Roald Dahl was a hardcore anti-Semite – but hating Jews is ok
Roald Dahl is dead. He’s been dead since 1990. He was a brilliant writer for children. Buried on his official website run by his estate is an apology for his brazen and unalloyed anti-Semitism. “The Dahl family and the Roald Dahl Story Company deeply apologise for the lasting and understandable hurt caused by some of Roald Dahl’s statements,” goes the comment.
Jews, eh, those folk devils for Christian culture. Lots of talented people are and have been Jew haters. It goes with the territory of being a Jew living amongst non-Jews to experience the slights and slurs. It’s part of the culture.
The New Statesman printed this gem from Dahl in 1983, part of an interview with the writer: “There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews… Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”
That in the New Statesman, which much later came up with this explainer for everything wrong with the world and your life:
The Dahl family apology adds: “Those prejudiced remarks are incomprehensible to us and stand in marked contrast to the man we knew and to the values at the heart of Roald Dahl’s stories, which have positively impacted young people for generations. We hope that, just as he did at his best, at his absolute worst, Roald Dahl can help remind us of the lasting impact of words.”
But why apologise now, thirty years after Dahl’s death? Is it all about money? They’ve done rather well flogging his stuff, despite of what Dahl said about Jewish power:
“It’s the same old thing: we all know about Jews and the rest of it. There aren’t any non-Jewish publishers anywhere, they control the media – jolly clever thing to do – that’s why the president of the United States has to sell all this stuff to Israel.”
Hating Jews is ok, say the anti-Semites. It is systemic, of course, because it tells Jews that they are the problem. Sure Hitler was a mass murdering anti-Semite but it wasn’t his fault, see. It was theirs. It is not punching down to hate Jews. It is punching up. It is their differences from the norm, their faces, culture and very being that need correcting. That’s how systemic racism works. It pitches the minority as an ugly otherness in need of fixing.
When two Jewish children wrote to Dahl, his reply was, well, take a look:
Dear Mr Dahl, We love your books, but we have a problem … we are Jews!! We love your books but you don’t like us because we are Jews. That offends us! Can you please change your mind about what you said about Jews. Love, Aliza and Tamar.
Dahl replied that he against not Jews but “injustice”. Jews are fair game. Attacking Jews does not make you racist say the liberal idealists in their Islington town houses and Suffolk parlours. It makes you just and righteous.
But it won’t matter. Shakespeare and Dickens are rife with anti-semitism. Shylock and Fagin are characters that reinforce and pander to the readers’ prejudices. They’re on every classroom reading lists.
“If a person has ugly thoughts,” Dahl writes in The Twits, “it begins to show on the face.” Do we could dig him up, give him the once over and beat him with sticks? No need. No point. Hating Jews is the oldest story in Christendom. And everyone loves a story…
Posted: 7th, December 2020 | In: Celebrities, Key Posts, News Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
