OF CABBAGES AND KINGS | Ye! Ye! No UK Visa For Kanye West… Transgenders Get A Choice: He, She, It? | Farrukh Dhondy

“O come with old Bachchoo and leave the lot

Of Wordsworth and Whitman forgot

Let Eliot sing in metaphoric rhyme, or Auden display his contempt

Let doggerel triumph, heed them not!”

From The Rubaiyat of Oh My Kayamat

This week a fourth man was arrested and charged with arson for allegedly setting fire on March 23 to three ambulances which were the property of a Jewish charitable trust based in north London in Golders Green.

These ambulances were at the service of anyone who needed them and, after the obviously antisemitic arson attack, several relatives of Muslim patients publicly announced that these Jewish charity ambulances had answered their family emergencies and come to their aid.

The four alleged arsonists -- innocent until proved guilty, of course -- are all young men of Pakistani origin and three of them British citizens. The police are even now investigating the incident, and it is thought that other individuals may have been associated with this purposeless arson attack, which damaged £1million worth of compassionate, publicly vital transport.

The police say they are not treating it as “terrorism”, and one assumes this is because no one was hurt or killed. The alleged arsonists have appeared in court, but apart from identifying themselves, have said nothing, so one doesn’t know why they carried out the attack.

Was their criminal passion some imagined revenge for the Benjamin Netanyahu regime’s bombing of Palestine and now of Lebanon? Or was it associated with the Israeli war on Iran? Or both? Or a general antisemitic racism? Obviously, the attack on charity ambulances is senseless as it does nothing for any cause in the world, however horrific and unjust the genocide in Palestine and now the threatened obliteration of Iranian civilian life palpably is.

The prosecution and perhaps defence arguments and revelations in court at the trial of the four may cast some light on what these (alleged) arsonists thought they were achieving. Look forward.

And this week, gentle reader, another episode with an antisemitic theme has hit the headlines and captivated the news on radio and TV. It concerns the invitation to the American rapper Kanye West as the star act of the “Wireless Music Festival”, which was to be held in early July in North London’s Finsbury Park.

Kanye West, who now likes to be called just “Ye”, has in the recent past issued a song called “Heil Hitler” and has made several public antisemitic remarks and sponsored the sale of reverse-swastika (not the Hindu holy symbol) sweatshirts.

He has since apologised for what he claims were stupid, irresponsible acts brought on by his acknowledged bipolar condition. Jewish groups and several British MPs lobbied the government to refuse him a UK visa. Sir Keir Starmer expressed strong denunciations of West’s antisemitism, saying his stance was unwelcome in Britain. That was a week ago and his application for a visa to come to Britain was still under consideration.

Now, even as I write this column, UK home secretary Shabana Mahmood has taken the decision to deny Kanye West a visa and entry. Kanye -- or just “Ye” -- has repeated his apologies and said if he is allowed into the UK he would with gratitude meet Jewish groups and declare that bouts of temporary “bipolar” condition, a madness depriving him of sense and responsibility, caused his crazy antisemitic rants and deviance. Really?

Even before Ms Mahmood’s decision to deny Kanye an entry visa, several commercial sponsors of the Wireless Festival, including its principal and traditional financers, Pepsi and the Diageo Group, which owns Johnnie Walker and other whisky brands, withdrew their sponsorships.

The organisers of the festival, despite the withdrawal of their main sponsors, had refused to rescind their invitation to Ye, declaring that they accept his apologies and believe his sincere repentance -- and in the spirit of forgiveness should allow him to put his past, deviant nastiness behind him.

But yes, gentle reader, the denial of a visa to Ye has put an end to the Wireless Festival. Cancelled. Tickets refunded.

I must admit that I have never tuned in to Kanye West’s rap or “songs”. I knew the name -- or what was the name. Now he calls himself “Ye” and I wonder why? Because it’s the last syllable of his first name and less is more?

I favour a more philosophical consideration. It’s that “Ye” can be pronounced “Yee”, which is the biblical pronoun for humanity -- as in “Come all Ye Faithful”. Calling himself “Ye” could perhaps be a part of his repentance as he announces, through the adoption of the inclusive pronoun as his name, that he feels that he’s the embodiment of all man and womankind?

Am I getting carried away? Perhaps Kanye is just announcing the pronoun by which he wants to be known. This allocation of a pronoun to oneself is the recent trend of transgender people to specify that “he” or “she” should be addressed as “they”.

Some who feel that birth gender can be replaced by its opposite, sign their names with brackets prescribing which pronouns they want used for themselves as in (she, her) or the masculine equivalent.

In replies to such communications, I follow my name with (it) as my preferred pronoun, as I want to be thought of as objective.

Karl Marx would certainly have said: “Transgender people of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your pronouns!”