The real reason Lorde boycotted Israel

IN the Left’s logic-free grievance hierarchy, women take a back seat to Palestinians (and Putin), writes James Morrow.

IT must be tough for those on the progressive side of politics.

The entire left these days seems consumed with competing grievances and agendas it must be hard to know on any given day whose cause to champion and whose to ignore.

But the decision by Kiwi pop singer Lorde to cave to the demands of activists and cancel a performance scheduled in Israel next year — while keeping stops in St Petersburg and Moscow on her world tour — inadvertently clarifies the way things really work.

Essentially, progressives tend to make up their minds about things according to a grievance hierarchy, which goes something like this: Worries about Palestine trump concerns about gay rights. And concerns about gay rights trump women’s rights which, despite the big and necessary push against harassment and abuse over the past several months, tend to wind up as the last unionised, fair-pay electric cab off the left’s organised and properly supervised rank.

Or to put it another way, being anti-Western means never having to say you’re sorry, but being female doesn’t mean that the left will let you get away with having your own opinion.

This grievance hierarchy also goes a long way to explaining why the activist classes are so single-minded when it comes to Israel, despite its vibrant democracy and thriving hi-tech scene, to say nothing of it being the only one of its neighbours to host a world-famous LGBT mardi gras festival.

This mindset also is why progressives can, without a hint of irony, attack the pro-Western, US-allied Jewish state and then turn around and tell anyone who will listen that Donald Trump is ushering in a new era of brown-shirted crypto-Nazism.

Now in announcing her own personal Israel boycott, Lorde has put herself in good company.

In Australia, Lorde is in the same boat as Sydney’s now-amalgamated Greens-dominated Marrickville Council, which in 2011 moved to cut off doing business with companies that did business with Israel.

Lorde performs at Melbourne’s Sidney Myer Music Bowl in November. (Pic: Andrew Tauber)

She has also aligned herself with those cranks who a few years ago led protests aimed at Jewish-owned Max Brenner chocolate shops to protest the occupation of the West Bank.

But the thing is, there are lots of occupations, illegal or otherwise, around the world.

Turkey, to take one example, has illegally occupied the northern third of Cyprus since 1974, when it invaded the island and expelled 150,000 Greek Cypriots from their homes.

And China infamously invaded Tibet in 1950, where it has ruled ever since with varying degrees of brutality.

Yet you never hear of a performer being hectored out of playing Istanbul or Shanghai. Just those who would do a show in Israel.

Meanwhile Lorde, while cancelling her Tel Aviv show, will still play her planned engagements in Moscow and St Petersburg.

This despite Russia’s treatment of gays, its interference in Ukraine, and even Putin’s dastardly plot to trick Hillary Clinton into thinking she could win America’s industrial heartland while spending most of her presidential campaign schmoozing big-money donors in New York and LA.

In other words, says the left, it is absolutely not OK to play a show in Israel because of how they treat the Palestinians. But Russia, with all its documented human rights abuses, particularly against homosexuals?

Have fun and send us a postcard from Red Square.

Were the rights of Russia’s gays as respected by progressives as those of the Palestinians (who themselves are no respecters of LGBT rights, to put it mildly), we’d surely hear howls of outrage.

But the grievance hierarchy says otherwise.

Which brings us to women, who even with all the attention being paid to the #metoo moment, are still being told to put their own opinions on the backburner to please others.

Only now it’s the progressives, not the “patriarchy”, pushing them around.

Lorde herself is a young woman, barely turned 21, but in recent weeks she was the subject of a sustained campaign by the activist left to cancel her Israel show.

On one level it’s hard to blame her for caving, even if the decision was boneheaded.

As Israeli concert promoter Eran Arielli, who was organising Lorde’s Tel Aviv show put it, “The truth is that I was naive to think that an artist of her age can withstand the pressure involved in coming to Israel, and I take full responsibility and ask the forgiveness of fans, admirers, and other dreamers.”

In any other context, this forcing of a young woman to bend to suit the will of an online mob would look like misogynistic bullying.

Nor would it be the first time a female artist has been told to toe the line — or else.

Lorde and her pal Taylor Swift have both been victims of activists’ campaigns for not thinking the “right” way. (Pic: Instagram)

Take the recent bizarre hate campaign directed against singer Taylor Swift.

Swift, to hear her critics on the left tell it, already has two strikes against her — being white and being well-off or “privileged”.

The fact that she has “failed” to denounce Donald Trump and take the correct stances on feminism and politics and Hillary Clinton is just the icing on the cake, leading even to her being branded an icon of the so-called “alt-right”.

Apparently feminism no longer means being able to have your own opinion or celebrate your own success. Who knew?

Or to put it another way, women must still sacrifice themselves to the movement. Sorry, Lorde, you may have wanted to go to Israel, but the Palestinians hold more grievance points.

In any case, the idea that performers should have any special insight into the world is a bizarre one, as is suggesting playing a show for pop fans in Tel Aviv should have any bearing on Middle East politics.

With rare exceptions, pop stars have no more insight than anyone else, and forcing them to mouth platitudes in service of some cause or another just means that there is one more realm of our already over-politicised lives where everyone has to take sides.

James Morrow is the opinion editor of the Daily Telegraph.

@pwafork

Originally published as The real reason Lorde boycotted Israel