Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Baddielphobia and the ugly truth about anti-Semitism

David Baddiel (Credit: YouTube)

David Baddiel could not have asked for better evidence for his thesis that ‘Jews don’t count’ than the online reaction to it.

Channel 4 broadcast his intelligent and touching documentary this week with that very title – Jews Don’t Count – and instantly there was an explosion of Baddielphobia. It was almost as if people were determined to prove his point. There’s a blind spot among progressives when it comes to anti-Jewish hatred, said Baddiel. And – boom – there it was, right away, in hateful comment after hateful comment: the blind spot, clear as anything.

Baddiel first made his case in his sharp polemical book Jews Don’t Count, published last year. He argued, convincingly, that there is a new leftish coalition that fancies itself as being ‘on the right side of history’ but which rarely takes up the cause of Jews.

Well done everyone for making Baddiel’s case for him

It’s not the left as we would have traditionally understood it, he says. It’s more cultural than economic, more into identity than class. But not all identities. There’s one identity group it cold-shoulders, whose experiences of racial hatred it tends to overlook. Jews, they’re just not that into you.

Baddiel’s book gives numerous examples of prejudicial speech against Jews that just didn’t cause much stir among supposedly anti-racist progressives. Speech that would have had them glued to their computer keyboards, hollering for the evil speaker’s cancellation, had it been aimed at any other ethnic minority.

None of the rules of identity politics seem to apply to Jews, says Baddiel. Especially the rule that says minorities must be allowed to define and speak about the racism they experience. Jews are excluded from the ‘sacred circle’ of progressive causes, he says.

This is so obviously the case.

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