Alasdair Palmer mulls over a stark message: ignore anti-Semitism and you undermine liberalism
Palestinian militant
The Hamas Charter 'is one of the most anti-Semitic political statements ever published'It is easy to portray fears about anti-Semitism as overblown. British officialdom has excelled in that activity, starting with the civil servant who, in 1942, condemned the evidence that Nazi Germany was systematically exterminating the Jewish population of Europe with the calm assertion that nothing of the kind was happening. It was all down to the hysteria of 'those wailing Jews'.
'Those wailing Jews' is still a common reaction to claims that anti-Semitism is on the rise. One of the virtues of Globalising Hatred, by the Labour MP Denis MacShane, is that it demonstrates how inappropriate the 'wailing Jews' reaction is today.
Anti-Semitism - virulent, violent anti-Semitism - is flourishing, principally because it is embedded in many of the political manifestations of Islam.
MacShane notes that the Hamas Charter, the document that sets out Hamas's guiding principles, 'is one of the most anti-Semitic, Jew-hating political statements ever published'.
He quotes the invocations to kill Jews which litter the Charter, as well as the familiar claims that 'Jewish money is used to take control of the world media', and that Jews 'plunder people's money'.
Those claims are derived from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a tract first published in 1903 supposedly outlining a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world, which was exposed many years ago as a silly fake (the Tsarist secret police forged the document).
But the Hamas Charter simply takes them as fact, asserting that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is the authentic voice of the Jewish world conspiracy - and institutions such as the Rotary Club, the Freemasons and the Lions' Club are its instruments.
It's all nuts - but it is also taken very seriously, and not just by Hamas. Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed organisation in Lebanon, justifies the killing of Jewish children and asserts that Jews brought the Holocaust on themselves so that they could get the state of Israel as a reward afterwards.
Sayyid Qutb, the ideological founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, depicts Jews as the mortal enemy of Muslims in his book Our Struggle with the Jews.
'Jews destroy what is holy and moral,' he says, before insisting that Allah brought Hitler to rule over the Jews. Now that 'Jews have returned to evil-doing in the form of Israel, let Allah bring down upon the Jews people who will mete out on them the worst kind of punishment'.
And so on. Many revered Islamic preachers refer to Jews as 'monkeys and pigs'. As MacShane points out, if any other racial or religious group were the target of this kind of abuse, there would be an outcry. But when it is Muslims calling for the destruction of the Jews, there is none.
Why the lack of response? MacShane suggests two principal causes: closet anti-Semitism of the 'those wailing Jews' kind; and anger at Israel and sympathy for the Palestinians, which allows many who should know better to end up thinking that Jews 'have it coming'.
In the end, however, MacShane is stumped by 'the failure of the intellectual and liberal Left to confront and take on anti-Semitism, or even to accept that it is real and a menace to every value that liberals and the Left have ever stood for'.
That failure is not restricted to the Left. It is common to all the political parties. If we are going to defend liberal values in Britain - if we are not to allow the 'Endarkenment', as MacShane calls the encroachment of fundamentalism - to erode the existence of a tolerant, secular society, then we have to fight bigotry, dogma and lies wherever they manifest themselves.
Bigotry, dogma and lies are three of the essential planks of anti-Semitism in all its forms, and so long as radical Islam has anti-Semitism at its heart, it will be incompatible with any decent social order. That's the message of MacShane's book. I hope it is one that we all take to heart.
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