If I wrote that a play “could have been a work of triumph in the hands of a more convincing cast ”, it would be annoying to find just four words, “a work of triumph”, attached to my name in advertising material.
Since I have not been entrusted with drama reviews since my local newspaper days, I cannot pretend to have been a victim of such distortion. But the history of arts journalism is littered with selective, misleadingly clipped or downright fraudulent quotes attributed to critics by film and theatre marketing people.
The Slate website offered some priceless examples a few years ago. Observant readers of the US magazine Entertainment Weekly must have been surprised to see advertisements for the 1995 film Se7en, quoting its critic’s description of it as “a masterpiece”. In fact, he had mocked the introductory credits sequence as “a small masterpiece of dementia”.
Such cases of words taken out of context are hardly in the same league as a misrepresentation that seriously damages a person or organisation’s standing in the eyes of reasonable people.
In a British newspaper, I spotted a short item reporting that the UK's National Union of Students (NUS) had refused to pass a motion condemning ISIL, known by some as ISIS, because it believed this would be Islamophobic.
Then I stumbled upon a fuller explanation, at a far-left website called Lenin’s Tomb. There is no need to to accept the Marxist blogger Richard Seymour’s argument. He points out that hostile media coverage relied on this part of an NUS statement: “We recognise that condemnation of ISIS appears to have become a justification for war and blatant Islamophobia.”
But the sentence was preceded by the assertion: "We stand in complete solidarity with the Kurdish people against the recent attacks by ISIS and join many others in condemnation of their brutal actions." Certain reports "overlooked" these words.
Seymour believes, as I do, that the union’s statement was badly phrased. “That,” he writes, “is why it can be misrepresented as saying that the denunciation of ISIS is Islamophobic, despite its clear denunciation of ISIS.”
Yet the ease with which the issue can become clouded is illustrated by comments on Seymour’s blog. One contributor says that while specific ISIL acts should be condemned, “in an outright battle with imperialist forces where ISIS forces are involved, we should make it very clear that we are for the defeat of the imperialist forces and in that sense, for the victory of ISIS forces over them”.
If that were the student body’s considered view, parents and education officials would be entitled to worry about what was going on in universities. But it is not.
Seymour says an important sticking point for the defeated motion was that it urged students to boycott anyone giving ISIL weapons, training or funding. While this seems uncontroversial, the union feared it gave a false impression that such activity was a major tendency among students, specifically Muslims. However slight, Seymour feels, the risk exists.
The NUS has been left in defensive mood by the controversy, and by some despicable targeting on social media of its black students’ officer, Malia Bouattia, as if she were a flag-waving champion of violent monsters engaged in murder, ethnic cleansing, repression and land-grabbing.
The union’s press officer, Collette Bird, says some national executive members felt the wording “would unfairly demonise all Muslims rather than solely the group of people it set out to rightfully condemn”.
With a clarity the union ought to have found sooner, she adds: “Of course NUS does not support ISIS and a new motion will be taken to the next national executive committee meeting, which will specifically condemn the politics and methods of ISIS and offer solidarity for the Kurdish people.”
I am happy to help the beleaguered union, and its persecuted official, demonstrate that they have not taken leave of their senses. But I await with interest the wording of that promised new motion.
Colin Randall is a former executive editor at The National
