Tainted saints

“He was my cousin, twice removed
— Each time by the police.
He married his brother’s mother-in-law
Who was also his sister’s niece...”
From A Parsi Family Tree (Ed. Bachchoo)

The sainted become the tainted. The British, and indeed international, media’s latest game is to identify all those who supped with the devil and weren’t equipped with a long spoon.

So the Rothschilds who invite former British Labour minister and operator-in-chief Peter Mandelson and the “crown prince” of Libya, Seif Gaddafi to their dining tables, onto their yachts, or to their estates and on their hunts have picked up the stain of association with a mass murderer. Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were political friends with Col. Muammar Gaddafi before he started butchering his own people. Now they are scrambling to make some distance.
The famous London School of Economics (LSE) has taken the colonel’s shilling in the form of educational endowments and the disclosure of the extent and manner of these gifts has caused its director Sir Howard Davies to resign.
The suggestion is that all dealings with mass murderers and dictators are cause for concern or at least cause for throwing mud. The mud may not stick even though it is clear that Col. Gaddafi’s son has nothing but his genes to qualify him for the wealth he dispenses or for his lifestyle and association with the good and great of the world of usury.
The flung mud (or other substance) doesn’t stick when people judge that the purpose to which the ill-gotten gains were then put is in itself noble. Take the case of Mother Teresa of Kolkata. Some years ago Christopher Hitchens and Tariq Ali made a documentary which proved that Mother Teresa had taken money for her charitable work from Papa Doc, the butcher of Haiti, and from Enver Hoxa, the dictator of Albania. Neither Doc nor Hoxa were well thought of as democrats or as people and the funds which the sainted Teresa got from them were not deemed to be hard-earned cash.
Nevertheless, Mother Teresa suffered no ignominy from the disclosure because what she was doing with the money was seen to be altruistic, good and even saintly.
The same argument may eventually be applied to Col. Gaddafi’s endowments to the LSE. I wonder, though, if the school has a course in contemporary north African history and whether its curriculum and contentions are in any way affected by the acceptance of Libyan money. In the interests of academic independence, we should be told.
There are murmurs one hears of the Jaipur Literary Festival being sponsored by philanthropists who do business with Libya. That, of course, is no reason to suppose that a Libyan or Arab writer who is in any sense critical of, or satirical about, Col. Gaddafi will not be invited onto a platform to read or discuss his or her work. Neither is it fair to assume that the Nirulas (whom I know) who finance wholly or in part this festival, or indeed the organisers of the festival (also friends of mine) can in any sense be accused of taking the murderer’s largesse.
The closest I myself ever got to... Well, here’s the story, I shan’t give it away: Some years ago I was a commissioning editor of the UK’s Channel 4 TV. The job entailed conceiving and commissioning programmes and programme makers, paying for the programmes, editorially guiding them and bargaining with my colleagues and superiors for their prime-time airing.
I went to a party, a private affair of a friend who happened to be a TV producer, but not one that worked for me or for Channel 4.
As I walked in, Ray, my host, said, “Great you could make it”, or words to that effect. “There’s someone who wants desperately to meet you.”
I got myself a drink and crossing the crowded room was introduced to a fat gentleman in a dark suit who was seated on a sofa between two young women. He lumbered to his feet as Mr Ray and I approached and beamed rather fetchingly as we were introduced.
“I have been very much interested in meeting you”, he said with a heavy, what I took to be Arabic, accent.
I was polite in return and the two young ladies, taking their cue from the gentleman, stood and vanished into the party to make room for me on the sofa. I sat, curious.
“Well, I propose to Channel 4 a six-part documentary on the history this century (it was still the 20th) of West Asia and the Arab world. We will have everybody speaking, anybody you want — Yasser Arafat, Sheikh Muhammad Hassan Fedlallah, people from Hezbollah, Hamas, the Sheikhs, Col. Gaddafi, the main players in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Muslim Brotherhood...”
“Israel?” I asked.
“Of course, of course”, he said.
“The main thing, 90 per cent, about such a series is access”, I said.
“We have complete access to everyone”, he replied.
“Huge enterprise”, I said. “Interesting if it comes off and it will have to have a very experienced producer...”
“Oh, yes, yes, yes”, he said. He had anticipated the hurdles he might encounter in pitching the idea to someone like me. “We have...” and he mentioned the names of very distinguished BBC directors and producers (who shall here remain nameless). I knew all the names and knew they’d done good work. “And it’s grand scale, battles, landscape, history like drama!”
“That’s good, but a six-parter? What sort of money were you thinking of?”
It was a social occasion and I didn’t want to invite him to meet me officially with a written proposal without getting some idea of whether Channel 4 could afford it.
“What about £40,000 per episode?” he said.
“You’d never make it for that!” I said.
A look of resignation came over his face. He’d dealt with amateurs before!
“No, no you don’t understand”, he said. “We are making the films ourself. The £40,000 per episode is a present for you.”
I thanked him and said I was in need of a drink.
“Who’s that fellow?” I asked Mr Ray
He grinned. “He’s the Libyan bagman”, he said. “No deal?”
I reported the incident to the channel controller the next day.
“Hmmm, £40,000 per episode. Not bad. And you turned that down?” he said. “So what’s your price then, Farrukh?”