John Galliano, the fashion designer who likes to dress up as a pirate, was convicted of anti-Semitism in a Parisian court last week, and fined.
Galliano was once chief designer at Dior, but he got drunk in a Paris bar and screamed anti-Semitic abuse at some fat people (I am guessing they were fat) who were so upset they recorded it on their mobiles. I do not mind saying that the anti-Semitic element does not bother me in this case, even though I am a Jew. I have sharp antennae for the real deal, and this is not it. When I watch Galliano shout ‘I love Hitler!’ on that YouTube video, I don’t see a man who hates Jews. I see a man who hates himself. I do not agree with Brendan O’Neill, who wrote on these pages last week that alcoholism is not a mental illness, and good for Amy Winehouse for not going to rehab and not being suckered by the therapy industry, even if not being suckered killed her. You cannot criminalise a man so committed to knitwear.
Galliano is sick, and rather stupid, like most fashion people, because he does not know that anyone who teamed Shirley Temple curls with a Douglas Fairbanks moustache went straight to Dachau with the Commies and the Liberals. I also see a man who loves Nazi uniforms so much he forgets the politics. I wondered briefly if he meant, ‘I love Hitler[’s clothes]!’ but his lawyer forbade this clarification for fear of making a bad situation worse. He wouldn’t be the first. At least one historian thinks Nazism was all about the clothes. Rommel’s reputation has almost survived, due to James Mason’s well-cut cinematic impersonation. The civilisation that lasted 12 years was big on the ribbons, short on the meat.
I felt the same way when David Irving was banged up for Holocaust denial, in Austria of all places. Was it a joke? Only a state that most enthusiastically embraced Nazism would actually imprison a man for agreeing with them, 60 years on. It was a disgrace. It was also very funny.
But this is how Europe battles anti-Semitism in 2011. It may seek to delegitimise Israel, deny her defensible borders, smirk with piety as the Israeli flag is torn from its embassy in Egypt — those Jews must learn! — but they do get the mad pirate guy. There are other cosmetic obeisances. There are constant memorials and memorial days to the horror; all too little, too late. The only memorial the Holocaust needs is a Jewish state.
When I was a child, I thought, childishly, that anti-Semitism was a relic of the past. It had burnt itself out in the chambers. There were no great Jewish communities in central and Eastern Europe – or anywhere in Europe — but there was no hatred either. There was nothing. To hear anything anti-Semitic, I would have to listen to Cabaret, or other Jews.
Not today; the Longest Hatred was sleeping, not dead. Where to start? The concert by the Israeli Philharmonic at the Royal Albert Hall two weeks ago, invaded by protestors whose greatest crime, after hypocrisy, was trying to sing their protest? To blanket protest against Israel assumes that all Jews think the same; and what kind of person believes you spread justice by interrupting culture?
Or my former union, the NUJ, which loves to censure Israel. I thought the NUJ existed to make sub-editors feel secure, but no. It is also its job to criminalise Israel, although on China, Russia, Iran and the rest — silence. They have a word for the agenda of people who ask them, ‘What about Iran? Or Russia? Or China? Why the obsessive interest in Israel, tabloid nation?’ They call it ‘whataboutery’, and hiss with self-righteousness. But they do not answer the question. There are boycotts, motions, censures, petitions, blah; in Poland anti-Semitic toys are back. (They need the toys, because the actual Jews have gone.) Diaspora Jews respond with organisation — Jewish mothers patrol kindergartens’ playgrounds, packing heat (metaphorically) — and the next accusation, inevitably, is, the Jewish lobby is so powerful!
Anti-Semitism in Europe would never have survived if it had not mutated. I have never been accused of well poisoning, for example, or deicide. But a friend has asked me, ‘What is it about the Jews and the Holocaust? Why do you go on about it?’ For the dead, you fool. A failed actress has told me ‘Jews control Hollywood.’ Yeah — and WASPs control sailing. ‘You’re going to Conservative Friends of Israel,’ said a journalist. ‘And are you a friend of Israel, Tanya?’
There is something new, and irritating. To mention anti-Semitism is to offend. The phrase ‘the anti-Semitism card’, which has no business being used by anyone not a psychopath, has entered the language. Ah, I might say, to one of my lefty friends, as we weep down mobile telephones made of minerals hewn from the land by child slaves in Africa, ‘Isn’t it interesting that one of the key themes of European history is the persecution of the Jews?’ ‘Don’t play the anti-Semitism card,’ they reply. The card? The card?
Of course they deny it, even though to say that anti-Semitism in Europe is dead because of the Holocaust — we will never burn the Jews again because we burnt so very many Jews — is pretty much the stupidest thing I have ever heard. We are not anti-Semites; we just want justice for the Palestinians. (If only their leaders and the rest of the Arab world wanted the same.) So — we would not hate the Jews were they not wicked. That is the clarion call of the anti-Semite through the ages. They did get the pirate though.