Gerald Scarfe isn’t anti-Semitic – but David Ward is

I’m turning into a Holobore. I can feel it happening, and it’s sapping at my soul.

What a week. It started with David Ward, the Lib Dem MP and anti-Semite. No, shut up. Yes he is. If you say ‘the Jews’ should have ‘learned the lessons of the Holocaust’ and that they clearly haven’t because of their ‘inflicting atrocities on Palestinians’ then you’re ticking every box. And he did say these things. So he is.

It’s ‘the Jews’ that rankles first, obviously. I’m a Jew. Am I inflicting atrocities on Palestinians? Me and Lenny Kravitz and Woody Allen? Oh, you cretin. But as bad, if not worse, is the shameless appropriating of the deaths and the displacement and the piles of shoes and hair for his own shabby political ends.

‘Actually, maybe Israel has learned the lessons of the Holocaust,’ you half want to say to the man, ‘which is why they don’t seek to wipe the Palestinians from the Earth, turning their teeth into jewellery and their skin into wastepaper bins, you hateful bloody dunce, you.’ But you can’t really, because that’s an insane thing to say, and you’d be down in the gutter with him and nobody wins. Nobody wins. I mean, Christ, what did he think he was doing? Does he think the Israelis have never thought about the Holocaust before? Does he think they’re going to read his horrid, eager little website and go, ‘Oh hell! I’ve just realised! That happened to us!’

Although the most depressing thing, probably, is the question of whether he actually knew exactly what he was doing, this man with a marginal seat and a large number of Muslim voters. Whether he was, you know, Speaking Out On Israel and Ending The Silence.