Friday 16 November 2012

Well done, Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell - Julius Streicher would be proud of you


So, the poisononous Jewish World Conspiracy theory is alive and well and currently hanging out with all those compassionate lefties at the Guardian.

What next? An article by Polly Toynbee pondering the possibility that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion might not be an anti-Semitic hoax after all? A scientist looks at the theory taught in Palestinian schools that Jews are apes rather than humans - and finds some merit in it? An admiring reappraisal of John Buchan in the literary pages based on this sort of sound political thinking from The 39 Steps: 
"... if you're on the biggest kind of job and are bound to get to the real boss, ten to one you are brought up against a little white-faced Jew in a bath-chair with an eye like a rattle-snake. Yes, sir, he is the man who is ruling the world just now, and he has his knife in the Empire of the Tsar, because his aunt was outraged and his father flogged in some one-horse location on the Volga."
Yes, indeed, Mr Bell - those damned, trouble-making Jews! Why in heaven's name do they insist on defending themselves against fascist terrorists determined to exterminate them? Hasn't history taught them that trying to reach an accommodation with their enemies is by far the best policy?

The Guardian faces deep financial problems. Let's hope they prove intractable.

2 comments:

  1. I very much doubt that Bell knows who Streicher is. The Kameradschaft at the Guardian have conveniently forgotten their "attitudinal" similarities to the "Nationalsocialistiche Deutsche Arbeiterpartei". Conrad Black had an interesting diary item in the Spectator [3rd Nov]:

    "While I am on this subject, British anti-Semitism seems, if anything, sharper and more widespread than I remember it. It is rarely virulent, just a staring down the nose as if one’s fish has gone off, and the adaptation of the word Jew from a noun to an adjective, like fanatical American Republicans, usually of the most conservative variety, who emulate Joseph R. McCarthy in referring derisively to the ‘Democrat Party’. (Democrats are supporters of the Democratic Party.) Some British people who grumble about the ‘Jew problem’ might wish to reflect that it would be much less of a problem if Balfour had not promised the same territory as a homeland to the Jews and the Palestinians in 1917. The Jew problem, historically, is more of a Foreign Office problem, a supremely unapologetic and remorseless institution."

    The Balfour Declaration of November 1917 was always a recipe for disaster. The British have a great love historically for carving out other people's borders.

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  2. When it comes to this sort of long-term conflict, I come over all Neocon and wonder why the likes of the Palestinians can't start dealing with reality in order to get the best possible deal for themselves rather than insisting on compounding their own misery by allowing a bunch of murderous fanatics to use them as pawns for their own purposes. When your government insists on lobbing rockets at the civilian population of a well-armed and famously belligerent neighbour which is fighting for its very existence, what do you expect to happen next???

    The Balfour Declaration is right up there with the Treaty of Versailles as an example of successful, sensible diplomacy.

    The Foreign Office's ingrained pro-Arabism and anti-Semitism is a fascinating subject. I wonder if anybody's written about it in a non-polemical way? Plenty of commentators have tackled the Left's increasingly hysterical and thoroughly unpleasant anti-Semitism (masquerading as anti-Zionism, of course). Given the prevailing Western attitude to Israel, it's as if Europe is determined to enjoy one last huge pogrom, with the Palestinians providing the excuse.

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