puzzled by a headline on an article which referred to "people who menstruate", adding: "I'm sure there used to be a word for those people," she wrote. "Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?"
Toby Young, general secretary of the Free Speech Union which has been supporting Mrs Keen, said that Change.org has launched a “pernicious assault” on her freedom of speech.
“It is extraordinary that when dealing with a question of such present public importance, Change.org would apparently apply its discretion in favour of silencing one side of an ongoing public debate and that, in doing so, would choose to adopt a stance contrary to the law of the country in which the relevant user was based,” he said.
“It undermines the public debate on gender identity in the United Kingdom. It also brings into question whether Change.org is a genuinely neutral platform when it comes to these important public debates or has its own political agenda it is seeking to promote.”
Change.org declined to comment.
