The Jews of the gathering night

by Melanie Phillips

The Jews of the gathering night

One of the most agonising and tragic aspects of the current global wave of Jew-hatred is the prominent part played in this by Jews. This is not a new phenomenon. Throughout the centuries of Jewish persecution, from the medieval ‘conversos’ to Karl Marx and beyond, there have always been Jews who, for a variety of reasons, have been ready and willing to advance the agenda of the persecutors of the Jewish people. Today, the west is teeming with their successors – almost always on the left, very often but not always highly secularised and with a tangential or deeply conflicted relationship with their Jewish identity, they are in the forefront of the movement to demonise, delegitimise and destroy Israel. They do it to no other country; only the expression of self-determination of their own people inspires in them such frenzied and obsessive loathing.

Nothing could be more inappropriate than their common soubriquet of ‘self-hating Jews’; on the contrary, they usually love themselves inordinately. What they hate is the Jewish bit of themselves – or to be more precise, everything but that bit of the Jewish bit which enables them falsely to represent Jewish powerlessness as the key characteristic of Jewish peoplehood, about which they generally know next to nothing and which they generally disdain altogether until the chance arrives to dump on it with maximum venom. The fact that they are Jews – however nominally – gives a free pass to the non-Jewish Jew-haters to dress up their bigotry as high-minded conscience, while still others of good will are led to believe the hateful lies and libels about Israel in the misguided belief that, since Jews are giving voice to them, they cannot be an expression of prejudice. The result of all this is that the Arab and Muslim agenda of the destruction of Israel and genocide against the Jews is advanced every time a Jew-hating Jew spews such venom into the public sphere.

On Front Page, David Solway lists some of the examples of this pathology:

The late Harold Pinter won a Nobel Prize, not for his over-rated plays, but for his anti-Israeli (and anti-American) posturing. Equally influential are fellow Jewish anti-Zionists like Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Naomi Klein, Joel Kovel, Tony Judt, Ilan Pappe, Tom Segev, Sara Roy, Henry Siegman, Avrum Burg, Jaqueline Rose and Richard Falk, to mention only a sparse handful, whose denunciation of Israel is so extreme and untextured as to be scarcely distinguishable from antisemitism.

Such apostates do not scruple to trade in apocrypha when indulging their animus against their own people, even when they can be readily exposed. In Fabricating Israeli History, Efraim Karsh has abundantly demonstrated how left-wing Israeli ‘New Historians’ have cooked the documents they work with. The lamentable Naomi Klein falsely accuses Israel of having cynically profited from ‘endless war’ and calls for academic and economic boycotts. Noam Chomsky’s gross fabrications have been outed by Peter Collier. The list goes on... Given the virulent anti-Zionist advocacy of so many prominent Jewish self-haters, one remains skeptical of ever achieving collective assent or reasonable consensus. Masking the syndrome of self-contempt as a quest for ‘justice,’ these Jewish turncoats seek redemption in a denial of both history and genealogy. Diagnostically speaking, it is not so much a mental illness or clinical aberration we are witnessing, but a sickness in the soul supple enough to contort itself into a spurious idealism, a simulacrum of ideological nobility.

Indeed, one of the most insufferable characteristics of these Jew-hating Jews is that they claim to represent authentic Jewish morality as opposed to the supposed corruption of those principles by Zionism and Israel. They do nothing of the kind. Their claim merely advertises their profound ignorance of Jewish ethics and history, which they so badly misrepresent. They are beneath contempt; and were the situation not so desperate, their rantings would be regarded as of no more consequence than those of any other fringe sectarian groupuscule. But their position in fashionable society means they are lionised by an equally ignorant and bigoted intelligentsia -- with the result that these Jews of the gathering night are significant contributors to the unconscionable agenda of our times.

Tuesday, 27th January 2009