‘Listen to what the man on the left of the camera has to say about Israel, the man who is addressed as Nick,’ a radical Corbynista friend suggested to me the other day in a social media message designed to change my mind about the Middle East. It’s part of a sustained campaign on his part which dates back at least ten years and is usually conducted with good grace, if never accord. So I listened to what this chap Nick had to say, with growing hilarity. Not because of what he said – which was what you might expect from a rank anti-Semite, but because of who he was. For it was none other than Nick Griffin, the former leader of the British National party.
Mr Griffin has, in the past, referred to the ‘Holohoax’ which he believes was fabricated by wartime propaganda and has been an ‘extremely profitable lie’. My friend had never heard of Nick Griffin. But how interesting that this is where the left is now getting some of its bullets from. Its anti-Jew bullets. Hitherto, directly quoting from Nazis, or neo-Nazis, was kind of verboten for them, except of course among the Palestinians themselves, who at least have the decency to make it absolutely clear that they wish the entire Jewish race to be wiped from the Earth and whose pre-eminent political movement, Hamas, has that goal written at the heart of its founding constitution.
You nod along and eventually end up painting virulently anti-Semitic daubs in an art gallery in Margate
Not any more. The Overton window on Jew-hating has shifted so far that even the most extremist comments from people who have pictures of Adolf pinned up in their basements are now considered… well, I suppose kosher isn’t the word – halal, maybe.
For another example of the shifting far-right-wards of the narrative, let me present to you Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. Now, it is true that she is one of the most stupid and sanctimonious people I have ever had the misfortune of meeting, and quite how she has survived as a ‘commentator’ almost wholly defeats me. Fifteen years ago she was a columnist for the Independent and I mentioned to the paper’s editor back then that I thought she was a woman of unparalleled idiocy. The editor smiled and revealed that his most august and talented columnist had once asked him why he had employed Alibhai–Brown. The editor had replied that he was very proud that the first national newspaper to employ a woman of Asian descent should be the Independent. The columnist shook his head sadly and said: ‘Of all the teeming billions of Asian women – and you had to choose her.’ A fair point and well made.
But still. She has tenure. She even won the Orwell Prize – which is handed out solely to people whom Orwell would have detested, but there we are. Anyway, she recently posted the following comment: ‘Uber Zionist Margaret Hodge will, we hear, become Ofcom chair after uber Zionist Michael Grade steps down. A two-step solution to ensure the Palestine & Palestinian suffering are denied proper coverage. And the Israeli state gets away with atrocities.’
My colleague Charles Moore has mentioned this grotesque spewing of racist bile and I would concur with his gentle puzzlement: what is an uber-Zionist? I suppose David Ben–Gurion might qualify, ditto Ariel Sharon and even Golda Meir. But Margaret Hodge or Michael Grade? A bit questionable, isn’t it? I think what Alibhai-Brown meant by ‘uber-Zionist’ was ‘Jew’. And further to that, I would suggest two things. First is that Alibhai-Brown would not have tried to get away with tweeting that sentence ten or even five years ago: there would have been a furore. And second, that the far-left narrative is moving so quickly towards outright Goebbelism that it wouldn’t surprise me much if, in a year or two’s time, she did actually use the word ‘Jew’. Given that almost all Jews are Zionist, the conflation will, one day soon, be absolute and the left can say what it really means with pretty much impunity.
I had previously been of the generous – and naive – opinion that the white left hates Jews because it hates Israel. That through the inevitable contact with the people who call themselves Palestinian and their Muslim supporters, there was a gradual erosion of the boundaries between loathing Israel and, as so many Muslims do, loathing the people who live there. You end up nodding along when they say the Jews control the media and armaments and capital, and eventually you end up painting virulently anti-Semitic daubs in an art gallery in Margate and thinking how clever and right on you are and down with the Pallys.
But this was wrong, I think. It is the other way about. They hate Israel because they hate Jews. We all need somebody to hate and for the left, Jewish people have come to represent a plethora of things they already hated: capitalism, the West, military competence, industrial competence, education and a hostility to the religion which they come close to worshipping themselves, Islam. In a sense Israel is simply an embodiment of those already-present loathings.
It is true the Overton window had already moved quite sharply over the past ten years or so in tandem with the rapid growth of our Muslim population and its growing political weight. That is in there somewhere – but perhaps only to the extent that this growing section of our community gives licence to the real feelings the white left already had. A white left which can show you racism in a handful of dust – except where the Jews are concerned. Then, it simply doesn’t exist.
So when four ambulances are set on fire, it is easy to spot the anti-Semitic white lefties. They are the ones asking why the Jews have their own ambulances, or the ones suggesting it was a false flag attack by Mossad, or that this wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for Gaza. These idiots are not only enemies of the Jews – they are enemies of the rest of us too.
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