The oldest hatred has woken under Labour
THERE is nothing in the least bizarre about Labour’s swerve to anti-Semitism. It is as predictable as night following day. The key word to note is “fanatic”. The true fanatic, of any faith or creed, and Labour is now dominated by them in all the controlling positions, is that they cannot tolerate or permit dissent. I do not mean open criticism. Even the most minor disagreement must be taboo. That is why dictatorships, ruled by fanatics, arrest and remove to re-education camps those venturing the slightest variation to decreed doctrine. Thus fanaticism and total intolerance become synonymous. Out of intolerance will come bigotry – again as night follows day.
There are various forms of bigotry and right out there in the lead is the racial version. In various parts of the world Muslims persecute Christians (the Caliphate) and it is closely matched by religious persecution. In the Mid-East Muslims hound Christians, elsewhere Chinese and Burmese (communists and Buddhists) persecute Muslims.
In Europe, for two centuries after the Reformation, Catholic tyrants burned Protestants and Protestants butchered Catholics.
Europe’s internecine faith wars are long behind us but older than them was the hounding of the Jews. And this alone never went away.What was done to European Jewry by the Nazis is endlessly re-screened in documentary after documentary. But the Nazis were not the only ones, just the most vicious. Other forms of antiSemitism simply slept – for a while.
Now one of them is alive again – in the once-honourable British Labour Party.
The key as to “why?” lies in Labour’s weird swerve to the ultra-Left. (Anti-Semitism was in no way alien to Soviet communism.) It is not about Left or Right, but about “extreme” and “fanatical”.
Labour today is far further Left than in the early Eighties, the days of Michael Foot and entryism when hard-line extreme Leftists infiltrated the party and took over while the guardians of decency slept. But today it is worse.
That is why those of us who hope we can lay a claim to decency, whether Christian, atheist, agnostic, humanist, Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh or Muslim, cannot in all conscience vote next Thursday for a party now so infiltrated at the highest level by bigots, tolerant only of anti-Semitism.
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CAN a once-meaningful word become so debauched that it not only loses all meaning but becomes profoundly irritating? I think so and my first candidate would be, “unacceptable”.
Officialdom has so over-used this word that one cringes to hear it yet again. It is applied from mildly impertinent to profoundly obscene; from all forms of bigotry to mass murder by terrorists. This word now replaces a score of much more accurate adjectives which our under-educated spokespersons (mustn’t say spokesmen, that’s unacceptable) have not yet mastered.
You might as well say that excessive rain is unacceptable. It just invites the question: so what are you going to do about it?
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CLIVE James, Jonathan Miller and Gary Rhodes – all gone in a single week. As Australian Clive might have put it: “Strewth, the old fella with the scythe has been on overtime.”
I have seen the figure with the hour-glass half a dozen times. On the wingtip, flying a small jet fighter through a cumulonimbus; on the transom of an open fishing boat in a wild Indian Ocean cyclone; in the shadows of an African rain forest as the enemy closed in.
So far he has always shaken his head and vanished. One day he will smile and beckon. And I will go with him. But without fear, for I believe there is a time and a place, and nothing we can do about it.