Programming note: We have a brand new Tale for Our Time airing nightly at SteynOnline - a very far-sighted novel by Robert Hugh Benson from 1907, Lord of the World. Part Eleven is tonight at 7pm North American Eastern - which is midnight GMT.
~Today is Holocaust Memorial Day in Britain, Germany, much of Europe ...oh, and Australia, which Paul Collits, in a throwaway aside at The Conservative Woman, breezily says is "now regarded as one of the least-safe countries for a Jewish person to live". That's a very competitive title - although perhaps not as much as it once was, as the number of countries with any Jewish population at all continues to shrink: "the last Jew in Afghanistan" fled a month after the Yanks did, although he outlasted the Christians, whose community was driven out on America's watch, as it was in Iraq, and as is now underway in Syria. First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people - although the old line still apparently comes as a surprise to many.
Jews have fewer friends among western elites than they did a generation ago. And yet today, at Auschwitz and elsewhere, the ceremonies go on - even though a few of them are hijacked, as Phelim McAleer reports, by some serious big-time Jew-haters. Back when Mr Higgins was merely the TD for Galway West, he attacked me in the Irish parliament (scroll down). I had assumed it was because I was too pro-Yank for his tastes, but the more obvious explanation is that my name is too Jewy for his tastes. If you ever go across the sea to Ireland and watch the sun go down on Galway Bay, push the raddled old hater in.
Michael D Higgins notwithstanding, as I wrote many many years ago, "it's hard to avoid the conclusion, especially after recent events, that in Europe formal observances of the Holocaust grow ever more fulsome in direct proportion to the rise in anti-Semitism". The leftie youth is wholly anti-Jew; the rightie youth is, to put it at its mildest, divided - and it will be interesting to see whether Trump can patch up that coalition.
So, as part of my increasingly obnoxious as-I-wrote-twenty-years-ago series, here is my column from The Daily Telegraph exactly two decades ago. The "Official Jews" (as Ezra Levant calls them) from America's Anti-Defamation League and the Canadian Jewish Congress et al who profess to be gobsmacked by the scenes on the streets of New York, Montreal, London, Sydney, etc, can't really be that obtuse, can they? As the late Kathy Shaidle used to say of Bernie Farber (who took the side of the Canadian Islamic Congress against me), "He must be adopted. He's too stupid to be Jewish."
Here's that Steyn column from January 25th 2005, with a couple of updates:
~According to a poll by the University of Bielefeld, sixty-two per cent of Germans are "sick of all the harping on about German crimes against the Jews" - which is an unusually robust formulation for a multiple-choice questionnaire, but at least has the advantage of leaving us in no confusion as to how things stand in this week of pan-European Holocaust "harping on". The old joke - that the Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz - gets truer every week.
I have some sympathy for that sixty-two per cent. Killing six million people is a moral stain on one's nation that surely ought to endure more than a couple of generations. But, on the other hand, almost everything else about the Germany of sixty years ago is gone - its great-power status, its military machine, its aggressive nationalism, and above all its need for lebensraum. The past is another country, but rarely as foreign as the Third Reich. Why should Holocaust guilt be the only enforced link with an otherwise discarded heritage?
[UPDATE: Right now close to twenty-five per cent of Germans are over sixty-four. For German Muslims, the figure is only five per cent. In another sixty years, all the young people will be Muslim and there will be no Holocaust Day.]
"Enforced" is the operative word. If most Germans don't feel guilty about the Holocaust, there's no point pretending they do. And that's the problem with all this week's Shoah business: it's a charade. The European establishment that has scheduled such lavish anniversary observances for this Thursday presides over a citizenry that, even if one discounts the synagogue-arsonists and cemetery-desecrators multiplying across the Continent, is either antipathetic to Jews, or "sick of all the harping on", or regards solemn Holocaust remembrance as a useful card to have in the hand of the slyer, suppler forms of anti-Semitism to which Europe is now prone.
From time to time, the late Diana Mosley used to tell me how "clever" she thought the Jews were. If you pressed her to expand on the remark, it usually meant how clever they were in always keeping "the thing" - the Holocaust, as she could never quite bring herself to call it - in the public eye, unlike the millions killed in the name of Communism. This is a fair point, though not one most people are willing to entertain from a pal of Hitler. But "the thing" seems most useful these days to non-Jews as a means of demonstrating that the Israelis are the new Nazis and the Palestinians their Jews. Iqbal Sacranie, Secretary-General of the Muslim Council of Britain, has told the Home Secretary that his crowd will be boycotting Thursday's commemorations because it is racist and excludes any commemoration of the "holocaust" and "ongoing genocide" in Palestine.
