Mick Hartley

Julie Burchill has a fine quote from Aldous Huxley to kick off her piece in the Spectator on the current wave of antisemitism:

"The surest way to work up a crusade in favour of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behaviour ‘righteous indignation’ – this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats."

So it is now with the Jews, as the current belief that Israel is committing some kind of genocide against the Palestinians at last allows that old Jew-hatred to be expressed openly, with passion.

Thugs and trustafarians now unite in Jew-hatred, a macabre crusade with echoes of the Salem Trials and the Cultural Revolution. I’m sure that everything, from not being able to get on the property ladder (Jewish landlords) to climate change (if Israel haven’t been blamed for that yet, it can’t be far off), will be used to justify yelling ‘Death to the Jews!’ at some point. But of course it will really be about the Crome Yellow Huxley quotation. A generation to which ‘bully’ is the worst word will now enjoy the thrill of bullying by telling themselves they’re standing up for the bullied.

This kind of neuroticism is everywhere in today’s anti-Semitism. We’ve all sniggered at those ‘QUEERS FOR PALESTINE’ photos and thought: ‘Don’t they know how they’d be treated in Gaza?’ Owen Jones was quick to blame Hamas’s murderous treatment of homosexuals on the British Empire, leading Darren Grimes to write: ‘Owen Jones is correct; before the British arrived in Palestine, it was wall-to-wall Pride marches, same-sex marriages and Lady Gaga tours.’ The ‘Harvard Arab Alumni Association’ has been asking for donations to help students’ ‘mental health’ after they were subjected to ‘relentless bullying and intimidation’ for calling Israel ‘entirely responsible’ for the pogroms which Hamas carried out, including murdering children in front of their grandmothers. Remember that old definition of ‘chutzpah’: the boy who murders his parents and then asks for clemency on the grounds of being an orphan. The hard fact we have to face is that the more evidence of atrocities they see, the more they’ll back those who carried them out. Cheerleading for evil while masquerading as caring for the underdog is part of the fun for these people….

As Europe recommences its once-loved if barely-remembered danse macabre, we see that the muscle memory was there all along – how familiar the tinkle of broken glass from a synagogue on the streets of Berlin sounds. No one will be allowed to sit this one out. Sooner or later, we will all have to pick our side. Or that side will pick us, as the mob – young and strong – gains velocity and the madness of crowds seeks to finally finish what it started so many times before. I know which side I’m on – but then, I am an old lady now, one who chose her side when she was a child, back in those wonderful days when only bad people screamed ‘Death to the Jews’. Back when we truly lived in modern times.