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As Charlie Sheen, John Galliano and Julian Assange demonstrate, anti-semitism is becoming trendy.
It was a great week, this week, for Pope Benedict XI to exonerate the Jews. It’s one of those twist of circumstances that can make even a fundamentalist atheist like myself believe in God – or, at least, the possibility of a great, overhanging Comic Logic to the Universe. Because in the week that anti-Semitism became really, properly zeitgeisty again – you can’t get more culturally now than John Galliano, Charlie Sheen and Julian Assange – thank Great Overhanging Comic Logic that the Pontiff/ex-member of the Hitler Youth decided to shut down that pesky old hatred once and for all in his new work, “Jesus of Nazareth – Part II” (I always said someone should write a sequel to that movie).
But the fact that the Vatican is still, in 2011, chasing its tail over the Jewish responsibility for the crucifixion (an event which, of course, was absolutely essential to Jesus’ divine mission, and thus the Jews should have been applauded for helping Him along the way to it, instead of reviled and persecuted for a couple of millennia) is just the Route One explanation for the persistence of anti-Semitism in our culture. In commissioning this piece, the brief was could I come up with the reason why many people still harbour negative ideas about this fairly tiny racial group, but of course there isn’t one single reason. The old blood libel – “His blood be on us and on our children”, shouted so loudly by the Jews to Pontius Pilate in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of The Christ – provides the historical context, but I’m really not sure if John Galliano even speaks Arameaic: and besides, he doesn’t seem to know much simpler historical things, such as the fact that Hitler really didn’t love gays.
This is also what gives anti-Semitism a somewhat ambiguous status with the Left. Despite so many key Lefties being Jewish – Marx, Trotsky, y’know: that level of Leftie – many of them, some less consciously than others, harbour a sense that Jews don’t quite fit into that key Venn Diagram marked Oppressed/Worth Fighting For. Yes, there was the Holocaust, yes there was 2,000 years of persecution and pogroms and massacres, but a) quite a lot of them have got a fair wodge of cash, and b) Israel.
Because Israel has become, in recent years, an icon for the Left of everything that is bad - American imperialism, oil wars, suppression of human rights - and since Jews, even Jews who do not support the state or its policies, are (at least in the minds of, say, Hamas) associated with it, knocking Jews may just be a blow for the oppressed, rather than to them.
As a result, people talking the anti-Jew talk can do it not as racists, but, paradoxically, as if they are somehow sticking up for other races. Underneath one of the various web films of John Galliano looking weirdly cold and lonely at that café that I watched the other day, there were a slew of comments, an awful lot of them supportive of the designer. One of them, johntron67, began: “What is it with the Jews! They’re the only group you just can’t say anything negative about…” What’s amazing about that – the same poster went on, later, to say, sinisterly, that “the cauldron will boil over though, one day soon, and guess who’s gonna get scalded…” – is not so much that johntron67 thinks that saying generally-OK and not-to-be-remarked-upon things about the Jews would include the comment “I love Hitler - your forefathers would’ve been gassed”; but that he really thinks that other ethnic minorities are, in comparison, fair game. Two words: Michael Richards. Charlie, Mel, probably even Galliano – they’ll work again: Mel Gibson is, even as we speak, in a big Hollywood movie, The Beaver. Since his n-word-fuelled outburst onstage in 2006, Kramer is toast.
David Baddiel: Hating Jews is Back in Fashion - Israel Insider