THE TELEGRAPH: Charles Moore reviews 'Trials of the Diaspora’ by Anthony Julius and finds the author's vigilance justified.
England can make the dubious boast of being the first country to have expelled the Jews en masse, in 1290. It also invented one of the strangest types of anti-Semitism, the blood libel. In the Middle Ages, Jews were massacred in York, Lincoln and elsewhere because of claims that they had kidnapped and killed Christian children for the blood of ritual sacrifice. This image of horror is still used against Jews. Modern newspaper cartoons – it is often in cartoons that the underlying visceral feeling appears most clearly – quite often depict Israeli leaders as deliberately killing children, and sometimes as vampiric. By a peculiar twist in our politics, such cartoons are now much more likely to appear in grand Leftish papers – such as the Guardian and the Independent – than in Right-wing popular ones.
There never was any evidence for the blood libel. But total lies can be surprisingly effective. In our time, the more important anti-Semitic lie is the denial of the Holocaust. You would think that its blatant untruth would kill it, but it turns out that the sheer scale of the lie has a curious power. Holocaust denial is a frequent feature of modern Muslim anti-Semitism, assiduously promoted by President Ahmedinejad of Iran. In this country, the Muslim Council of Britain, while not actually denying the events of the Second World War, objects to what it sees as the privileged status the words "the Holocaust" confer on Jews. It will only mark the Holocaust if other genocides are commemorated too, and many extreme Muslims pretend that Israel is itself genocidal.
Holocaust denial helps resolve a dilemma in the minds of anti-Semites. They believe that Jews secretly rule the world. But if this is true, how can it be that they allowed six million of their number to be murdered? Answer: it didn't happen! The Jews pretended they had been killed in order to win unique sympathy, set up their own state, and advance their power. The same mind-warp is applied to more recent events. Polls suggest that large minorities of Muslims believe that "the Jews" blew up the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Such madness is not confined to ignorant Muslim masses stirred up by fanatics: I have heard it seriously advanced by non-Muslims at a respectable dinner party. >>> Charles Moore | Monday, March 22, 2010
