Israeli Books Banned In Scotland

Dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen.
--Heinrich Heine

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
--Ray Bradbury

Via Virtual Jerusalem: A Scottish municipality has banned from its libraries books by Israeli authors and that were printed or published in Israel.

The West Dunbartonshire Council, consisting of towns and villages west of Glasgow, ordered new books by Israeli authors to be banned from the council's libraries, according to reports.

The ban reportedly was ordered after last year's raid by Israeli commandoes on a ship attempting to break Israel's blockade on Gaza that led to the death of nine Turkish nationals. The ban followed a decision made 2 1/2 years ago following the Gaza war to boycott goods produced in Israel. According to that law, the council and all its public bodies are forbidden to sell goods that originated from Israel.

Read the rest.

Amos Oz, David Grossman, S.Y. Agnon, Batya Gur, Dorit Rabinyan, Sami Michael, Naomi Ragen, Yehuda Amichai, Tom Segev, Orly Castel-Bloom, Dan Pagis, Yoram Kaniuk, Emil Habibi, Michal Govrin...a language, a nation, an entire literature rejected. I'm sure these censors feel themselves quite smugly in the right. I can't begin to express my fury.

We are only just beginning to sound the vile depths to which the delegitimization campaign against Israel is sinking. This sounds fine, now. Books may only be bought from countries with a right to exist...which would be all of them, except for Israel.

I'm making no excuses for the West Dunbartonshire Council. I don't care if they're vicious or well-meaning, ignorant or knowledgeable, they have set out to be part of the mechanism of destroying a nation.

Hat tip to Vicious Babushka, both for being one of the first people to bring this story to my attention, and for the Bradbury quote, which I would have never remembered.

Junie B. Jones

Are you acquainted with Junie B. Jones? Junie B. ("the B stands for Beatrice. Except I don't like Beatrice. I just like B and that's all"), currently aged 6, is the star of delightful series of children's books.

She is also #71 on the most-challenged and -banned list the ALA has compiled for 2000-2009.

Junie, you see, is a darling child who tells her adventures in a unique and self-posessed voice. She sometimes misspells words, and she makes an occasional grammatical error. She runs her poor first grade teacher, Mister, "He has another name too. But I just like Mister, and that's all.") into the ground. And she sometimes disobeys her parents. There's an element in town that objects. In a serious damn way. Junie B., as I said, is #71 on the challenged and banned list. She comes in 5 ahead of The Joy of Gay Sex.

Apparently these challenging and banning people can't wait until the kids are in high school to ban Huck Finn, so they'll go after his little, suburban sister.

And don't get me going on the people who've set their sights on preventing their children from reading And Tango Makes Three. Suffice it to say that if you fear your children's purity may be damaged by a story about two male penguins hatching out an egg together, the problem is most definitely with you. Rather than with the penguins.