Jonathan Freedland: Antisemitism: The Hatred That Refuses to Go Away
[Jonathan Freedland writes a weekly column for the Guardian.]
If, as the old saw has it, antisemitism is a light sleeper, then it has just woken up with a start. In the space of a few days, a range of assorted eminences have dropped their guard and given voice to the Jew-hating demons in their heads.
So far only John Galliano has paid with his job, the "transgressive" designer dropped by fashion house Dior after delivering a drunken rant in a Paris bar to two women he took to be Jews: "I love Hitler," he began. "People like you ought to be dead, your mothers, your forefathers would all be fucking gassed."
That outburst stands out from the rest of the current crop of antisemitic remarks partly because it consists solely of abuse, even if of the most hateful kind. The others have in common that hallmark of anti-Jewish rhetoric: the conspiracy theory, the suggestion that Jews secretly plot and scheme with each other to shape the world to their own ends....
That influence stretches, it seems, all the way to the Olympic park in Stratford in east London – at least according to Mohammad Aliabadi, the head of Iran's National Olympic Committee who complained this week that the jagged-shaped logo for London 2012 clearly spells the word "Zion". That, the Iranian complained, was "a very revolting act". If most people have so far failed to see "Zion" surreptitiously contained inside the graphic, well that, Aliabadi would surely say, only goes to prove the dark genius of the Jews – able to conceal their cunning ways when it suits them. Or perhaps, as the US journalist Jeffrey Goldberg blogged, the Iranians are wrong and the logo secretly spells out: "Mark Spitz is Jewish, and Jason Lezak is Too, So Go Drown Yourselves in the Caspian Sea."
In this talk of Jewish plots, the Tehran regime has an unlikely ally in Fox News – or at least in its early-evening host, Glenn Beck. The ultra-right motormouth's most recent musings on the Jewish people compared the US's usually liberal Reform rabbis to "radicalised Islam", but of more relevance was his extended disquisition on the financier and philanthropist George Soros. Using an image with long-established service in the cause of antisemitism, Beck branded Soros "The Puppet Master" – using an actual marionette to show how Soros pulls the strings of those figures Americans might naively imagine to be in charge. To Beck, Soros is the "king" while Barack Obama is a mere "pawn". In another broadcast, the Fox pundit described the financier as "the head of the snake". Puppets, snakes, masters of the global chessboard – it's a palette of imagery any Nazi propagandist would instantly recognise....
We may want to believe it went away, but it never did. Not even in the late 1940s, immediately after the revelations of the Holocaust confirmed the murderous place where antisemitic discourse could lead. There were still English literary critics around in those years to refer to the Jews as "Shylocks", still crime novels with the conniving Jew as the arch-villain. We may want to see the likes of Galliano as relics from another era or as mere eccentrics, but they are expressing a set of attitudes that remain deep in the soil and which have never been fully shaken off. They can appear in the most respected institutions, voiced by the most respectable people. Even when they seem to be dozing, they are never quite dead.
Read entire article at Guardian (UK)
If, as the old saw has it, antisemitism is a light sleeper, then it has just woken up with a start. In the space of a few days, a range of assorted eminences have dropped their guard and given voice to the Jew-hating demons in their heads.
So far only John Galliano has paid with his job, the "transgressive" designer dropped by fashion house Dior after delivering a drunken rant in a Paris bar to two women he took to be Jews: "I love Hitler," he began. "People like you ought to be dead, your mothers, your forefathers would all be fucking gassed."
That outburst stands out from the rest of the current crop of antisemitic remarks partly because it consists solely of abuse, even if of the most hateful kind. The others have in common that hallmark of anti-Jewish rhetoric: the conspiracy theory, the suggestion that Jews secretly plot and scheme with each other to shape the world to their own ends....
That influence stretches, it seems, all the way to the Olympic park in Stratford in east London – at least according to Mohammad Aliabadi, the head of Iran's National Olympic Committee who complained this week that the jagged-shaped logo for London 2012 clearly spells the word "Zion". That, the Iranian complained, was "a very revolting act". If most people have so far failed to see "Zion" surreptitiously contained inside the graphic, well that, Aliabadi would surely say, only goes to prove the dark genius of the Jews – able to conceal their cunning ways when it suits them. Or perhaps, as the US journalist Jeffrey Goldberg blogged, the Iranians are wrong and the logo secretly spells out: "Mark Spitz is Jewish, and Jason Lezak is Too, So Go Drown Yourselves in the Caspian Sea."
In this talk of Jewish plots, the Tehran regime has an unlikely ally in Fox News – or at least in its early-evening host, Glenn Beck. The ultra-right motormouth's most recent musings on the Jewish people compared the US's usually liberal Reform rabbis to "radicalised Islam", but of more relevance was his extended disquisition on the financier and philanthropist George Soros. Using an image with long-established service in the cause of antisemitism, Beck branded Soros "The Puppet Master" – using an actual marionette to show how Soros pulls the strings of those figures Americans might naively imagine to be in charge. To Beck, Soros is the "king" while Barack Obama is a mere "pawn". In another broadcast, the Fox pundit described the financier as "the head of the snake". Puppets, snakes, masters of the global chessboard – it's a palette of imagery any Nazi propagandist would instantly recognise....
We may want to believe it went away, but it never did. Not even in the late 1940s, immediately after the revelations of the Holocaust confirmed the murderous place where antisemitic discourse could lead. There were still English literary critics around in those years to refer to the Jews as "Shylocks", still crime novels with the conniving Jew as the arch-villain. We may want to see the likes of Galliano as relics from another era or as mere eccentrics, but they are expressing a set of attitudes that remain deep in the soil and which have never been fully shaken off. They can appear in the most respected institutions, voiced by the most respectable people. Even when they seem to be dozing, they are never quite dead.