Thursday, August 07, 2008
"Luc Mandret, a well-known blogger, wrote that in June, in Charlie Hebdo, Siné had defamed Muslims more coarsely than he had insulted Jews, but those comments had produced no similar reaction." And then enter Elie Weisel: "a letter in Le Monde signed by 20 politicians and public intellectuals, including Elie Weisel, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Alexandre Adler, Claude Lanzmann and Bertrand Delanoë, mayor of Paris. Siné “has broken the barrier that separates humor from insult and caricature from hate,” they said." And who is a better judge of humor and satire than Elie Weisel? I mean, say what you want about the man: the he is an irritating poseur, that he has no literary talent whatsoever, that he is a liar having read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in Yiddish before the book was actually translated into Yiddish, that he has no moral authority whatsoever, that he has never met an Israeli war crime that he did not endorse, but you have to admit: he is really funny and humorous.