Therein lies the problem

I have just finished reviewing the comments from the David Cesarani thread dealing with the vile accusation by Oliver Miles questioning the impartiality of two Jewish members of the Chilcot Inquiry.

If there was any thread that revealed the raw nature of anti-Jewish bigotry that inhabits the “Comment is Free” threads it was this. The number of comments that accused Jews of being more loyal to Israel than their host nation was simply astounding.

In the recently released JCPA report on antisemitism in US blogs, Adam Levick wrote:

One of the oldest anti-Semitic staples is that Jews are not sufficiently loyal to the countries where they reside and instead are more loyal to Israel. Indeed, this notion underlay the failure of European emancipation. From the Dreyfus Affair in France through the Nazis’ rise to power, Jews – no matter how devoted they actually were to their host countries -were viewed as outsiders lacking in national loyalty.
Such ad hominem attacks against American Jews who support Israel are common within the blogs in question. The “Working Definition of Anti-Semitism” of the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia defines as anti-Semitic: “accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.”

We will publish a more extensive post with a collection of the worst comments from the Cesarani thread in the course of the next week. In the meantime, I wanted to highlight this particular comment by petrifiedprozac below not because it was the worst of the worst – it wasn’t – but because of the casualness in which it has become conventional wisdom that Jews who support Israel have crossed some rubicon of acceptability in British society.


Through the drip drip demonization and delegitimization of Israel in the Britism media, Zionism, which in essence is a movement for the self-determination of the Jewish people, has become synonymous with the worst excesses of evil. What is becoming more and more clear is that in 21st Century multicultural Britain, to be a Jew that believes in Zionism, regardless of where one stands on the Israeli political spectrum, is an indelible stain on one’s character. The fact that Zionist Jews (who make up the overwhelming majority of British Jewry) are regarded with such disdain does not bode well for the future of British Jewry. And therein lies the problem.

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