In The Jews Don’t Count, the British comedian, novelist, and television personality David Baddiel reacts to his uncomfortable discovery that there are many who will fight vigorously against the faintest expression of bigotry of just about any kind, but will ignore or defend anti-Semitism. Nick Cohen, reviewing the book, takes the case of the acclaimed American novelist Alice Walker—who has written vile anti-Semitic poems and endorsed the most paranoiac fantasies about Jewish world domination—as an example:
[T]he idea that an African American author could ever be “cancelled” for racism against Jews remains unthinkable to right-thinking people. . . . In 2019, a musical version of [her book] The Color Purple came to the UK. There was a hell of a fuss because Seyi Omooba, one of the cast, had once written an anti-gay post. The producers fired her, of course. Omooba’s prejudice was unforgivable, while Walker’s was, if not quite forgivable, then a matter of no consequence.
While praising Baddiel for acknowledging this, Cohen suggests that he does not fully appreciate the extent of the problem:
The Jew was the Christian world’s “other” for centuries. Islam may have taken its place at times but in in our inherited culture the face of Satan is the swarthy and hooked-nose face of the Jew. . . . These prejudices run deep, so deep that many on the left cannot acknowledge their existence or their power.
Others, however, possess all too conscious prejudices. The Stalinist tradition is as explicitly anti-Semitic as the far-right tradition, as is today’s radical Islam. To parts of the left, anti-Semitism is not just about Jews, it never is, but part of a wider far-left world view that encompasses support for Vladimir Putin and Iran, and also a contempt for democracy as fierce as anything you will find in the Trump movement. For if the “Zionist lobby” controls everything from Keir Starmer’s Labor party to the media, how can elections be free, how can democracy be anything other than a sham?
Read more on Spectator: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-jews-don-t-count-to-the-anti-racists-