I see even national treasures aren’t safe from the petulant, punitive tantrums of the irritant left. Witness the travails of Maureen Lipman. Two actors you’ve never heard of have flounced out of a stage production with Dame Maureen, citing her views as the cause of their ideological pant-wetting. And what are her criminal beliefs? She supports the existence of a Jewish state.
Oh Lord, grant me the confidence of a bit-part actor getting on his high horse over a dame who’s been entertaining the nation for six decades
Dame Maureen will be appearing in Right Before I Go at the Soho Theatre in London in a few days’ time. It’s a play that draws on real suicide notes left by public figures and everyday people. Its aim is to illuminate suicide’s horrors. No sooner had Lipman’s involvement been announced than the keffiyeh clowns of the thespian left were spluttering into their seven-quid matcha teas.
The first to sashay away in a flourish of cheap outrage was Gerard McCarthy. He was in Hollyoaks once apparently. He said he could not in good faith appear alongside Ms Lipman given the views she has “repeatedly expressed regarding Israel and Palestine”. Oh Lord, grant me the confidence of a bit-part actor getting on his high horse over a dame who’s been entertaining the nation for six decades.
The next to exit in a juvenile huff was Iz Hesketh. No, me neither. With Lipman on board, I feel this production no longer “aligns with my own personal values and beliefs”, said Hesketh. Nothing will “ever change” if “we don’t stand by our morals when it matters”, Hesketh continued, as if this were a modern-day march on Selma rather than the tinny bleating of D-list luvvies so vain they won’t even breathe the same air as those they disagree with.
It’s the narcissism of the Lipman spurners that is most alarming. Imagine if we all scarpered from situations that did not perfectly align with our “personal values and beliefs”. Workplaces would collapse. Social life would come to a standstill. I’m writing this article in a cafe. Perhaps I should ask if anyone in here believes a man can become a woman, given such intellectual voodoo offends my reality-based beliefs. Should I leave for the good of my self-esteem?
This is the tyrannical wreckage left by the ideology of the Safe Space. A generation trained to take offence at everything, to cherish their own porcelain feelings above all else, is naturally going to struggle to share a space with “bigots”, which is PC-speak for thought criminals. Art in particular is imperilled by the bourgeois cult of self-worship. The communal act of creation becomes all but impossible in an onanistic era where the self is valorised like a false god.
There’s a horribly authoritarian streak in the passive-aggressive shaming of Dame Maureen. As Lipman herself points out, how fitting that one of her scorners is called McCarthy. A bloke named McCarthy pointing a bony finger at a thespian over her supposedly unpardonable beliefs? What decade is this? Perhaps all board-treaders will in future be asked: “Are you now or have you ever been a supporter of the Jewish state?”
For that is all that Dame Maureen believes: that Israel has the right to exist and the right to fend off the armies of Islamofascists that raped its women, murdered its men and who continue to plot its genocidal annihilation. We overlook at our peril how insane it is that such a decent, moral and righteous belief, one shared by many of us non-Jews too, has become a sin of cancellable proportions. A hill I’d happily die on: wanting the Jews to defeat their Nazi-like tormentors is good actually.
I’ve seen some on the digital left – not McCarthy or Hesketh – say Lipman is racist. What slanderous drivel. She was a lifelong socialist until the British left decided to devote itself to obsessive libellous frothing over the world’s only Jewish nation. Not content with rebranding the belief in women’s liberty as “transphobia”, now the left frames support for Jewish security as “Arabophobia”. Everywhere we are surrounded by Kafkaesque linguistic traps, laid to ensnare those of us who cling for dear life to the belief that women and Jews are human beings too.
You want to see racism? Actual racism? Then look at the broader campaign against Dame Maureen. When she was performing in the brilliant play Allegra in Aberdeen earlier this year, a “Palestine solidarity” group put out a leaflet depicting her with devil’s horns. The Jew as demon? How medieval. Outside almost every theatre she’s performed in this past year, there’s been a whiffy rabble of keffiyeh-smothered Israelophobes barking about “genocide”.
Let’s speak plainly. An 80-year-old Jewish woman is being demonised and harassed simply for believing in Jewish self-determination in the Jews’ ancestral homeland of Israel. It’s obscene. Where are her fellow actors? Where’s Equity? Where’s the Labour party, which Lipman supported for decades before the Corbynites took over? Their silence over this lo-fi persecution of a Jewish dame is as shameful as the persecution itself.
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