Me, Myself and Jews

A personal view on the moral test the West has failed

Roughly ten years ago I was invited onto a tiny local politics discussion page. I was already using Facebook (offered in the manner of someone saying ‘I’d tried a little weed before I moved onto crack) and making some political comments here and there, but not very many.

I was politically engaged and had strong views (on just about everything) but I wasn’t devoting a huge amount of time to it. And I didn’t really think that would change-I’d never gone on marches, I’d laughed at student politics when I was in that environment, and what I joined was essentially a group of perhaps 300 people online, only 10-20 of whom commented regularly. It was the politics site of a very small backwater town in Essex, England, not the Oxford Union debating society.

I left that local politics group years ago, but not before I managed to get threatened with violence for my views, told that I would be ‘run out of town’, had Antifa members trawl through my social media and put slogans on pictures of me, and get called a ‘threat to democracy’ years before Donald Trump did.

Since then, I must have agreed or argued with thousands of people through social media. I’ve written two essentially political books, a third that is yet unpublished, and devoted far too much time, perhaps, to arguing with strangers I will never, ever meet. I can’t say it’s been wasted time, since I’ve actually gone on to personally meet some of the people I’ve agreed with the most and form what I consider real friendships even with some I’ve never seen in person. That fellowship is the best thing about social media.

But that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about the thing that surprised me most about this modern form of false community and online second life, especially the parts of it devoted to politics. The thing that surprised me most, the thing that I never expected to end up talking about and losing and making friends over, was the Jew hatred.

I was very naive, really. I assumed when I first went on social media that there was a western consensus on the topic of Jews, that it was something that didn’t need talking about. I assumed everyone knew exactly what the Holocaust was and what it represented, how it had started and grown, how it was itself tied to centuries of prior hatred and demonization, and how all of that was obviously, clearly, irrefutably evil. I was so clear in thinking that this was a basic moral position that pretty much everyone in a civilized society shared that my expectation was that I’d never end up in discussions or disagreements about it.

I didn’t go into political discussions thinking any one of them could be turned into a discussion about Jews or any one of them could suddenly reveal a person I’d previously considered sensible to be a Jew hater.

I guess my naivety there reflects the fact that I’m not myself Jewish. I hadn’t lived with that weight of history. I hadn’t heard those family stories, those real and horrific messages from the relatively recent past and the most ancient of times, too. There wasn’t always a part of me sensitive to their return.

My family were from South London, and they moved out to more and more rural locations after my birth. There were, as far as I know, no Jews in my primary school, and none in my secondary school either. Back then, some forty or more years ago, schools in Essex had almost exclusively white Anglo-Saxon, English pupils. I think there were maybe three black kids in my year at my secondary school, which was quite a large one by provincial English standards, and I remember only one non-white pupil at my primary school. Jews, being one of the smallest of ethnic minorities in the UK, didn’t feature at all.

This was long after Windrush, of course, but also before Tony Blair’s government open door policy on mass immigration that really saw the demographics of England fundamentally alter.

I met and befriended the first Muslim I had personally known at University when I was 18. Still no Jews. I don’t think I met anyone Jewish until my mid twenties. The first Jewish person I met was on the same entry level administrative post as me when I briefly worked for a financial company. I can’t remember his name but I do remember his appearance.

He looked like a Nazi fantasy of the perfect Aryan.

He was young, tall, muscular, blonde, blue eyed, and very definitely not Woody Allen. If you wanted to picture someone as far as possible from the racist and hate filled depictions through history of what a Jew looks like, that was him. I hesitate to say it, but he looked like a more handsome Reinhardt Heydrich. He actually joked with other trainees that he’d been bullied for being so….well, Nazi Fantasy of Perfection, in his looks.

My only other experience of Jews in my younger years was two-fold. First, I’m a Spurs fan, a supporter of the Tottenham Hotspur football club, which my father and my grandfather on my father’s side both supported before me. Spurs are a club associated with Jews and with a Jewish fanbase, so much so that Spurs supporters have proudly adopted the name ‘Yid Army’ (yid being a slur used in England against Jews, hurled by rival fans at Spurs fans, and then taken on by both Jewish and non Jewish Spurs fans as a defiant mark of pride). So I had an affinity through my football club, even though it didn’t mean I actually met any Jews.

The second connection was through literature. I was a huge fan of 20th century US literature, to the extent of picking it as my main focus at university. Most of the US writers I loved the most were Jews. I was reading everything I could find by Joseph Heller (author of what I consider to be the finest 20th century novel…no, not that one, but an extraordinarily bleak book called ‘Something Happened’), Saul Bellow, all the comedy writing collections of Woody Allen, the science fiction of Isaac Asimov, the literary fiction of Philip Roth, J.D. Salinger, Nathaniel West, and others. Through Jewish American authors in a series of asides, I think I’d read more about Coney Island than I’d ever read about any one place in London.

In other words, the small and very integrated British Jewish community was something that I either didn’t consider at all, or something that I dimly connected to a few other things I loved. My experiences of ‘Jewishness’ were minimal, fictional, and positive. My knowledge of crimes against Jews was also, of course, at an emotional remove different to the actual Jewish experience, but one suffused with the (correct) idea that basic morality and basic decency consisted in rejecting that hatred of Jews and everything connected with it.

