Friday, August 29, 2008

professional contrAryans?

After the interweb kerfuffle that surrounded the story of ‘Harry Potter and the goosestepping academics',there has been a great deal of discussion about how a certain section of the Left have developed a selective blindness towards anti semitism,
Just to prove that the 'anti- imperialist left' don't have a monopoly on scarcely concealed anti semitism, I have just received a email with this weeks missive from those 'jolly japesters’ at spiked-online and found this about Jerry Springer's BBC programme Who Do You Think You Are

But how many more times must we be told that the Nazis weren’t very keen on Jews? Why not have a documentary on the Pope not being a Protestant? Or on ursine bowel movements in arboreal regions? It’s been told time and time again.

Leaves a distinct queasy feeling in the guts.
But do fear as All is apparently ok as;

I’m not anti-Jewish. In fact, I am exactly the opposite. I’m very pro-Israeli, because I think the Jews are a nation of geniuses. You can always spot a loser in life if he is anti-Semitic. This is the politics of envy. Hitler hated the Jews because he thought they were clever; the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche loved the Jews because he thought they were clever. Hitler, the über-anti-Semite, was an über-loser. Never trust anyone who hates Jews

A great improvement on ‘some of my best friends are Jewish’ –‘some of my favourite nations are jewish.’
And I always thought that at the heart of modern anti-Semitism was not some idea that Jews were inferior but that they were geniuses (who ran the world).

But

(Why is there always a BUT?)

But Holocaust stories have become very tiresome,

Those Jews do keep on about it don’t they?

especially when people alive today claim victimhood status on behalf of their ancestors, which is not only boring but despicable. Jerry Springer shed many a tear on behalf of his grandparents who were rounded up by the Germans in Czechoslovakia. But what about the people who actually survived Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and the like, or the children of the survivors and the dead who do actually remember the trauma they endured? This programme felt like an insult to genuine Holocaust survivor
These were the cheap words of a cheap TV presenter who has made his career from deriving cheap thrills from the misfortunes of others. He has made a living from parading and creating ‘victims’ by humiliating them on American and international TV, and now parades himself as an ersatz victim on the BBC.


I have a confession to make, I like Jerry Springer!! I have always found his show sympathetic and decent, not unjudgemental, but never treats its guests as victims, in fact it has been for many years one of the few programmes on which american working class people get to speak for themselves.
Mr. West finishes his piece apparently equating the industrialised murder of Jerry Springer’s grandparents, and millions of others with his own family experiences;

All families have skeletons in their closets. My direct paternal ancestor was Lord North (yes, the surname is no joke), the incompetent prime minister who lost Britain the War of Independence against the American colonies. My grandfather Douglas West was features editor of the Daily Mail in the 1930s, where he championed Mosley’s fascist Black Shirts. My maternal grandparents in Dublin used to host dinner parties for the German ambassador in the 1940s.
But then again, my mother was a leading feminist in Ireland in the 1960s who brought condoms from Belfast to Dublin, and my father was a veteran journalist in Vietnam at the same time and was one of the first to say that the US campaign there was actually correct. He was also one of the very last journalists to leave Saigon before the final US retreat in 1975.
But I am not ‘traumatised’ by any of these events, nor informed by them. We are who we are, not who our ancestors were


I dislike this man.

Anti Semitism seems to be this year’s black.

1 comment:

Dave E said...

Patrick West - uber thick twat. I'm so fucking pleased that your affluent middle class skeletons have not blighted your over priveleged life, so fuck off you daft bastard.