RUTHFULLY YOURS

Haaretz: The British Left can’t tackle anti-Semitism if it doesn’t want to understand it

* Tom Gross: There has been a great amount of coverage in the British media in recent days concerning the furious row that is engulfing Britain’s main opposition Labour party about anti-Semitism within its ranks. The vast majority of readers of this list live outside the UK, so for those interested, I attach seven articles below. (By coincidence, the authors of these articles are all subscribers to this list: four are left-wingers; three are on the right.)

* Niall Ferguson (London Sunday Times): Former London mayor Ken Livingstone’s claim that “when Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel” is nonsense and based on the claim of the [self-hating Jewish] American Trotskyist Lenni Brenner, who at an anti-Israel meeting in Connecticut, said that Jews were as “crooked as a dog’s hind leg”. As early as April 1920 Hitler called for Jews “to be exterminated”. In Mein Kampf he wrote: “If at the beginning of the [First World] war and during the war 12 or 15,000 of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas . . . the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain.” Germans who voted National Socialist in 1932 and 1933 were therefore not voting for a Zionist resettlement programme. At a torchlit parade on February 6, 1933, in Hamburg 20,000 brownshirts chanted: “Death to the Jews,” and – according to one eyewitness – “sang of the blood of the Jews which would squirt from their knives”.

* Leading British historian Andrew Roberts: The sole reason Ken Livingstone brought up the Fuhrer in his interview was to be as vicious and loathsome as he possibly could to any Jews listening.

* Leading British World War Two historian Antony Beevor: For Livingstone to describe Hitler as a Zionist is “grotesque”. * Liam Hoare (Haaretz) : Anti-Semitism is indeed anti-Jewish racism – but it is also a unique form of prejudice, at once a virus and pathology. Anti-Semitism is a condition where Jews are the eternal antithesis. The hatred against them survives by constantly mutating. Christian anti-Judaism flowed into race-and-blood anti-Semitism. The accusation that Israelis murder Palestinian children and harvest their organs is the freshest incarnation of the old blood libel. Jews have been held responsible for both capitalism and communism, modernity and backwardness, powerfulness and powerlessness, sexual prowess and sexual inadequacy, extreme wealth and extreme poverty.

* Charles Moore (Daily Telegraph) : Jeremy Corbyn has refused to share a platform with David Cameron over the EU referendum, although they both advocate a Remain vote. [But Corbyn happily] shared a platform with Sheikh Raed Saleh, who (elsewhere) called Jews “bacteria”; with representatives of the British Muslim Initiative, which plays the anti-Semitic card of comparing Jews with Nazis with its “Stop the Holocaust in Gaza” placards; with what he calls his “friends” from Hamas, whose charter calls upon Moslems to kill Jews. And Corbyn has shared platforms with others who claim that “the Jews” that carried out the 9/11 attacks.

* Jonathan Freedland (The Guardian): “So this is my plea to the left. Treat us the same way you’d treat any other minority. No better and no worse. If opposition to racism means anything, it surely means that.” * Jonathan Freedland: Israel was deemed a “disease” by a caller to a 2010 show on Press TV, the Iranian state broadcaster, without objection from the host, Jeremy Corbyn.

* Tom Gross: The Guardian itself (though not Jonathan Freedland), along with the BBC, has been contributing to British anti-Semitism for decades now, as I have documented on countless occasions, for example here in my time showing the Guardian editor parts of Israel and the West Bank and here. I have also many times in the past, documented the anti-Semitism of Mayor Livingstone on this list, for example, here.

* David Hirsh: Last month Livingstone said that in his 45 years in the Labour Party he had never once seen any anti-Semitism. On that occasion he was jumping to the defence of Gerry Downing, a Labour Party member who wanted to “re-open the Jewish Question” and Vicki Kirby, a Labour member who tweeted that the Brits “invented Israel when saving them [the Jews] from Hitler, who now seems to be their teacher”. He was also trying to douse the scandal in Oxford University Labour Club after its Chair resigned, saying that members seemed to have “some kind of a problem with Jews”. These were the students who taunted Jewish members calling them “Zios” and singing “Bombs over Tel Aviv”. – See more at: http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001608.html#sthash.JkHXvBzB.dpuf

OXFORD–As it has for over 500 years, the Magdalene College Choir sang the Hymnus Eucharisticus from a tower high above this university town on the first day of May, followed incongruously by a dirty Elizabethan ditty about nymphs in Spring. An Anglican vicar blessed the bedraggled revellers crowding the surrounding streets. Most of them had tippled through the night.

Undergraduates for centuries celebrated May Morning by jumping off Magdalene Bridge into the shallow and frigid River Cherwell, but this year police barriers made the stream inacessible. Risk aversion has trumped tradition even in Oxford, once the last redoubt of British bloodymindedness. Whether one thinks the British Empire organized rapacity (mostly) or a civilizing influence (occasionally) or both (mainly), the men who made it evinced a madcap daring. The once-adventurous British no longer wish to leap into the unknown, except perhaps in the fantasy world of Harry Potter. For the same reason, Britain will vote to remain in the European Union on June 23. The annoyance of remaining in Europe is not too onerous to bear, and the risk of something going pear-shaped during a British exit (“Brexit”) is incalculable. Besides, Europe is gradually falling apart on its own, which means that the British have no urgent need to exit at the moment.

Stick around long enough, alas, and you turn into a theme park: the Oxford faculty recalls the last Spartan hoplites oiling their hair, playing their flutes and drilling in phalanx for Roman tourists at the end of the first century. Oxford is the world’s prettiest university town and a tourist destination par excellence, with dons and students substituting for the cartoon characters who greet the guests at Disney World.

Oxford today is all overpaying foreign students and bewildered Britons with middle-class accents. The accents are the giveaway: absorbing the clipped consonants and plummy vowels of the academic dialect was half the reason to go down to Oxford, the hallmark of acculturation into the British elite. Oxford itself is divided quaintly into thirty colleges, which range in order of poshness from Balliol to Ruskin and in braininess from Merton to Pembroke. Students meet weekly with a tutor and otherwise are left to their own devices. That is the mode of learning most easily replaced by Internet communication and the digitization of libraries, but such is Oxford’s residual cachet that inertia will carry it forward for another century.

The barbarians have not conquered it so much as infiltrated, as in the late Roman Empire. Oxford’s faculty still speak the King’s English and strike grand poses, but their grandeur is redolent of caricature. The end of empire spelled the end of the British elite, that is, the Mandarin caste of civil servants and military men who played Great Games and fought Britain’s wars. Almost nothing is left of the British merchant banks who once dominated world finance. As the victors in two World Wars, Britons are the only Western Europeans still ready to fight, as they did effectively in Iraq and Afghanistan. But Britain’s military and political role is too withered to support an elite caste.