The Independent’s Problem With The Jews In The Lobby
NOT all Jews are Israelis, just as not all Anglicans are English, not all Muslism are from the Islamic State in the Levant and not all Catholics are Vaticanites.
But to the Indy Jews are all Israelis and all Israelis are Jews, even those Druze fighters for the IDF.
The Indy produced the following:
That was changed to read:
Did you spot the difference?
One line remains in both versions:
…pro-Israel lobby is multi-tentacled and incredibly powerful.
Here is a 1943 cartoon from the Nazi magazine Lustige Blätter, showing a Jew with his tentacles wrapped around Britain and America.
The Indy is the paper that featured this from Yasmin Alibhai Brown:
Be scrupulous in your response when people are branded anti-Semites – particularly if their accuser is a loyal friend of Israel. Those pointed at may well be anti-Semitic, but they could also be misrepresented.
Who might be a “loyal friend of Israel” in the Indy?
Do you see shades of Richard Ingrams, who wrote in the Gaurdian:
I have developed a habit when confronted by letters to the editor in support of the Israeli government to look at the signature to see if the writer has a Jewish name. If so, I tend not to read it…
Chesterton wanted Jews to wear the ‘yellow star’:
“Let a Jew sit on the Woolsack,” he opined, but “let him sit there dressed as an Arab. Let him preach in St Paul’s Cathedral, but let him preach there dressed as an Arab… The point is that we should know where we are; and that he should know where he is, which is in a foreign land.”
But let’s not leave the Indy hanging there. It does emply Howard Jacobson, who wrote:
…you never know what pops out inadvertently, and were I to show, perchance, and just in passing, that I am not party to the near universal anti-Zionism of our times, Richard Ingrams would not want the innocent reader to mistake me for a Papist. Be it known, then: I am a Jew.
And now pause to ask yourself, innocent reader, what I have saved you from. Jewish cunning? A Jew concealing his identity in order to win you round to his way of thinking? But how could I do that, Jewish or otherwise, unless my thinking struck you as persuasive? And would discovering my identity make my reasoning at a stroke unpersuasive? Is there a reader out there so gullible or so easily manipulated that he cannot assess the worth of an argument on its own merits, but first must know the ethnic identity of the person from whom it originates?
Bit offensive to the reader, that. And a bit offensive to the Jew – I say no more – to suppose that once you can know him as a Jew you know the complexion of his mind.
Are you Jews are all in the lobby, literally, unable to enter the main building for fear of polluting the place..?
Posted: 1st, September 2014 | In: Reviews Comment (1) | TrackBack | Permalink
