Anti-Semitism with a `caring' face

[drdon326]

I'm asking this right now because a couple of weeks ago, on April 22, Britain's Association of University Teachers - an organization representing over 48,000 professional swots - voted to ban all contact with two Israeli universities, and asked its executive committee to consider a boycott against a third, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Israel was accused of being "a colonial apartheid state" worse than South Africa, a "regime" worthy of "removal," and its universities of repressing academic freedom. Needless to say, this show of spite received rapturous applause; well, Britain is currently playing host to the biggest ever annual number of violent anti-Semitic attacks, both on people and on property, since the 1930s. Who can blame the teachers, so conscious of their uncoolness, for wanting to get "down wiv the kidz"? They're too respectable to daub swastikas on a synagogue - but it sure feels good to band together and bully them Israeli academics!

Just imagine; for once, the swots aren't having their books ripped up in front of them by a gang of thugs - they're the ones doing the ripping. But if we learned nothing else from the Shoah, you'd think we'd have learned that the seductive power of herd-mentality cruelty can suck in the most unlikely people; it sucked in the Germans, for instance, almost all of them, a nation thought by many to be the most cultured and civilized in Northern Europe. And now, 60 years after the rough-necked Brits showed the cultured Krauts the true meaning of civilization, we are going through our own dark night of the anti-Semitic soul.

In one way this turn of events is as unexpected as it is cruel - after all, in this country it tends to be academics who react to anything from mild censorship to book-burning with "That's how Hitler started!" That they are now doing something Hitler would thoroughly approve of, and did - barring contact with Jews - seems to have escaped them. But in another way, it makes logical, horrible sense. It's not so long since English academia saw nothing wrong with having Jewish quotients as a matter of course, lest the "best" universities be overrun by those unnaturally smart Hebes. Far from flying in the face of English academic freedom, maybe the latest haters are simply reverting to type.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/570993.html

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great article

[Resolution_242]

1. Good article, thanks

The author Julie Burchill had the good sense to leave the anti-Israel Guardian for the Times.

Good, bad and ugly

Julie Burchill
November 29, 2003
The Guardian

As you might have heard, I'm leaving the Guardian next year for the Times, having finally been convinced that my evil populist philistinism has no place in a publication read by so many all-round, top-drawer plaster saints. (Well, that and the massive wad they've waved at me.) Once there, I will compose as many love letters to the likes of Mr Murdoch and Pres Bush as my black little heart desires, leaving those who have always objected to my presence on such a fine liberal newspaper as this to read only writers they agree with, with no chance of spoiled digestion as the muesli goes down the wrong way if I so much as murmur about bringing back hanging.

Not only do I admire the Guardian, I also find it fun to read, which in a way is more of a compliment. But if there is one issue that has made me feel less loyal to my newspaper over the past year, it has been what I, as a non-Jew, perceive to be a quite striking bias against the state of Israel. Which, for all its faults, is the only country in that barren region that you or I, or any feminist, atheist, homosexual or trade unionist, could bear to live under.

I find this hard to accept because, crucially, I don't swallow the modern liberal line that anti-Zionism is entirely different from anti-semitism; the first good, the other bad. Judeophobia - as the brilliant collection of essays A New Antisemitism? Debating Judeophobia In 21st-Century Britain (axt.org.uk), published this year, points out - is a shape-shifting virus, as opposed to the straightforward stereotypical prejudice applied to other groups (Irish stupid, Japanese cruel, Germans humourless, etc). Jews historically have been blamed for everything we might disapprove of: they can be rabid revolutionaries, responsible for the might of the late Soviet empire, and the greediest of fat cats, enslaving the planet to the demands of international high finance. They are insular, cliquey and clannish, yet they worm their way into the highest positions of power in their adopted countries, changing their names and marrying Gentile women. They collectively possess a huge, slippery wealth that knows no boundaries - yet Israel is said to be an impoverished, lame-duck state, bleeding the west dry.

If you take into account the theory that Jews are responsible for everything nasty in the history of the world, and also the recent EU survey that found 60% of Europeans believe Israel is the biggest threat to peace in the world today (hmm, I must have missed all those rabbis telling their flocks to go out with bombs strapped to their bodies and blow up the nearest mosque), it's a short jump to reckoning that it was obviously a bloody good thing that the Nazis got rid of six million of the buggers. Perhaps this is why sales of Mein Kampf are so buoyant, from the Middle Eastern bazaars unto the Edgware Road, and why The Protocols of The Elders of Zion could be found for sale at the recent Anti-racism Congress in Durban.

The fact that many Gentiles and Arabs are rabidly Judeophobic, while many others are as horrified by Judeophobia as by any other type of racism, makes me believe that anti-semitism/Zionism is not a political position (otherwise the right and the left, the PLO and the KKK, would not be able to unite so uniquely in their hatred), but about how an individual feels about himself. I can't help noticing that, over the years, a disproportionate number of attractive, kind, clever people are drawn to Jews; those who express hostility to them, however, from Hitler to Hamza, are often as not repulsive freaks.

Think of famous anti-Zionist windbags - Redgrave, Highsmith, Galloway - and what dreary, dysfunctional, po-faced vanity confronts us...."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1094420,00.html

[Colorado Blue]

2. Wow. Good for her. And it jibes with the reports I've been

finding on the 'net, about growing Judeophobia in Europe and, dishearteningly, in Britain.

Here's a great article, cross-posted from the Jewish Group:

A dangerous time to be a Jew

snip

When Israel offered to do what everyone has wanted it to do since 1967 - withdraw from Gaza - the reaction to the initiative was as if Sharon had proposed the execution of every first-born in Araby. Yet Sharon's ruthlessness has almost decapitated Hamas, and certainly slowed the suicide bombings. Indeed, as a result of his policies, there are signs that the intifada is drawing to an end.

snip

In blaming Jewish-American neo-cons and in longing to appease the terrorists, the bien-pensants purveyors of these conspiracies will not heal Islamist grievances. For such grievances are about western power, modernity and freedom. Islamist terrorists visualise "Jews" as perhaps a weak link in our western civilisation, but an essential part of our society. Those who swallow conspiracy theories miss the point. For al-Qaeda maniacs, we are all Jews.

This month, arsonists attacked two more synagogues in north London; more than one hundred synagogues have been desecrated since 2000. This, in a time of prosperity: what would happen in a time of instability if these cod conspiracies became accepted political discourse?

Until 9/11, Anglo-Jewry had become accustomed to prejudiced coverage of Israel. But if you were not a Zionist, as many Jews are not, you did not need to worry. Since 9/11, and particularly post-Iraq, we have witnessed a sea change. It is as if, in the mythical scale of 9/11, al-Qaeda had unlocked a forgotten cultural capsule of anti-Semitic myths, sealed and forgotten since the Nazis, the Black Hundreds and the medieval blood libels. Just words? But words matter in a violent world. This weird and scary nonsense is an international phenomenon, not a British one. Despite it, Britain retains the easygoing tolerance and pragmatism, the sources of her greatness. It is still better to be a Jew in England than anywhere else.

http://www.newstatesman.com/nssubsfilter.php3?newTempla...