Know Your Place

The neoconservative blog Harry's Place is maintained by various boys in the City and on Wall Street, each of which is now nothing more than a theme park maintained at public expense because visitors to London or New York expect to see it.

Their tax-dodging exhibits are wholly dependent on the tax-paying workers of industrial and agricultural Britain and America, not least including the heavily unionised workers in the manufacturing industries that the weak pound will restore in full to the North, the Midlands, the Scottish Lowlands, and South Wales. We are paying taxes so that they do not become so poor that they might have to pay taxes.

So you might expect those exhibits to mind their manners.

Well, dream on.

They are in fact behaving exactly as spoilt adolescents always behave.

The old trick of labelling all critics of neoconservatism anti-Semitic, even though the neocons are not most Jews and most of them are not Jewish at all, has been extended to cover all critics of the crash-causing bailout beneficiaries, who are not most Jews, and most of whom are not Jewish at all. Whether this double libel now extends to everyone who voted for Obama, all of whom must have been opposed to the neoconservative war agenda and none of whom can have been too happy about the bailout, I have yet to check.

But the real ire is for anyone who makes any of the following clearly "anti-Semitic" statements:

- The hardline Zionism of something like Harry's Place has now been repeatedly rejected at the ballot box in Israel, and those promoting it from Britain and the US are doing as the Irish-Americans used to do and artificially prolonging the suffering of people thousands of miles away, where they themselves do not live and have no intention of ever living;

- First the nomination and now the election of Obama proves conclusively that the almighty "Israel Lobby" does not exist, and in particular calls into question the continued existence of AIPAC, which very clearly now has no influence over anything, so that no one now need (or will) pay it any further heed;

- Obama rightly regards Israel just as every American President has always rightly regarded Britain when not actually at war with her, namely as a generally friendly but nevertheless entirely distinct foreign country (one among several or many), the interests of which by no means necessarily correspond to those of the United States, which the President of the United States is sworn, paid and housed to protect and promote;

- For good or ill, both those nineteenth-century Christian thinkers and leaders who warned that Europe would become less Christian as a result of Jewish entry into mainstream society, and those rabbis who warned that that same process would de-Judaise European Jews, have turned out to have been more or less half-right, and the Western European and Coastal American culture that the likes of Harry's Place claim so vociferously to be defending is precisely the product of that process (I have never heard this better explained than by my old friend Rabbi Lionel Blue, then a Visiting Fellow of one of the Durham colleges of which I was then a Tutor, and who thought that I was Jewish when he first met me);

- The founding text of Judaism is the polemically anti-Christian Talmud, just as the founding text of Islam is the polemically anti-Christian Qur'an, since both are Semitic reactions against the recapitulation in Christ and His Church of all three of the Old Israel, Hellenism and the Roman Empire (unless, that is, you know of any Jews today who sacrifice animals or practise polygamy, as in the Old Testament, and indeed as in the background to the New Testament); and

- The number of Jews in America is massively exaggerated in the popular mind on both sides of the Atlantic, being proportionately not much higher than in Britain, so that both anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and Likudnik smugness that Uncle Sam will always have to look after them for domestic electoral reasons, are wildly removed from reality, as the election of Obama eloquently testifies.

No such ire, however, is extended to those who hold that possibly or certainly the greatest ever President of the United States was "elected" by the judicial discounting of the votes of Jews as such, nor to those who hold that possibly or certainly the greatest ever Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Labour Party was a man who warmly welcomed the defection of a then-sitting MP (Robert Jackson) from Michael Howard's Tories specifically on the ground that New Labour was "led by a Christian". Obviously, neither of those views is remotely anti-Semitic. Perish the thought.

When Cortés pulled down the blood-drenched Aztec idol and replaced it with a tiny statue of the Madonna and Child, the earth shook with the blood-curdling cry of the demons thus exorcised. Something rather similar is going in over at Harry's Place. Among many, many other places. But not at their expense. At yours and mine. Yet it is far too much to hope that they might show you or me any respect. So, when are we going to find something - anything - better to do with our money?