31 October 2019
Letter to the Editors
Anti-semitism
from Anthony Silver
Dear Sir,
In this week’s edition your in-house Corbynista has gone too far.
In the past his gratuitous and offensive use of quotes from Julius Streicher and Hitler to justify some obtuse and asinine point in support of ‘Der Corbyn’ may have laid claim to having a smidgen of context. His ‘just get it done’ reference to Heydrich + Himmler, in this week’s edition, was nauseatingly provocative and racist and would be more at home in publications like Stormfront and American Renaissance.
If he had quoted the white supremacists Hoffmeyr or Breivik, or the misogynists Hemmingway or Nabokov, I question whether such quotes would have passed the edit. It is perhaps a sign of our times that gratuitous quotes from anti semitic war criminals have become in your publication, du jour. Shame on you.
As to John Watson’s observation that Corbyn’s failure to remove anti-semitism from the labour party is a failure of management ability. Well this apologia has been seen before, in Germany and Italy during the 1930’s.
With one exception in Switzerland in the 1980’s I had never really seen anti-semitism until 2016 despite the fact that I was the only Jew in a C of E prep school in the 1960s, followed by boarding school with a Jewish Quota (a limit to the number of Jews allowed) in the 1970s and then entering the City in the early 1980’s, all of these at a time when there were absolutely no constraints on corporal punishment, name calling or bullying. Of course if people didn’t like me, in an attempt to find a weakspot they might call me Jew or yid, but if I had been Christian and overweight they would have called me fatty.
That was not anti-semitism, just people expressing their freedom of speech, which to my mind is far more healthy than keeping it bottled up.
Today the situation is far more serious, whether by design or by accident there is a momentum to the de-humanisation of Jews in this country, hardly a new tactic – Nazis referred to their victims as sub-humans. One anticipates this in parties of the extreme right, but not institutionalised in a party of the (increasingly) left.
However back to your Corbynista. As you choose not exercise your right to ‘edit’ his copy, I exercise my right not to read it, or your publication, which is a shame for to some extent you fulfil your stated brief in looking at the news from a fresh perspective. Would your inspiration TE Lawrence who while pro-arab, was never an anti semite (being a supporter for a jewish state in Palestine), approve?
Please remove me from your subscription list.
Yours etc
Anthony Silver
