February 22, 2004
OLD HATE AND NEW:
Return of the old hatred: Anti-Semitism is on the increase and its roots are not in the Right but in the Sharon-hating Left (Melanie Phillips, February 22, 2004, The Observer)
Coverage of Israel is obsessive and disproportionate, and marked by a hysteria and malice not applied to any other conflict. And it cannot be divorced from the overt Jew-hatred that has now surfaced in Britain and Europe, particularly the give-away calumny of world Jewish power. The claim that Jews conspire to dominate the world is one of the oldest tropes of classic Jew-hatred. Astonishingly, claims made by the European Left are not far removed. It repeats claims that the 'powerful Jewish lobby' is now running American foreign policy. When Labour MP Tam Dalyell observed that a 'cabal' of Jewish power was behind Blair, he was thought a loveable eccentric. In the House of Lords, a meeting heard that Jews control the British media. One peer told a Jewish colleague: 'We've finished off Saddam. Your lot are next.'The outcome is that an astonishing axis has developed between Islamic Jew-haters and the Left, marching behind the banners of 'human rights' on demonstrations in Europe producing chants of 'Hamas, Hamas, all Jews to the gas'.
Why? The main reason is ignorance of both the Middle East's history and its present. Next, the Left's hatred of Sharon is so great, along with its prejudice that America/the West is the oppressor and therefore the Islamic/Third World the victim, that it can't see what is happening.
Then there's the Left's deconstruction of the very concepts of objectivity and truth, so that it has become a conduit instead for propaganda and lies; and finally, its own history of Jew-hatred from Marx onwards. The final twist is that there are some Jews on the Left who subscribe to all the above too.
If you'll excuse the self-reference: I, for one, am honored to be hated as much for being American as the Jews are hated and to be hated by the detestable Europeans at that. Posted by Orrin Judd at February 22, 2004 11:01 AM
I was interested -- amused, even, in a purely intellectual way -- to learn this weekend that Adolf Eichmann, everybody's poster boy of the Good German, did not leave the Evangelical Church until 1937.
That's a decade after he joined the SS.
When he left, it was not because he had suddenly become an antisemite and therefore found Christianity incompatible; nor that he had become an atheist. He found the Christian god too small for him.
Anyhow, we know where the roots of antisemitism lie. Neither to the Left nor the Right.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at February 22, 2004 5:29 PMIn Semitism.
Posted by: oj at February 22, 2004 5:39 PMHarry:
Right, and that is why we see antisemitism surging in tandem with the European Christian revival we are hearing so much about.
Awfully sneaky, those Europeans.
Posted by: Peter B at February 22, 2004 6:14 PMSpeaking of religious bigotry.
Posted by: Genecis at February 22, 2004 8:30 PMHarry,
The hard right (I mean the really
hard right) deplore religion specifically
Christianity for its semitic origins. It's probably not a swamp you'll ever wade into but would become evident if you did.
Orrin thinks Shiites will be influenced by what they've been taught religiously for 1,500 years. Why shouldn't Christians also?
Even if they are no longer observant.
Antisemitism and Christianity have always gone together. Now we see antisemitism in the home of the religion.
Why would anybody go looking for a novel explanation?
Posted by: Harry Eagar at February 23, 2004 6:04 PMBecause it's no longer home? The question is why are secularists even more anti-Semitic, even exterminationist? What is it that they are taught? A fight over the Messiah is perfectly comprehensible, why did applied Darwinism require dead Jews?
Posted by: oj at February 23, 2004 6:22 PMWhy did guilt (if that's the right word) of a group of people in the 1st century require that Jews in England be exterminated in the 12th century?
It is your trope that extermination began after Darwin. History says different.
Eichmann was a good German and he was contemptuous of everybody, including, for example, the Arabs he met on his trip to Haifa. But it is inconceivable that he would have organized the slaughter of the Arabs, because he did not believe Arabs were infecting Germany.
His testimony (excerpted in "Eichmann Interrogated") is full of lies, but by the John Morris principle that the "furniture" of the testimony of a liar has to be absolutely faithful in order for the lie to have a chance of succeeding, it is crystal clear that it never occurred to E. that anything in Naziism was contradictory to what he had learned at the knee of his "very devout" Lutheran mother.
If you want to argue that nazi interpretations of Darwin interacted with Christian antisemitism, that's OK by me. Arguing that Christianity had nothing to do with it is absurd.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at February 24, 2004 2:00 PMHarry:
They weren't. They were expelled because they denied the Messiah.
Extermination is a uniquely Darwinian phenomenon for obvious reasons.
Posted by: oj at February 24, 2004 2:05 PMA distinction without a difference, Orrin.
I should have made a note, but I encountered an eyewitness report on the English expulsion of the Jews last week (in a footnote to Prescott's "Ferdinand and Isabella") that made it clear that they were destitute and were going to starve to death.
Just the same as what we've been observing, with stoic but Christian indifference, in east Africa these last decades, and no different from what the Nazis did.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at February 25, 2004 9:19 PMHardly:
http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/vjw/England.html#Expulsion%20of%201290
Posted by: oj at February 27, 2004 11:31 PM