Anti-semitism

Thursday

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

When Israel was but a dream

‘On the night of 15 April 1897, a small, elegant steamer is en route from Egypt’s Port Said to Jaffa.’ ‘At the end of October 1898 the small steamer Rossiya made its way from Alexandria in Egypt, via Port Said, to Jaffa.’ It is unusual, or maybe even unique, for the first chapters of two books published at the same time to open with almost identical sentences. But then My Promised Land and Herzl are telling different sides of the same tale: the story of Zionism from the beginning, one of the strangest, most romantic, most bewildering episodes in modern history, and to this day one of the most bitterly

Thursday

Stephen Robinson

Harry Shearer on bringing out Richard Nixon’s feminine side

Hollywood tends to treat Richard Nixon as an oafish B-movie villain, so it is ambitious and original of Harry Shearer to try to convince a British audience of the very feminine side of the 37th American president. As a veteran comedy actor and the ‘voice’ of several of the Simpsons cartoon characters — including Mr Burns, Smithers, and Ned Flanders — Shearer has the vocal range to get almost anyone right if he puts his mind to it. But voice work was not the main challenge in the forthcoming Sky Arts drama. Shearer is more intrigued by the physical aspects of the central role in Nixon’s the One, which he

Monday

Brendan O’Neill

The latest anti-Semitic cry: ban circumcision

There are lots of weird campaign groups around today, but none so weird as a band of unmerry men called ‘the intactivists’. If you’ve never heard of the intactivists and you’re a bit squeamish, or you are reading this while lunching on a sausage roll, then you might want to turn the page now. Intactivists are men who were circumcised at birth and who, as their name suggests, long to become ‘intact’ again. In a nutshell, they want to recover their foreskins. And they’ll do almost anything to achieve this, including undergoing skin grafts and even attaching weights to the little bits of foreskin that their possibly careless circumciser might

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Dept of It’s Always the Jews: FIFA Edition

Yikes: Former FIFA vice-president Jack Warner has blamed Zionism for the circumstances that led to him and former Asian Football Confederation chief Mohammed Bin Hammam being forced out of world football. Warner, 68, resigned from FIFA after ethics investigations were begun into a meeting he held with Bin Hammam where FIFA say payments were made to Caribbean football officials ahead of the election for FIFA president in June. Qatari Bin Hammam was handed a lifetime ban by FIFA for his role in the affair while a number of Caribbean officials were given suspensions last week. Bin Hammam was not immediately available for comment. Trinadadian Warner says in a letter to

Thursday

Caroline Moorehead

Monsieur le Commandant, by Romain Slocombe – review

There can be few characters in modern fiction more unpleasant than Paul-Jean Husson, the narrator in Romain Slocombe’s Monsieur le Commandant. Indeed, he is at times too nasty. If this otherwise compulsively readable novel about betrayal in Nazi-occupied France has a flaw, it lies in Husson’s irredeemable villainy, as if to make such a man more rounded, more subtle, were to allow a flicker of understanding for his actions, or to suspect the author of a degree of sympathy for the man. Husson is an anti-Semite, a Pétainist, a much-decorated hero of the first world war and a member of the Académie Française. He numbers among his friends Céline, Brasillach

Thursday

Melanie McDonagh

Why G.K. Chesterton shouldn’t be made a saint

The bad news for fans of G.K. Chesterton is that there are moves afoot to make him a saint. The Catholic bishop of Northampton, Peter Doyle, is reportedly looking for a priest to promote his canonisation. Pope Francis is an admirer, too; he supported a Chesterton conference in Buenos Aires and was on the honorary committee of the Chesterton Society. So why is this a bad idea? Chesterton was, among other things, probably the most engaging apologist for Catholicism, long before he became a Catholic. His little book Orthodoxy is the best personal account of the faith you’ll come across — unabashedly subjective, wildly romantic, fundamentally right. His Napoleon of

