I’ve been brooding on Derb’s aside about English antisemitism. I would agree with him that historically it’s by far the mildest and most harmless, and I never understand fellows who comb through, say, the works of John Buchan and alight triumphantly on a passing reference to a hooked nose as evidence that middle England was slavering to open up an Auschwitz in the Home Counties.

However, it seems to me that that traditionally mild antisemitism is fast vanishing and being replaced by something much closer to the more virulent Continental forms. The sinister rootless cosmopolitan Jew reviled in Europe was never a big deal in Britain: the Wandering Jew has his work cut out wandering as far afield as the Wandering Englishman. But Israel is another matter. I happen to be reading Tom Bower’s book Conrad And Lady Black, about my old boss and his wife Barbara Amiel. Barbara’s sins are mostly the ones leveled by Brits at World War II Yanks – oversexed, overpaid and over here – but Mr Bower adds to them the following:

By 2000, Amiel had become a passionate supporter of aggressive Zionism… Barbara Amiel’s writings in the Telegraph hardened the perception of the newspaper as an uncritical propagandist for Zionism…

“Aggressive Zionism”? Don’t these formulations ring a little odd to American ears? Here’s another example. A couple of years back, the BBC’s in-house poet and arts pundit, Tom Paulin, gave an interview in which he said that “Brooklyn-born” Jewish settlers on the West Bank “should be shot dead” because “they are Nazis” and “I feel nothing but hatred for them”. (Happily for him, a couple were, indeed, shot dead just a couple of days later.) Unlike another BBC chap whose mild and factually indisputable observations about the Arab world led to his firing, Mr Paulin was kept on the air. The only reference to his incitement to murder was an oblique allusion in his official BBC biography:

His polemical, knockabout style has ruffled feathers in the US, where the Jewish question is notoriously sensitive.

“The Jewish question”? “Notoriously sensitive”? Is this really how they talk at the BBC these days? T S Eliot’s the least of an English Jew’s worries.