The Jong remains inflamed

US novelist and feminist pioneer Erica Jong fears that Muqtada al-Sadr may order her execution by firing squad.

Jong revealed her terror following a conference at Columbia University celebrating the 35th anniversary of Fear Of Flying, the novel which made her name back in 1973. The style and first-person narration suggests that Fear Of Flying is autobiographical – which Jong denies. The book’s lasting significance may lie in the way it liberated language. Long before the Vagina Monologues, it made casual use of “cunt” and inserted the phrase “zipless fuck” into the vernacular.
Fear Of Flying depicts the heroine/writer, Isadora Wing, visiting her sister, Randy, who lives in Beirut with her children and husband, a Lebanese Arab – who crawls into Isadora’s bed and asks for a blow-job.
The chapter containing this sequence is named ‘Arabs and Other Animals’. It sparked an outburst at the conference from Jong’s sister, Suzanna Daou. Prior to the book’s publication, Daou was visited by Jong at the Beirut home she shared with her children and husband, a Lebanese Arab.
“I have been angry about this for 35 years,” Daou told the conference. “The book was based on my family. But my husband was a wonderful man. It’s implied that he climbed into her bed and asked for fellatio. He would never ever have behaved in that way. It was a terrible betrayal.”
What seized my interest was not the betrayal but the reaction to the chapter-heading back in the 1970s, and Jong’s reaction to her sister’s complaint now.
1973 was the heyday and high point of political correctness – the year the Roe-v-Wade judgment made abortion legal in the US, Black Panther Bobby Seale came within a few hundred votes of becoming mayor of Oakland, and the US Gay Liberation Movement held its first national conference. Never was awareness of the right to separate identity so acute.
Would the heading ‘Blacks and Other Animals’ or ‘Gays and Other Animals’ or ‘Jews and Other Animals’ have passed without comment in a Number One best-seller that year? But Jong’s reference to Arabs went entirely unremarked.
Jong told The New Yorker she now regretted using the phrase, and went on: “When Muqtada al-Sadr comes to power and I am facing the firing squad, it will be for that.” 
Purporting to apologise for admitted racist language, she portrays herself as free speech heroine and potential martyr.
And in what country is she speculating Muqtada al-Sadr’s Shia movement might take power? She’s hardly suggesting she’ll be living in Iraq. How can her remark be understood other than as a restatement of the paranoid war-mongers’ mantra that Muslims and Arabs are out to take over the world and crush our hard-won right to read raunchy best-sellers?
US playwright Betty Shamieh – who is married to an Arab American – points out that Jong is reinforcing the entirely mistaken notion that Arab/Muslim hostility to the US derives from a hatred of freedom, rather than of the role US forces play in Muslim and Arab countries.
The incident illustrates again how deeply embedded in the consciousness of the West anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hatred has become. The ‘War on Terror’, torture, massacre, renditions and all, would be impossible without it.
Let us ponder this the next time some gobdaw columnist warns that Muslim schoolgirls wearing the hijab are a threat to the freedoms we hold dear.

I was taken aback in London last week by friends looking forward to the Glasgow East by-election (polling, July 24) with a sense of glee they say they haven’t felt since the night Michael Portillo was given the heave-ho. They all want New Labour hammered in its third safest Scottish seat. But none seemed aware of the Celtic factor.
Glasgow East has the largest Catholic population of any constituency in Britain. Poles apart, almost all are of Irish extraction. This is Glasgow Celtic’s throbbing heart-land. And New Labour has angered fans of the Scottish football club more than somewhat.
On November 19 last, former Defence (and Northern Ireland) Minister John Reid, one of Westminster’s most gung-ho pro-warriors, was brought in by Glasgow Celtic’s major share-holder, Dermot Desmond, to take over as club chairman. Fans were outraged. But Desmond had the shares, and therefore the whip hand.
Reid had to have a Special Branch bodyguard by his side at home games for the rest of the season. His regular public presence in the constituency was a reminder that New Labour represented war and occupation. Said Jeanette Findlay of the Glasgow Celtic Supporters’ Trust: “Reid will forever be identified with an invasion that brought about a humanitarian disaster. Why bring this controversy to our club?”
The first-ever Labour MP for Glasgow East was legendary leader of the “Red Clydesiders” John Wheatley, elected in a landslide in 1922 in recognition of his passionate opposition (he’d gone to prison for his pains) to World War One. A reputed 120,000 people gathered to cheer him as he left St. Enoch’s station en route to Westminster.
Glasgow East is, arguably, also the most consistently anti-war constituency in Britain.
In Government, Reid was instrumental in pushing through “anti-terrorist” legislation for a £5.5 billion high-tech identity recognition scheme. Now it’s emerged that, on November 29 last, he travelled to Dublin to speak to executives bidding for the contract, lending his prestige to their bid. The company he advised, International Investment and Underwriting, is, according to the Mail On Sunday, run by Desmond.
Reid’s every note has offended the ears of the Glasgow Celtic faithful.
“He could cost Labour a few hundred votes,” says Jeanette Findlay. Which might, be enough.
If Labour loses, Brown’s a goner. He might be the first British PM ever toppled by a bad signing for Glasgow Celtic.