That Great Big Beautiful Dahl, so beloved by some in the children's book world, has been dead for quite a while.
Should we say something good about the dead? He's dead. GOOD.
He wished the same for Jews everywhere. It didn't matter if he knew them or not. As far as Roald Dahl was concerned, "Hitler didn't just pick on them for no reason..."
Dahl was such an antisemite, he used his celebrity to promote hatred of anyone based on their Judaism or, in fact, on simply being born of Jewish parents.
Give him credit for his honesty, but that's about it. Then again, he picked a target not known to fight back, and he was quoted in British newspapers that didn't seem to care about fair and balanced reporting.
Dahl was not treated like a pariah for his views.
That was reserved for another children's author, TOMI UNGERER.
Did Ungerer preach hatred to interviewers? Of course not.
He was banned from libraries in America because his cartooning included satirical and sexual cartoons for the Village Voice and other lucrative and well-respected international markets. Doesn't that tell you more than you want to know about how cavalier antisemitism was and still is?
Fact is, any politician or celebrity can say almost the same things Dahl said (how about "Israel should be wiped off the face of the Earth") and nobody would object. Not as much as they would if somebody wrote (erroneously): "Francis Scott Key is a stone cold racist...NEVER stand up for the National Anthem."
A week or so before the happy 100th birthday for Roald Dahl, Gene Wilder died.
Dahl would've been upset...that it took so long. Gene Wilder, "Willy Wonka," was a Jew. As far as Roald Dahl was concerned, "Hitler didn't just pick on them for no reason..." and if Hitler felt that little Jewish kids should go into crematoriums after being starved down to skin and bone, that would apply to Gene Wilder.
Roald Dahl believed Gene Wilder should've never played Willy Wonka. He should've been killed while still a child. "HITLER DIDN'T JUST PICK ON THEM FOR NO REASON."
Hitler, of course, didn't just "PICK ON" them. He raped them. He starved them. He experimented on them. He tortured them. And then he killed them.
From his comfortable desk in Great Britain, a very fine desk indeed, because the royalties were pouring in for his oh-so-fanciful children's books, Roald Dahl spread his messages of hate and intolerance.
For the very, very young, he wrote about how bad "ugly" thoughts were:
To the adults, Dahl offered no end of ugly thoughts.
In 1983, in the Literary Review, Dahl promoted the stereotype of "those powerful American Jewish bankers," declaring the United States was "utterly dominated by the great Jewish financial institutions over there."
In the New Statesman, he whispered about the odious "Jewish character that does provoke animosity," unlike the Irishman, the Black, the Latino, the Asian or anyone else. "Hitler didn't just pick on them for no reason."
And in 1990, Dahl proudly declared, "I am certainly anti-Israel, and I have become anti-Semitic," as if that was something to be proud of. Perhaps he carried a card that he could present to Arabs: "I have become anti-Semitic."
Dahl was so far gone, he even raged that "there aren't any non-Jewish publishers anywhere."
He promoted the worst kind of bigotry.
Today, there were people who are willing to riot because Francis Scott Key wrote "The Star Spangled Banner," and a few revisionist-history buffs (such as Shaun King of the NY Daily News) want to pretend he was a "stone cold racist." There are those who calmly agree that Israel should either be wiped off the map, or handed over to the Palestinians, since Jews have absolutely NO right to walk where Moses stood, or a Jew named Jesus.
While "ain't no man righteous, not one," it seems that Roald Dahl gets a bye because, why, he wrote "Matilda" and "Willy Wonka" and "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang," and these are lovely books. There seems to be no attempt to even acknowledge that the man had some serious faults, or that not EVERYTHING he wrote deserves to be taken to one's heart.
Tomi Ungerer was in exile for a lifetime. Entire generations of children couldn't find his books in a library. Ronald Dahl, who committed the great offense of promoting religious-racial hatred and intolerance, was always welcomed.
Today's climate, regarding BLACKS or MUSLIMS or LATINOS among others, absolutely demands total respect. Anyone suspected of intolerance (such as Francis Scott Key) is raged against as someone whose poetry should never be read by anyone ever.
We live in strange times, but it seems that the one constant, the one thing that never changes, is how often antisemitism is deliberately ignored. Dahl actively spoke about the destruction of ONE particular country and the persecution of ONE particular people, and he was, and is, far from alone, and far from censure.
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