May
8, 2002, 8:45 a.m. That
’30s Feeling
All
too familiar.
By David Pryce-Jones
he Thirties are coming round again in Europe. Fascists are flourishing
politically in France and Italy, and now comes the murder of Pim Fortuyn,
a populist politician who might have done well enough in the forthcoming
Dutch elections to hold the balance of power in that country's parliament.
But it is the widespread Jew-baiting that best reveals that Europeans
are evidently incapable of learning from their history.
France is the outright
prizewinner where anti-Semitism is concerned. They burn synagogues there
— five of them so far — and they attack Jews in the street,
and daub "Death to the Jews" on the walls of pretty much every
large city. "They" means the Muslims, of whom there are about
5 million according to official figures, but more like 10 million according
to figures that allow for illegal immigration. Fired up by rage against
Israel, these Muslims — mainly from North Africa — are in a
pre-intifada stage. There have been over 400 attacks on Jews so far this
year.
Britain does things
differently. In the Thirties, the British Union of Fascists under its
leader Sir Oswald Mosley never managed to attract much popular support,
but it still degraded public life with repeated acts of violence against
Jews, and steady incitement to Jew-baiting. Mosley is long dead, but his
widow, Lady Mosley, is an unrepentant apologist of Nazism, losing no chance
to proclaim what a delightful and humorous man Hitler was. She should
know. Not just a friend, Hitler was a witness when the Mosleys married
in Berlin in 1936.
Now a poet by the
name of Tom Paulin has given an interview to Al-Ahram, the leading
official Egyptian newspaper in which he declares that Israel ought not
to exist, and that American Jewish settlers on the West Bank ought to
be shot. Paulin teaches at Oxford University, and he appears as a commentator
on the arts on a well-known BBC program. It is unusual — if that's
the right word — for people like this to be calling for mass murder.
As part of his college
duties, Paulin had a student, one Nadeem Ahmed, a Muslim who was studying
medieval Arab thought at Oxford. But an examiner, Dr. Fred Zimmermann
of the university's Oriental Institute, failed Ahmed in a qualifying exam
in the Arabic language. Claiming racial discrimination, Ahmed brought
a case against the university and Zimmermann. Whereupon Paulin went into
a tailspin, and made 200 phone calls on Ahmed's behalf, threatening to
make life unbearable for university authorities, and seeking to blacken
Zimmermann as someone who had to be "bunged off to Israel to get
out of the way."
In court, Judge Playford
found that Paulin and Ahmed had been "mischievous" in their
unfounded claims of racism. It was "lamentable," the judge thought,
that Paulin had telephoned cryptic messages to the university authorities
and made insinuations about Zimmermann, who in any case is German, and
not Jewish or Israeli.
Paulin is evidently
obsessed with Jews. Legislation exists to prosecute him for his remarks
advocating the murder of American-born Jews in Israel. Seemingly, the
fact that his words were published in an Egyptian paper creates a legal
loophole. The university faculty has retreated into embarrassed mumbling
about Paulin's right to free speech. One of the few colleagues prepared
to take a position called him a "useful idiot," borrowing the
phrase once used by Lenin to describe fellow travelers of Communism.
The BBC meanwhile
continues to invite Paulin to comment on the arts. And another British
intellectual, A. N. Wilson, a novelist and columnist in the Daily Telegraph,
has leaped to Paulin's defense. Recently Wilson himself questioned Israel's
right to exist, arguing that its creation had been a historic mistake.
Paulin, in Wilson's view, is a stimulating conversationalist, and a brilliant
scholar too. Jews escaping Hitler were very lucky to have been allowed
into a free country like Britain, he explains, and it would be very un-British
to suppress Paulin's views or to "pretend that they are criminal
merely because some people find them offensive." Wilson also praises
Lady Mosley extravagantly, for her stimulating conversation and intellect,
and what he calls "her deep personal goodness."
All these brilliant
people, quite incapable of understanding a thing.
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he Thirties are coming round again in Europe. Fascists are flourishing
politically in France and Italy, and now comes the murder of Pim Fortuyn,
a populist politician who might have done well enough in the forthcoming
Dutch elections to hold the balance of power in that country's parliament.
But it is the widespread Jew-baiting that best reveals that Europeans
are evidently incapable of learning from their history.
