Personal Life and Politics
Lipman is Jewish. She was married to dramatist Jack Rosenthal from 1974 until his death in 2004, and has had a number of roles in his works. She has two children, writers Amy and Adam Rosenthal. Lipman is a Labour Party supporter. She is on the editorial advisory board of Jewish Renaissance magazine.
Lipman supports the work of the Burma Campaign UK, Europe's largest NGO regarding Burma. Lipman supports the process of democratisation in the troubled nation. Lipman also supports the work of Prospect Burma, a non-political charity that offers Burmese students the opportunity to study at universities outside of Burma. Lipman spoke on behalf of Prospect Burma in the BBC Radio 4 Charity Appeal, which was broadcast on 6 September 2009.
Lipman supported Israel during the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah conflict. On 13 July 2006, in a debate on the BBC's This Week, she argued that "human life is not cheap to the Israelis, and human life on the other side is quite cheap actually, because they strap bombs to people and send them to blow themselves up." These comments were condemned by Muslim political columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown who said "Brutally straight, she sees no equivalence between the lives of the two tribes" and left-wing journalist John Pilger, who in the New Statesman criticised the BBC for allowing Lipman – whom he described as "a Jew and promoter of selective good causes" – to present her allegedly insensitive remarks without, in his view, any "serious challenge". Lipman responded to Alibhai-Brown's accusation of racism by arguing that the columnist had deliberately misrepresented Lipman's comments as generalisations about Muslims rather than specific comments about terrorists.
In the Jewish Chronicle, Lipman argued that media reporting of the conflict was "heavily distorted":
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There is rarely any film of rockets being fired into Israel, nor any mention of the damage, nor of the 250,000 refugees who have fled to the centre of Israel, nor of rockets targeting Israel every day since it withdrew from Gaza, nor the damage done by 100 Hizbollah rockets a day... More people are being killed in São Paulo, Somalia and Darfur than in this conflict. Where is the coverage? It is as if the Iraq War has completely stopped while this blanket coverage in Lebanon goes on and on and on... I sometimes think Israel should ban the press as Zimbabwe has. They are a democracy, though, and behave accordingly... I respect freedom of speech, but I’m contemptuous of the 300 signatories ". To English, assimilated, sometimes self-despising Jews such as Gerald Kaufman and Harold Pinter, I say: where are you going to go when the shit hits the fan? It doesn’t matter if you stand in Parliament or marry into the aristocracy, there will be no Israel to receive you, as they have received so many before. Why didn’t they put their ad in an Israeli newspaper? Because it is more important to impress their fellow Englishmen than to effect change in the situation. Where are their signatures against Burma, Nepal, Tibet and Zimbabwe?... |
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