The war against the Jews (13)

Thursday, 3rd April 2008

Professor Robert Wistrich, the British born academic at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem who is the doyen of the study of antisemitism, yesterday delivered a blistering and devastating denunciation of Britain as the contemporary epicentre of antisemitism in Europe. As the Jerusalem Post reports, Wistrich said that the problem is exacerbated by a growing and increasingly radical Muslim population, the weak approach taken by a timid British Jewish leadership, and the detachment of the British from their Christian roots.

In his address, Wistrich said that today's British media had taken an almost universally anti-Israel bias, especially but not exclusively on the BBC, with context removed from description of Israeli military actions, and Islamic jihadist activity such as suicide bombing never connected to ideology. ‘Under no circumstance will a Palestinian act of terrorism be referred to as terrorist, They are militants similar to the floor-shop dispute in Liverpool whose workers have decided to go on strike,’ he said.

‘Palestinian terrorism is portrayed as a minor pin-prick compared to 'massive' retaliation of this “rogue” state [Israel],’ he said. ‘You cannot read a British newspaper without encountering a variant of the libel that Zionism is racism or Zionism is Nazism,’ he said, describing a culture of ‘barely disguised hatred’ when the subject of Zionism of British Jewry or Anglo-Israel relations is broached, unless they are ‘the good anti-Zionists.’

With the media and the elites skewed against Israel — aided by former Israeli academics who routinely condemn the Jewish state and who have attained ‘historic dissident status and are listened to as the authentic voice of Israel’ —the whole discussion of anti-Semitism had become distorted in Britain, with the accuser becoming the accused, he said. ‘The self-proclaimed anti-racists of the [London Mayor Ken] Livingstone brand lead the pack when it comes to the prevailing discourse about Israel and by implication Jews. If you bring up the subject of anti-Semitism you are playing the anti-Semitism card and you are [seen as] a dishonest deceitful manipulative Jew or lover of Jews who is using the language of anti-Semitism to disguise hide or silence criticism of Israel,’ he said.

Yup, that’s the measure of it. And as a result there are precious few public figures who are prepared to name this evil that is so deforming British public discourse. One of the very few is the Tory MP Michael Gove, who really does get it. In an article in today’s Times, he points out how the most civilised people in the country — in this case, Ed Stourton of the Today programme — don’t get it at all; they have the most extraordinary tin ear when it comes to antisemitism and the fact that it has become, appallingly, an accepted feature of British public life across the political spectrum:

Whether it comes from the hard Left or the wildest shores of the Right, whether it masquerades as liberation rhetoric or brave truth-telling about hidden power brokers, anti-Semitism is finding new allies, making new connections, gathering new force. Something is clearly awry in our culture. The Iranian Government holds conferences to discuss the historical truth of the Holocaust, yet some newspapers try to minimise the danger from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and defend him from ‘misquotation’. Learned magazines devote thousands of words to the pernicious nature of Jewish influence on Western governments, and senior commentators then celebrate the delicious courage of this novel argument. Academics, without apparently being conscious of the irony, argue for a boycott of Israeli thinkers in the name of freedom. It is one of the grave distempers of our times, this prejudice towards the Jewish people, their nation and their collective identity. And one of the tasks of our times is its exposure, its combating and its defeat.

Twenty six years ago, I wrote a play, Traitors (which was performed in a fringe theatre in London) about the way polite British antisemitism had not only re-emerged from under the stone where it had been hiding but had become the one prejudice that now dared not speak its name. That period, when anti-Jewish feeling was whipped up by the first Lebanon war but then went back under its stone during the Oslo appeasement process, was in retrospect merely a small foretaste of the psychic pogrom that was to be unleashed against the Jews along with the start of the second intifada. The way in which Britain has been consumed by this madness is not just a source of untold anguish to those British Jews who (unlike their community leadership) don’t have their heads in the sand, not just a source of horror and dismay to those many decent British non-Jews who can see what is happening, but is also a positive menace to all who are fighting to defend civilisation from going down the pan.