Pure fiction

[23rd – 24th April 2016] Suppose that all of a sudden I have gone just absolutely mad. I mean, really. To the point of discarding all civilized restraints on my normal behavior. Further, that I have started thinking horrible things about various European or world leaders. Somehow, I have developed this nationalistic hatred for them. I hold them to be both dictators and sado-masochistic sexual perverts. I am actually beginning to fantasize about their private parts or their affairs with various farm animals.

Also imagine, if you can, that I have also started fancying myself as both a wit and a poet. All my life I have somehow clung to the belief that at least my closest friends might see me in both ways as an unrecognized genius. Now I have decided to go public — to take my sharp yet warm sense of humor, as well as my elegant, well-crafted lyricism, to the broad masses.

Always pretending, this is why and how I venture to compose an immortal work of political satire. Something that will uphold all the greatest human rights and freedoms. So (assume that) I sit down to write the 23 lines below in a flexible format. Note that there are some blank spaces about (i) an iconic food associated with a given country (line 1); (ii) ethno-religious groups that may with some reason believed to be suffering from discrimination or persecution in that country (line 7); (iii) the name of the country’s top statesman who happens to be my hate object (line 11); (iv) his/her title or position (line 12); (v) two key place-names that might be taken as bracketing that country end to end (line 16); (vi) once more the leader’s title and country (line 22); and (vii) the top leader’s name yet again, though this time coined into a triplet together with two notorious child abusers and rapists (line 23).

You see, I don’t want to have to write a different poem every time I want to insult any head of state (whether queen or president or prime minister). Hence these ten or twelve blanks constitute a changeable set.  Absolutely hypothetically speaking, for the UK and for Germany itself, as given in the table below the concrete applications might be:

The path of science is a thorny one. Scientific models are inevitably complex, requiring all sorts of assumptions, and therefore I hope I may be forgiven for asking you to make yet another, albeit final one. Suppose that I am going to take this on the air — that, using my existing television connections, I somehow persuade… TRT World, for example, to arrange an “American Idol” or “America Has Got Talent” kind of show solely for me. It is going to be a one-time, one-act comedy stand. I go on stage, grab the microphone, and (this is my second disclaimer) explain to the audience that I don’t have any intention of slandering anybody; all I want is to demonstrate the difference between satire and slander. I am going to read something slanderous, I say, but I am going to warn you whenever it becomes slanderous, so that in the end, it will not be for defamation but education purposes.

With the cutest possible smile on my young spoiled brat face, I then proceed to read my masterpiece, pausing at every line to try to bring out, through my guffaws — for I am laughing uproariously all the time, sometimes so hard that I am almost falling over my desk — that “ ho ho ho, this is slander, this is forbidden.” My audience (please stay with me and sustain your belief to the end) seems to agree and to take the point, for they too are laughing louder and louder at each line especially as I keep pointing out, to keep educating the unenlightened of course, that this too is ho ho ho slander and prohibited, and that too is ha ha ha slander and prohibited, and that is the law that we have been laughing and abiding by.

This, then, is what I read before a universal audience (with only one four-letter word abbreviated):

His tail really stinks of (…….),

worse than a pig’s fart;

he is a man who batters women

while wearing a leather garter;

what he loves most is to f— goats

and to oppress minorities

As he kicks the (…….) and beats up (……..),

he keeps watching child-porn movies,

and even in the evening, instead of sleeping

he prefers licking a hundred lambs’ penises;

yes, it is truly Mr (……..),

a (……..) with a tiny penis

Everyone in his country

loudly sings to a flute

that this pig has shrunken testicles;

from (……..) to (……..) everybody knows

that this man is a queer,

a pervert, infested with lice, a sodomizer of animals

Like his balls, his head, too, is completely empty; 

until his penis begins to burn when he pees,

he emerges as the star of all gang bang parties;

this then is the (….….) of (……..),

(…….) Fritzl Priklopil

Now, just what do you think might happen?

Do you think there might be some offense taken in Germany, or the UK, or France, Italy, Israel, the Netherlands or the US, depending on how I might have chosen to fill in my blanks so as to direct my invective hither or thither?

In particular, how do you think the Gatestone Institute, Freedom House, the Middle East Forum, Daniel Pipes or Burak Bekdil might react if and when it becomes a matter of Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel from Haifa to Beer Sheva or Jerusalem?

Or what the BBC might say if I were so indelicate as to address my allegations of bestialism (allowing for all gender changes in the text) to Her Majesty the Queen?

Also consider the possibility that there might be something in Turkish law about slandering any foreign flag, country, or head of state, and that legal procedures might therefore be started against me at some point.

In the past, I have benefited from the support and solidarity shown by Western intellectuals, newspapers or television channels when I spoke up to defend the historical truth of the Armenian genocide (the 101st anniversary of which, incidentally, we shall be commemorating precisely today, 24th April 2016). It is something that I shall always remember with equal, collegial gratitude. But how many brave defenders of “the freedom of the press” in the West do you think might jump to my defence in this case?

During my previous two days’ surveys of such “press freedom” interventions by European media, I forgot to mention a rhyming contribution by The Economist: “There once was a prickly sultan,  whom Germans loved insultin’” (16 April 2016). Supposing my poem was to have a lot of Turks laughing at Europe… in the persons of Joachim Gauck or Elizabeth II. What might The Economist say on my hypothetical behalf? That once there was “a prickly queen” or “a prickly clergyman” that “Turks loved insulting”? Would it be as simple as that? Would Douglas Murray spend a weekend writing crude limericks now on my side, i.e. against whichever Western leader I might have happened to draw a bead on? Might John Oliver advise, equally sanguinely, that it is only a poem, and that Europeans must simply learn to listen politely to poetry?

A final question to women’s and feminist groups, LGBT activists, ever-so-vocal critics of hate speech… Do you see anything in my poem that might come within your ambit, your chosen field of struggle? And if so, where have you been all this time?

Oh, but what a hopeless, shameless bunch of cowardly hypocrites you all are!