Swedish crime writer and personal hero of mine, Henning Mankell, was aboard the Swedish ship Sofia, one of six ships in the flotilla carrying aid to Gaza. The 25-strong crew, including Mankell – as well as Nobel peace laureate Mairead Corrigan-Maguire – were among hundreds of activists arrested and held in Israeli custody following the storming of the Gaza aid flotilla. Mankell, who has been politically active from a young age and was once a merchant seaman, said he had been struck by the lack of other writers and intellectuals on the voyage and called on others to become involved. I know how he feels. 99.9% of people I know do nothing about anything for anybody ever. Mankell had decided to join the aid-delivering flotilla in a gesture of solidarity towards Palestinians currently living under the Israeli blockade.
I’m not sure I would fuck with the guy from whose tortured and twisted mind sprang Kurt Wallander, the clinically depressed, disillusioned Swedish police detective. Living with the guilt of having accidentally shot and killed a man in the fog, and in and out of alcohol-fuelled depressions, having witnessed a friend tortured to death and his wife savagely beaten and left for dead with a noose around her neck, a sadistic serial killer violently slaughtering successful men with an axe before collecting their scalps as trophies, a young Dominican girl set herself on fire in something called a “rape field”, a flower shop manager found starved and garrotted in the woods, nuns with their throats slit in an Algerian convent, a birdwatcher skewered to death in a pit of carefully sharpened bamboo poles… and a Swedish housewife murdered execution-style.
Seriously, I wouldn’t fuck with this guy.
Society had grown cruel. People who felt they were unwanted or unwelcome in their own country, reacted with aggression. There was no such thing as meaningless violence. Every violent act had a meaning for the person who committed it. Only when you dared accept this truth could you hope to turn society in another direction.
— Henning Mankell (Die fünfte Frau)
The crime writer describes the ‘horrifying moment’ when he realised Israelis had chosen to attack the ships in the guardian uk.