Thursday

Ian Thomson

An Armenian Sketchbook, by Vasily Grossman – review

Vasily Grossman, a Ukranian-born Jew, was a war correspondent for the Soviet army newspaper Red Star. His dispatches from the front between 1941 and 1945 combined emotional engagement with independent-minded commentary. A solitary, questioning spirit, Grossman set out always to document truthfully what he saw and heard. His report on the vile workings of the Treblinka death camp, ‘The Hell of Treblinka’, remains a masterpiece of controlled rage and unsparing lucidity. Unsurprisingly, Grossman was mortified when the man who had prevented Hitler’s annihilation of Jewry was suddenly set on their extinction. In early 1953, Stalin announced in the pages of Pravda that a plot to murder Kremlin members had been

Friday

Martin Bright

A lesson in solidarity, from the Jewish community in Britain

This week I wrote my last Bright on Politics column for the Jewish Chronicle. Here it is in full: This is my last Bright on Politics column. After three-and-a-half years at the JC, I will leave with a lump in my throat, so please forgive me if this piece is a little sentimental or, dare I say it, schmaltzy. When I started work at the paper, some of my former colleagues warned me I was consigning myself to a backwater. Nothing could be further from the truth. Even before I joined the paper I had always felt it to be a unique publication: an ultra-local community newspaper with global ambitions.

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

Should Jews leave Britain?

Should Jews leave Britain? The question is prompted by this piece written by the Israeli journalist Caroline Glick. Glick recently came to London to take part in an Intelligence Squared debate. The debate was about Israeli settlements. Glick and Danny Dayan attempted to explain to the London audience that Palestinian rejection rather than Jewish settlement in the West Bank is the primary reason there is still no solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. The debate is now available on Youtube and there you can see the deeply rancorous tone of the discussion. At one point Lord Levy’s son, Daniel Levy, (arguing against Glick and Dayan) has to be almost physically restrained

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Gerald Scarfe, anti-Semitic? No.

So, that Gerald Scarfe cartoon, then. I don’t like it much, but then I like cartoons which make me laugh, (and especially so if they have animals in them). McLachlan, Honeysett, Rowson et al – and on a daily basis of course, Matt. I’m always at a bit of a loss with those big cartoons in the broadsheets which are attempting to tell me something very meaningful and make me stroke my chin. This one made me averse because it seemed to encapsulate the shrieking hysteria of the metro-left; translated into words, it says: ‘Netanyahu is building walls out of the blood of murdered Palestinian innocents!’, which is exactly the

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Iran: Jews make Gays

An article in an Iranian state-controlled newspaper has claimed that the Jews are spreading gays. According to Mashregh News the ‘Zionist regime’ (with the help of the US and UK) is deliberately spreading homosexuality to pursue Zionism’s real goal of world domination. Quite how you can dominate the world through gays, I don’t know. It’s true that the very hard to spell Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir became the world’s first openly lesbian head of state in Iceland a few years ago. And only last year Elio Di Rupo became the first gay Prime Minister of Belgium. But if Israel is in fact the force behind this then it seems to me one

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Anti-Semitism, Islamism and Islam

My blog on last week’s bombing in Bulgaria and convictions in Manchester provoked a response from my colleague Martin Bright which I should like to respond to in turn. In his post Martin writes: ‘You won’t hear me say this very often, but I don’t think Douglas has gone far enough. For once, I think even he has pulled his punches. ‘What links these two events across a continent?’ he asks. ‘The answer is ideology. It is an ideology which deliberately targets Jews as Jews.’ I know what Douglas means: that there is a deeply entrenched anti-Semitism at the heart of the politics of extremist Islamism which strips its victims

Monday

Martin Bright

Anti-Semitism: no longer big news

My fellow Spectator blogger Douglas Murray wrote a powerful post yesterday. Like him, I was disturbed by the way the Bulgarian bus-bombing and the Manchester terror trial were treated in the media. You won’t hear me say this very often, but I don’t think Douglas has gone far enough. For once, I think even he has pulled his punches. ‘What links these two events across a continent?’ he asks. ‘The answer is ideology. It is an ideology which deliberately targets Jews as Jews.’ I know what Douglas means: that there is a deeply entrenched anti-Semitism at the heart of the politics of extremist Islamism which strips its victims of humanity.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

