‘Anti-semitism’

The word ‘anti-semitism’ for what took place in Israel on October 7th is a wonderfully convenient word all round. It is a boon, of course, to Islamists and their Western sympathisers because it blends October 7th into the long history of Christian anti-semitism that concluded (let’s hope it concluded) in the Holocaust. It hints that, if Islamists deliberately and systematically murder Jews today, there’s Christian precedent for it in the even quite recent past and no justification for Europeans to think that October 7th had anything particularly to do with Islam. It was just the latest manifestation of an age-old and shared hatred. It might happen to be Middle-Eastern Muslims doing the killing now, it was European Christians then. There’s no essential difference. Their anti-semitism is continuous with ours. It’s all part and parcel of the same, one thing, the mystery of Jew-hatred, common to Islam and Christianity, the Middle East and Europe. The al-Aqsa Flood is continuous with the Final Solution; and, if Christian Europeans want to blame Middle-Eastern Muslims, they can only reasonably do so by partaking in that blame themselves (and without, for most of them, the excuse of having suffered the Catastrophe of having been dispossessed of a homeland ).

It suits the Islamists and those who apologise for them to give the present work of murder a name that blends it with previous works. If it’s anti-semitism, it’s familiar and we’re all in it together. Let those who are without this particular sin …

But it doesn’t suit just the Islamists. It also suits (and this is, in every way, more to the point) British official, politically-correct opinion, that opinion, that multi-faceted opinion that urges us to celebrate multi-cultural diversity. What could be more inconvenient for those holding that opinion (and who in any position of public authority in Britain today does not hold that opinion?) than to be prompted to suggest publicly that there is, in the present-day, something uniquely, savagely violent in the Muslim attitude towards Jews, and not just Jews but towards any population it thinks of as its enemy (including the British)? If it were once supposed that there is something uniquely menacing about Islam, it might have also to be supposed that we have made a terrible mistake in allowing so many Muslims into what was once Christian Europe. It might have to be supposed not just that all immigration ought to be reduced but that Muslim immigration especially ought to be reduced and, perhaps, even, put a stop to altogether. British public figures might have to start discriminating … discriminating between religions and cultures whose members are capable of living in peace in Britain—perhaps capable even of loving the country—and those who can’t. They might have to get used to sounding unpleasantly like (think of the disgrace of it) those Hungarian politicians on the ‘extreme right’ that they usually express such morally superior scorn for.

But what is the likelihood of any such supposition ever becoming anything more than suppositious, especially when we have a small, peaceable Jewish population and a large and—it seems so anyway—potentially violent Muslim one, one of whose leaders wants to turn the al-Aqsa flood into a world-wide tsunami? Of course, if it were the other way round … change places, and, handy-dandy … it would be the threat of Jewish violence (and votes) our governors would be shielding their eyes from.

‘Anti-semitism’ is a wonderful catch-all, appease-all term. It, understandably, satisfies the Islamists. It may even, for different reasons, satisfy the Jews. But those whom it satisfies most of all belong to our own political class, those who govern us and speak for us. Just as, ever since we made peace with and an ally of Germany, ‘Nazis’ has made, where any dirty work is concerned, a convenient euphemism for ‘Germans’, so now ‘anti-semites’ makes a convenient euphemism for ‘Muslims’—even for those who are every bit as semitic as the Jews themselves.

Duke Maskell writes a Substack newsletter Reactionary Essays, which you might like to follow here. 

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