Ah, well. He's just some canny Muslim opportunist, can't blame the chap for trying it on. But look at how my colleagues at The Spectator chose to mark the anniversary. They ran a reminiscence by Anthony Lipmann, the Anglican son of an Auschwitz survivor, which contained the following sentence:
When on 27 January I take my mother's arm - tattoo number A-25466 - I will think not just of the crematoria and the cattle trucks but of Darfur, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Jenin, Fallujah.
Jenin? Would that be the notorious 2002 "Jenin massacre"? There was no such thing, as I pointed out in this space at the time, when Robert Fisk and the rest of Fleet Street's gullible sob-sisters were going around weepin' an' a-wailin' about Palestinian mass graves and Israeli war crimes. Twenty-three Israelis were killed in fighting at the Jenin camp. Fifty-two Palestinians died, according to the Israelis. According to Arafat's official investigators, it was fifty-six Palestinians. Even if one accepts the higher figure, that means every single deceased Palestinian could have his own mass grave and there'd still be room to inter the collected works of Robert Fisk. Yet, despite the fact that the Jenin massacre is an obvious hallucination of Fleet Street's Palestine groupies, its rise to historical fact is unstoppable. To Lipmann, those 52-56 dead Palestinians weigh in the scales of history as heavy as six million Jews.
And what's Fallujah doing bringing up the rear in his catalogue of horrors? In rounding up a few hundred head-hackers, did the Yanks perpetrate another Auschwitz? These comparisons are so absurd as barely to qualify as "moral equivalence".
I'm not one for philosophical meditations on Zionism. Had I been British Foreign Secretary ninety years ago, I doubt I would have issued the Balfour Declaration. Nor am I much interested in whose land was whose hundreds or thousands of years back. The reality is that the nation states of the region all date back to the 1930s and 1940s: the only difference is that Israel, unlike Syria and Iraq, has made a go of it.
[UPDATE: That remains true post-Assad and post-Saddam. The Christian population of "liberated" Syria is now under siege. The parliament of Iraq has just lowered the legal marriage age for girls to nine years old - but maybe that's just to bring it in line with Rotherham and Rochdale.]
As for the notion that this or that people "deserve" a state, that's a dangerous post-modern concept of nationality and sovereignty. The United States doesn't exist because the colonists "deserved" a state, but because they went out and fought for one. Were the Palestinians to do that, they might succeed in pushing every last Jew into the sea, or they might win a less total victory, or they might be routed and have to flee to Damascus or Wolverhampton.
But, whatever the outcome, it's hard to see that they would be any less comprehensively wrecked a people than they are after spending three generations in "refugee" "camps" while their "cause" is managed by a malign coalition of UN bureaucrats, cynical Arab dictators, celebrity terrorists and meddling Europeans whose Palestinian fetishisation seems most explicable as the perverse by-product of the suppression of their traditional anti-Semitism.
[UPDATE: As I have said innumerable times, in one of the bleaker jests of history, in post-war Europe Islam turned out to be the biggest beneficiary of Holocaust guilt. Increasingly, the Jews get the blame for that too.]
Americans and Europeans will never agree on this, and the demographic reality - the Islamisation of Europe - will only widen the chasm in the years ahead. But, if I were a European Jew, I would feel this week's observances bordered on "cultural appropriation". The old defence against charges of anti-Semitism was: "But some of my best friends are Jewish." As the ancient hatreds rise again across the Continent, the political establishment's defence is: "But some of our best photo opportunities are Jewish."
~from The Daily Telegraph, January 25th 2005
The one line that doesn't hold up in that last paragraph is "Americans and Europeans will never agree on this": for the last year, the faculty at Columbia and Harvard have sounded indistinguishable from your average Pallie-loving Continental professor.
~We had a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with my column on the Southport kiddie-killer and the lies of Sir Keir Stürmer. My Saturday music show was an Australia Day-ish cavalcade, and Rick McGinnis's weekly movie date opted for George Clooney in Up in the Air. Our Sunday Song of the Week tipped its hat to a Neapolitan blockbuster. And our marquee presentation was our current Tale for Our Time - Robert Hugh Benson's extraordinarily prescient Lord of the World: Click for Part Eight, Part Nine and Part Ten. Part Eleven airs tonight at SteynOnline.
If you were too busy this weekend worrying that Tulsi may not be as "qualified" to run the national-security apparatus as the fellows who've done such a grand job this last quarter-century, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
~We thank you for all your kind comments this last grisly year - and especially all those new members of The Mark Steyn Club, and those old members who've signed up a chum for a SteynOnline Gift Certificate or a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead.
