Never Again
(Via Eugene Volokh)
Here is some more about what Victor Davis Hanson calls “fashionable anti-Semitism”.
This Hanson quote refers to the repulsive Tony Judt article I deplored earlier:
There has always been the suspicion that European intellectuals favored the dismantling of Israel as we know it through the merging of this uniquely democratic and liberal state with West Bank neighbors who have a horrific record of human-rights abuses, autocracy, and mass murder. After all, for all too many Europeans, how else but with the end of present-day Israel will the messy Middle East and its attendant problems – oil, terrorism, anti-Semitism, worries over unassimilated Muslim populations in Europe, anti-Americanism, and postcolonial guilt – become less bothersome? Moreover, who now knows or cares much about what happened to Jews residing under Arab governments – the over half-million or so who, in the last half-century, have been ethnically cleansed from (and sometimes murdered in) Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, and almost every Jewish community in the Arab Middle East?
And what is the value of the only democratic government in a sea of autocracy if its existence butts up against notions of third-world victimhood and causes so much difficulty for the Western intelligentsia? Still, few intellectuals were silly enough to dress up that insane idea under the pretext of a serious argument (an unhinged Vidal, Chomsky, or Said does not count). Judt did, and now he has confirmed what most of us knew for years – namely, that there is an entrenched and ever-bolder school of European thought that favors the de facto elimination of what is now a democratic Jewish state.
When the Andrew Wilkie incident occurred at Oxford, the tone of Wilkie’s email to the Israeli struck me as astonishingly casual – the phrase I used when writing to the Oxford administrators about Wilkie’s prejudice was “chummy anti-Semitism”.
Wilkie was comfortable in his anti-Semitism and wanted the Israeli to know it. It suggested more than an individual bigot’s ugly little mind, but a nest of fools in the Oxford community that supported Wilkie’s attitudes.
Oxford has since attempted to redress Wilkie’s email by suspending him. So little, so very late.