Anti-Semitism is an evil that still requires examination

Can you explain, briefly, why some people are prejudiced against Jews? It’s an interesting question. My late mum was a bit anti-Semitic, and I always found her mild animus incomprehensible and indeed weird, as did my father. It surfaced during the Yom Kippur War, when I was 13: my dad and I were urging on the Israelis — in a slightly detached way, as if it were, say, Leeds playing Chelsea in a football match and through default one found oneself supporting the lesser of two evils, i.e. Chelsea. Mum was cheering on the Arabs because, she admitted, she wasn’t ‘keen on’ Jews. We were both surprised, my Dad and

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

Sarkozy shows extremists the door

Who on earth does Nicolas Sarkozy think he is? The answer, of course, is President of the French Republic. And from that position — and propelled by the Toulouse shootings and doubtless by the imminent election — he has chosen to expel a number of people from the Republic whose views, actions and teachings are deemed inimical to the State. Sarkozy gave the order yesterday and a couple of hours later the men were on planes back to their countries of origin. As the Times reports, the Algerian Islamist Ali Belhadad was flown back to Algiers and Almany Baradji, an imam, was sent back to Mali. The French Interior Ministry

Thursday

Martin Bright

The ultimate Jewish conspiracy theory

This has to be the ultimate Jewish conspiracy theory story. Why have the Wikileaks disclosures been so soft on Israel? Here is Tariq Shahid from the Palestine Think Tank. I’m hoping it’s a spoof but here’s my favourite section: “Browse through all the news sources available on the latest Wikileaks revelation, and try to find even only one revelation that actually damages Israel, even though so many of the revealed documents are directly or indirectly connected to Middle East politics, and to a large extent to Israeli affairs. Did you find any document among them that either creates difficulties for the government of the Zionist entity, or even slightly embarrasses

Saturday

Austen Saunders

The winning entry

So just how good is it? Because of course those splendid people, the Man Booker judges, have rather prejudiced this review by going and giving their prize to Jacobson’s latest. If only they’d had the patience to wait for the launch of this blog. Because although not on the panel this year (September is such a busy time), I am always more than happy to drop the odd word of wisdom, share my insights, and generally do my bit to see that contemporary novelists are held to account for their various crimes against culture. And all in all, perhaps this year’s prize hasn’t been too badly awarded, because Jacobson has

Saturday

Jonathan Sumption

Not as bad as the French

This is a long book, but its argument can be shortly stated. Anthony Julius believes that anti-Semitism is a persistent and influential theme in English history, which is all the more dangerous for being unacknowledged by most anti-Semites and concealed behind a facade of complex, subtle and hypocritical social convention. He sustains the argument over nearly 600 pages of densely annotated text, in a book which is in equal measure wonderful and infuriating. It is immensely learned. It is thorough. Its patient accumulation of detail challenges conventional English images of their own society. Much of the analysis is observant and shrewd. But much of it is also laboured, sanctimonious and

Patrick Marnham

The reality behind the novels

‘I never knew peaceful times’, Irène Némirovsky once said, ‘I’ve always lived in anxiety and often in danger’. ‘I never knew peaceful times’, Irène Némirovsky once said, ‘I’ve always lived in anxiety and often in danger’. This comment was made during a radio interview in 1934, when the novelist, who would later write Suite Française, was in fact living through the only peaceful period of her life. She had survived the pogroms of her childhood in Kiev and the dangers of her family’s flight from St Petersburg during the October Revolution. In Paris she had gone through a difficult period of resettlement before achieving her childhood dream of becoming a

Monday

Martin Bright

Is Jenny Tonge really sorry?

So Nick Clegg has acted against Jihad Jenny Tonge following her statement to the Jewish Chronicle that there should be an inquiry into stories that the Israeli army was harvesting organs in Haiti. But by removing her as health spokesperson in the Lords without removing the Lib Dem whip, he may just be prolonging the agony. If he had hoped to draw a line under the affair, it seems that Baroness Tonge has other ideas. She has already given an interview to the Iranian state TV channel Press TV, which appears to back the idea that she was pushed out by the “Zionist lobby”. [N.B. The Baroness’s interview with Lauren Booth looks like