Don’t make a martyr out of Sally Rooney
I’ve managed to avoid the work of Sally Rooney. I gather she’s not only a best-selling novelist, but also the Irish, Marxist ‘voice of the millennial generation’, with all the terrible opinions those descriptors now imply. But thanks to a bad call made by the UK government last summer, she has become a ‘progressive’ cause célèbre who none of us is now allowed to ignore. Rooney, you’ll be shocked to learn, hates Israel. She is convinced of the modern-day blood libel that its war on the killers of Hamas is in fact a ‘genocide’ against the Palestinians of Gaza. And she has thrown her support behind Palestine Action – the anti-Israel direct-action group that was proscribed as a terrorist organisation in Britain last year, following its ransacking of an RAF base in Oxfordshire. ‘I support Palestine Action. If this makes me a “supporter of terror” under UK law, so be it’, Rooney wrote in The Irish Times shortly after the ban. She also pledged to donate her royalties to the group. Both of which constitute …
