Leo McKinstry has written a powerful column in the London Daily Express entitled “SHAME ON THE LEFT AND ITS VICIOUS HATRED OF ISRAEL.” (Hat tip: Atlas).
[I]t is a bizarre paradox of modern Britain that there is now a climate of increasing hostility towards Jews, particularly in those Left-wing intellectual circles which otherwise make a fetish of their concern for racial sensitivities.
Dressed up as criticism of the state of Israel, anti-Semitism is becoming not just tolerated but even fashionable in some of our civic institutions, including the universities and parts of the media.
Thanks to the Left’s neurotic hatred of Israel, we now have the extraordinary sight of self-styled liberal campaigners launching McCarthyite witch-hunts against anyone deemed to have Israeli connections, as in this week’s debate at the University and College Union’s annual conference at Bournemouth calling for a boycott of all Israeli academic institutions.
Nick Cohen summarized the descent of the British Left-wing into anti-Semitism earlier this year in his important (and underappreciated) book “What’s Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way”:
All around me, liberal London descended into the radical chic of the ultra-right . . . The Independent and New Statesman produced neo-Nazi iconography, while an article reprinted by the London Review of Books won the praise of a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan for explaining that a Jewish “Lobby” controlled American foreign policy.
The Church of England’s General Synod, university lecturers and architects called for boycotts of Israel and none of them felt the need to explain why they didn’t demand boycotts of states which had committed far greater crimes against humanity, up to and including genocide.
Nick Cohen is a man of the Left, and his concluding paragraph in his chapter on this subject, expressing the historical significance of what he has witnessed in leftist intellectual circles in London, thus carries particular weight:
Perhaps [a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute] will satisfy all the Islamists who are currently saying that their wars in Chechnya, the Philippines, Indonesia, Kashmir and Somalia, and their terrorist campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan, India, Britain, France, Spain, the United States, Denmark, Holland, Canada and Austria are part of a unified war against paganism and for a Caliphate. Perhaps they will shake themselves and say “fair enough, we realize that now you’ve addressed our root cause, we don’t want a theocratic empire after all and will return to civilian life.”
If the liberals and leftists are wrong, and there are good grounds for thinking that they are horribly wrong, history will judge them harshly. For they will have gazed on the face of a global fascist movement and shrugged and turned away, not only from an enemy that would happily have killed them but from an enemy which already was killing those who had every reason to expect their support.