You meet someone. You get on fine enough. They seem tolerant, interesting and then…”It’s the Jews, they pull all the strings.” What do you say? How do you react? Clearly they cannot be a reader of this blog if the run that line past me.
There is the short term and the long term. I once dated a bird and got along well until she tried to explain that the number of Jews killed in the holocaust was greatly exaggerated and it was really all part of a plot by the Jews to secure a homeland. I did not try to argue. But that was it for that relationship. There are some boundaries you cannot cross.
My short term reaction was to go for a cigarette. Leaving the room allowed me to calm down and to think about what to say. I returned calmly and said that I had a problem with that. I was asked if I was Jewish. Aaaaaagh. Shall we just run a similar exercise: do you have to be black or Asian to think that racism is not a very good thing? Of course not.
No I am not Jewish. A lot of my closest friends are but that does not stop me getting very hot under the collar when someone cites the Protocols of Zion as a source. This is a book written in 1903 in Russia which purports to show letters from Jewish leaders detailing their devilish plot to control the world. The letters are, of course, total forgeries and were shown to be at the time but it is still wheeled out regularly to show what the wicked frigging Jews are up to. Hitler was a big fan of the text. The idea of the Jewish puppetmaster pulling strings was a key feature of the cartoons of Julius Streicher in 1930s Germany.
So what about the holocaust How does having one third of the World’s Jews ( more than two thirds of European Jewry) wiped out fit into this master plan for world domination? I did not ask that question because I know what the standard reply is. “
For various reasons I really do not wish to fall out with this person. But we have agreed that this subject matter is out of bounds. I cannot have a rational discussion with someone who uses proven forgeries as source material. And, for me, the fight against anti-Semitism is a core part of my DNA. I worry that anti-Semitism is on the rise across Europe in a dangerous way. I note the Guardian ran a Bibi Netenyahu as a puppeteer cartoon (in the style of Streicher) a few weeks ago and thought it acceptable. But that is the least of the (often open) hostility Jews face across Europe these days. Have we learned nothing?
When some folks start demanding that yellow stars get handed out again, they can put me down to have one too.