Mick Hartley

Interesting piece from yesterday's Sunday Times [£], by Anthony Julius and Deborah Lipstadt, on the Livingstone saga:

There are three questions that have been raised by the sorry affair. The first question is: does anything that Livingstone has said raise any interesting historiographical issues? The answer is no.

The second question is: why is the Labour Party unable to address the shame that his continued membership brings upon it? The answer to that is that his tastes are shared by too large a fraction of the party — or too large a fraction, at least, of its governing bodies.

And the third question: why are we unable to recognise Livingstone for what he is? The answer lies in the history of anti-semitism. If anti-semitism blinds people to the world, then the recent history of anti-semitism has blinded people to its earlier history. Specifically, the Holocaust has blinded us to the pre-Holocaust diversity of anti-semites. There any many species in the anti-semitic bestiary.

There are religious versions — principally, Christian versions, and at least one Muslim version; political versions — principally, right-wing versions, but also liberal and leftist ones. And yet Hitler’s programme of genocide has come to define anti-semitism. It is as if the horror of Hitler’s mass murder of Jews has erased the assaults and exclusions, the slurs and defamations that conditioned their existence before Nazism. The pre-Nazi history of anti-semitism has been lost; non-Nazi contemporary anti-semitisms are inadequately acknowledged, when not altogether defined out of existence.