English anti-Semitism on the march
I am as appalled by antisemitism as is the author below. And I am perfectly confident that much of what he describes is accurate. I am however also appalled at his major omission. The article appeared in the Left-leaning and exaggeration-prone “New Republic” so one is not surprised by the omission. What is not mentioned directly (but can be seen in the sources quoted) is that the phenomena described occur almost exclusively on the British Left — joined by some Muslims on occasions. Maybe his own narrow social circle makes the author believe that the Left intelligentsia is the whole of England. It is not. Excerpt only below
There is something in the air here, something you can smell, but also, in a number of cases, something more immediately affronting to Jews. It is important not to exaggerate. Most English Jews walk safely through their streets, express themselves freely, enjoy the friendship of non-Jews, and feel no less confidently a part of English life than they ever have. Organizations monitoring anti-Jewish incidents in England have reported a dramatic increase after Gaza: the daubing of slogans such as “kill the jews” on walls and bus shelters in Jewish neighborhoods, abuse of Jewish children on school playgrounds, arson attacks on synagogues, physical assaults on Jews conspicuous by their yarmulkes or shtreimels. But, while these incidents ought not to be treated blithely, they are still exceptional occurrences.
And yet, in the tone of the debate, in the spirit of the national conversation about Israel, in the slow seepage of familiar anti-Semitic calumnies into the conversation–there, it seems to me, one can find growing reason for English Jews to be concerned. Mindless acts of vandalism come and go; but what takes root in the intellectual life of a nation is harder to identify and remove. Was it anti-Semitic of the Labour politician Tam Dalyell to talk of Jewish advisers excessively influencing Tony Blair’s foreign policy? Was it anti-Semitic of the Liberal Democrat Baroness Tonge to refer to the “financial grips” that the pro-Israel lobby exerts on the world? Such allusions to a pro-Israel conspiracy of influence and wealth, usually accompanied by protestations of innocence in regard to Jews themselves–”I am sick of being accused of anti-Semitism,” Baroness Tonge has said, “when what I am doing is criticizing Israel”–have become the commonplaces of anti-Israel discourse in the years since Philip Roth wrote The Counterlife. And, whatever their intention, their gradual effect has been to normalize, under cover of criticism of Israel, assumptions that 50 years ago would have been exclusively the property of overt Jew-haters. The peculiarly immoderate Israel-loathing that Roth remarked upon in 1987 is now a deranged revulsion, intemperate and unconcealed, which nothing Israel itself has done could justify or explain were it ten times the barbaric apartheid state it figures as in the English imagination.
Demonstrators against Israel’s operation in Gaza carried placards demanding an end to the “massacre” and the “slaughter.” There was no contesting this rhetoric of wanton destruction versus helpless innocence. Hamas rockets counted for nothing, Hamas’s record of endangering its own civilian population counted for nothing, Amnesty reports were cited when they incriminated Israel but ignored when they incriminated others. Whatever was not massacre was not news, nor was it germane. The distinguished British film director Ken Loach dismissed a report on the rise of anti-Semitism across Europe as designed merely to “distract attention” from Israel’s military crimes. An increase in anti-Semitism is “perfectly understandable,” Loach said, “because Israel feeds feelings of anti-Semitism.” Scrupulously refusing the Holocaust-Gaza analogy, Robert Fisk, writing in The Independent a few weeks ago, nonetheless argued that “a Palestinian woman and her child are as worthy of life as a Jewish woman and her child on the back of a lorry in Auschwitz”–at a stroke reinstating the analogy while implying that Jews need to be reminded that not only Jewish lives are precious. And a columnist for the populist newspaper The Daily Mirror has taken this imputation of callousness a stage further, writing of the “1,314 dead Palestinians temporarily sat[ing] Tel Aviv’s bloodlust.”
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Posted by JonJayRay on April 14, 2009 8:16 pm
» Filed Under Bigotry, Hamas/Hezbollah, Hypocrisy/Situational Ethics, Israel, Liberal Media/Bias, News, Revisionism, anti-Semitism
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2 Responses to “English anti-Semitism on the march”
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Yeah, well their rag said since the permafrost in Syria melted we only have 11 months to live before global warming killed us all back in March of 2005, yet here we are still alive, so people should hold Britain in contempt for these 2 reasons.
It ain’t for nothing that antisemites, Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, etc were SOCIALISTS (that’s LEFTISTS for our brain challenged liberals). The leftists put the label fascists on the antisemitic part of their organization hoping to dupe the public into believing ‘fascists’ were ‘right wing’ and ’socialists/commies’ (the ‘good guys’) were ‘leftwing’. But they are all statist leftwing creatures and there is nothing rightwing about either fascists or socialists/commies.