In yesterday’s London Sunday Times, Anthony Julius and Deborah Lipstadt on the latest Livingstone imbroglio:
“Ken Livingstone, who has been suspended from holding office in the Labour Party following his claims that Adolf Hitler supported Zionism, is a provocateur. That is to say: he doesn’t care about the truth.
To respond to him is already to elevate him; to debate him is a waste of time. Self-pitying, self-admiring, he believes himself to be a truth-telling, special-interest-defying, independent-minded maverick. He cannot be persuaded out of these delusions.
The implication is that anti-semitism is best engaged with at the level of reason, or ignored, following a diagnosis of imbecility. The problem with that approach is that it overlooks the fundamentally malicious nature of anti-semitism. Anti-semites have not reached their conclusions by some faulty line of reasoning that can be corrected. As if Livingstone, when presented with the historical record would say: Oh I see! Gosh, I got it wrong!
Livingstone and people like him conform to a familiar pre-1933 – that is to say pre-Holocaust – type of anti-semite. This kind of anti-semite lived among journalists, politicians and others with access to newspapers, radio stations and other public forums. They could be relied upon to see the Jews behind every scandal, to give a “Jewish twist” to any issue of public concern.
When criticised, they dismissed their critics as in the pay of the special interests that they had exposed. Of course their enemies attacked them: didn’t that prove they were on the right track?
They mostly appealed to constituencies liable to resentment at others’ perceived success. They tended to cast themselves as oppositionists, progressives. Their constituents were down, when they should be up. The Jews were up, when they should be down. Why was this so? A ready answer was always provided.
This explains much in Livingstone’s own career. He found his pleasure in anti-semitic asides mostly in the long years of his own political opposition.