Jews Don’t Count by David Baddiel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Jew-Whispering

Fortunately the days of Swastikas on storefronts and Jew-baiting at cocktail parties are mostly past. Or at least only a few obviously mad people would defend the doers. But that doesn’t mean that Jews have been liberated from a sort of anti-Semitic Jim Crow intended to keep them in their place. This is what David Baddiel’s (according to him, the best known person in Britain for being Jewish) book is about - the spruced-up, toned-down, but unmissable hatred of Jews. Once you become aware of it, you can’t miss it.

The new anti-Semite is a kinder and gentler racist than his forbears. He knows that berating the Jew, much less kicking him, is generally counterproductive to the cause, which, of course, is to create a feeling of superiority. Catcalls of ‘Christ killer’ or overt hostility might provoke a public reaction that looks bad and feels bad. So the anti-Semite has developed a new strategy: ignore the Jew. Just don’t acknowledge him at all. Act as if anti-Semitic racism just doesn’t exist, and really never has.

This new approach has real functional merit. Jews get the message, so the anti-Semite gets his buzz. And unlike traditional methods, there’s nothing overt to criticise. Obviously any complaints, for example by a Jew like Baddiel, are a consequence of over-sensitivity (and of course Jewish paranoia). The proof lies only in the negative differences in the attention paid to others not in positive action. These differences are what Baddiel slowly and softly reveals, the undercurrent of hatred of which only the victim is aware.

It’s a kind of horse-whispering really. Like the modern cowboy, the modern anti-Semite knows that Jews are intelligent, social creatures. Getting such animals to conform requires subtlety and lightness of touch. Body language not harangues establish dominance. Slight but decisive nudges are then all that is necessary to remind the animal of whose in charge. Once a horse is under saddle it has essentially lost its identity as a horse and, and accepts and is accepted in its servile position among human beings.

The successful Jew-whisperer is then able to minimise the importance of the growing number of overt acts - the vandalism of Jewish cemeteries, the harassment of Jewish neighbourhoods, and indeed the killing of Jews in their synagogues. The anti-Semite can claim these are isolated incidents that involve religion not race (this inverting the causality used by the Catholic Church to distance itself from its anti-Semitic pedigree).

Baddiel provides dozens of factual examples to make his point. These are necessarily anecdotal. One in particular I find irresistible. I think it appropriate to end my remarks with it:

“… in July 2020, following the general questioning around race and ethnicity provoked by BLM, the Archbishop of York, the Right Reverend Stephen Cottrell said, in the Sunday Times, ‘Jesus was a black man’.

If you don’t think that comment profoundly offensive, you’ve made Baddiel’s point for him. Jew-whisperers are everywhere.

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