And I guess I assumed that this was a fairly standard British position. I never thought, to be honest, that I’d be dragged into arguments about Jews, find loathsome attitudes to Jews popping up all over the place, and have to remind people about basic moral responses and things like gassing or slaughtering Jewish children being wrong.

When I went online and started arguing about politics, I entered into those discussions as a conservative, as an English patriot, as a guy interested in the US, as a traditionalist, as a working class right-winger, as a romantic about my ‘green and pleasant land’, as pretty much everything on one side of politics except as a friend and defender of Jews. Hating Jews was not part of what I thought I’d be fighting against or debating.

And yet the most frequent thing causing me to get into lengthy and sometimes vicious arguments, the thing that has caused more unfriendings, blocks, insults and aggravation, the thing that has required me to negatively view people I might otherwise agree with on many other topics, has been this unexpected, unknown, unfathomable to me but deep and ever present current of Jew hatred. It’s been a dark, sinister, deadly riptide in the ocean of social media, as it is in the ‘real world’ too.

Having never felt or understood it myself, seeing Jews more as people who produce astonishing works of literature or people who made some of the comedy shows I’ve loved the most, and then as a traditionalist gradually coming to see in their story, in the story of their survival against hatred over generations a kind of template for the beauty of human endurance itself, the extent of Jew hatred bewildered me.

It bewildered me when it came from the Left, because the Left kept telling me at the same time that they were the champions of ethnic minorities and the opponents of oppression, racism and hate and the people best at defending the defenseless…and yet the Left was very happy to indulge the worst hatred and the oldest racism of all when it came to the Jews and to tell Jewish voters (who generally believed the false protective promise of the Left and voted accordingly) that their lives and safety don’t matter.

It bewildered me when it came from the Right, because the Right kept telling me that they wanted ethnic minorities who didn’t require handouts, who had a strong work ethic, who shared Judeo-Christian values, who built things rather than destroying them, who contributed and were successful, who obeyed the laws and rules of the majority, who integrated successfully…and yet were prepared to reject the ethnic minority which most embodied these positive features and which, by number, posed the least imaginable threat to the white majority.

And it bewildered me most of all from people claiming to be rational and investigative and knowledgeable, whilst both ignoring known horrors like the Holocaust and the obvious moral response to those, whilst indulging ridiculous and fantastical beliefs like the idea that an obscure dead kingdom on the Spice Road of the Middle Ages is a ‘Khazarian Jewish Mafia’ still operating today.

I never ever felt I would NEED to spend as much time as I have spent arguing against OBVIOUSLY EVIL ideas of Jew hatred which even the most cursory knowledge or even the most fitful, tentative and cautious morality obliterate to the extent that the only way of accepting those ideas is by abandoning your own capacity to reason and your own essential humanity.

I thought all of it was fucking obvious.

And the moral test the modern West has just so thoroughly failed is that I was, and am, right about that….but millions cannot see it. Millions. After the Holocaust. After the disgusting and proven nature of the things Hamas did three weeks ago. After thousands of years of non Jews getting this wrong.

They still are. We still are.

And it doesn’t matter how you wrap it up or excuse it. It doesn’t matter if you pretend that you oppose the Israeli State but not the Jewish people, because that State was founded as a just and righteous reaction to hate, as an offering of protection and a means of protecting themselves, not as a theft of land from others. If you use any words like colonialist, or settler, or apartheid, or ‘stolen land’, in reference to Israel, you are utterly ignorant of 3,000 or more years of Jewish history, so ignorant of the land you are discussing that your words are worth less than a single grain of sand, there or elsewhere.

It doesn’t matter if you think some generalized, saccharine, ‘love everybody’ philosophy that envisions a world of rainbows and unicorns in which all wars would cease if we just hug one another is a better and a more moral path, because that path is an illusory one that cannot exist in the real world and especially cannot offer anything in adequate response to the kind of evil Hamas represents, the kind of evil which wants to put Jewish babies in ovens. Your sentimentality in response to atrocity is actually saying that the slaughtered innocents don’t really mean anything, because according to you we shouldn’t be angry and we (not just Israelis, not just Jews, but EVERYONE with a true morality) shouldn’t demand retribution.

To say to the victims of an atrocity that they should not respond is a moral obscenity, and to say this ONLY to Jews, shows where this alleged ‘compassion’ and ‘balance’ is actually coming from.

It was a very simple test. It was one we were asked before.

The test was not ‘tell us what you’ve read from the Palestinian perspective’.

The test was not ‘tell us what half-assed dishonest maps of Israeli ‘encroachment’ you’ve looked at in your five minutes of understanding history via biased sources’.

The test was not ‘show how much sophistry and false equivalence you can use to end up backing brutal terrorists’.

The test was ‘do you consider Jews human beings who deserve to be able to live without worrying that their baby will be put in their oven and roasted to death whilst they are gang raped to death’.

Are Jews human beings to you?

That was the moral test determining what your response to an atrocity should be.

And millions failed it and are failing it. On the Right, on the Left, progressives and ‘truthers’ both, sentimentalists and alleged realists, Muslims and Christians, allies of the Palestinians, and believers in unicorns.

Disgustingly, unforgivably, they failed the easiest test of one’s own humanity there could ever be.