Q&A: What Do You Think About the Incident?
What Do You Think About the Incident?
Question
What do you think about the incident that happened during the Oscars ceremony, in which the actor Will Smith slapped the presenter Chris Rock after the latter mocked his wife.
(You can see it here: https://m.ynet.co.il/Articles/61006470)
My question does not relate to this specific case, but to the act itself. How much worse is the physical violence that was used than the verbal violence, if at all?
Of course, I am not in favor of violence of any kind. It is important to me to understand whether there are cases in which physical violence is less severe than verbal violence.
Answer
I don’t understand the question. Is this some kind of competition over which bad act is worse? What is more serious, stealing or hitting? Or maybe speaking slander?
I don’t know how to answer such a general question, and I also don’t really understand it.
Discussion on Answer
A slap for old folks’ homes
Public discourse was also storming this week around the ringing slap that actor Will Smith gave Oscar host Chris Rock in the middle of the ceremony. And why all the fuss? It turns out that Smith’s wife, Jada, has recently been suffering from an autoimmune disease that causes hair loss. Rock somehow thought this was a great setup for a joke, and so he found the opportunity to say that Smith looked like “G.I. Jane 2” (a film whose heroine is bald).
A hilarious joke. If you didn’t collapse with laughter, then there is apparently something defective in your sense of humor.
Smith, at any rate, did not think the joke at the expense of his wife’s illness was terribly funny. He went up on stage and landed Rock a powerful slap. From that moment, the world split in two: the camp claiming that no provocation justifies violence, and the camp claiming that there are situations in which a slap in the face is exactly the right thing at the right time.
Will Smith slaps Chris Rock at the Oscars ceremony. Photo: AFP
I, for my part, am really not a fan of violence, but in this case I belong to the second camp, the one that supports Smith. Yes, after saying the obvious—that violence is not a way to solve problems—we also need to say the qualification that ought to be obvious: every rule, even the most important one, has exceptions. Yes, even the rule against violence needs qualification: it depends on the level of provocation and the level of violence. In this case, this was shaming of the ugliest kind.
Thank God I have never lost my hair, but I can imagine that for a woman—certainly a public figure like Jada Smith, who has media standing in her own right—a disease involving hair loss brings with it physical suffering, and certainly severe mental anguish. In any case, the likelihood that this is what she experienced is certainly high, and Chris Rock had no way of knowing that this was not so.
In such a situation, telling a joke that mocks a person suffering from illness, without clear knowledge that the person in question is indifferent to it, or perhaps even enjoys “black humor” about their illness (and there definitely are such people), is one of the nastier things one person can do to another. Certainly when the event takes place before an audience of millions, including all of the social milieu of the victim of the illness. Faced with such provocation, a slap in the face—and specifically one delivered in front of the whole audience that witnessed the insult—is an entirely reasonable response. If Smith had shot Rock, there would definitely be reason to be appalled by the disproportionate response. But a slap?
A few days before the Oscars ceremony, I attended a memorial for the son of a friend, a 23-year-old young man who committed suicide about a month ago. With great courage, the father revealed during the shivah and again at the memorial the emotional crisis his son had fallen into: he had been diagnosed with Asperger’s, and the children in his elementary school class abused him because of it. Years of intensive and difficult rehabilitative work were required to rescue the son from his pain. And then, recently, it became clear that a certain incident reopened the trauma, and the son could no longer bear the pain, and he took his own life.
Can anyone say that those abusive children did not deserve a few slaps? It is time for people to understand that shaming is a terribly violent act, and whoever engages in it, even if he only meant to tell a joke, may get hit back.
(Yair Sheleg)
“Young folks’ home slap” also fits here—meaning to say, in a young people’s club the violence is on the rise.
They’re not young anymore.
No one is young except in mindset.
With God’s help, 28 Adar, the international day of demonstrations (“Go out and demonstrate at night”), 5782
That scoundrel who publicly mocked Mrs. Smith’s illness deserved not only a ringing slap in the face, but spit in his face. But what is outrageous is this: why is the husband the one who has to fight alone for his wife’s honor?
The president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and all the council members should have immediately removed the offending host from the stage and sent him off contemptuously to hell. They should have suspended him on the spot and summoned him the next day to a “pre-dismissal hearing.” By failing to do so, the people of the “Academy” proved themselves to be a gang of scoundrels beyond repair.
And until they correct the wrong and disgracefully remove the mocking stock performer, we should refrain from watching their films, as the verse says: “You shall not make any gash in your flesh.”
Regards, Yiftach Lahad Argaman-Bakshi
(Not the questioner)
Actually, there are feminists who think it was a good thing that he hit him, because he laughed at his wife.
Do you think it is actually positive that someone who humiliates women should get slapped? For educational purposes of course, not because of anger?