I am a philo-Semite. The disproportionate Jewish contribution to Western civilization — not least to science and the arts — is one of the most astonishing achievements of modern history.
I am also an anti-anti-Semite. The murder and mayhem perpetrated by anti-Semites throughout history, above all in the 20th century, deserves its special place in the annals of infamy.
I had assumed that anti-Semitism had no place in British life, aside from the odious antics of skinheads and other Neanderthal types on the fringes of the far right. There are therefore few things that depress me more than the resurfacing of anti-Semitism on the British left, and not on its fringes.
In an interview on BBC London last week, Ken Livingstone, the former mayor of London, claimed that “when Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism — this before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews.”
Some Nazi officials did indeed favor emigration as the “solution to the Jewish Question.” But for Livingstone to claim that this was Hitler’s preferred option is simply wrong.
From as early as 1919, Hitler repeatedly stated that he saw the Jews as “the racial tuberculosis of peoples.” In a speech he gave in April, 1920, he called for them “to be exterminated.” In “Mein Kampf’’ he wrote: “If at the beginning of the [First World] War and during the war (12,000) or 15,000 of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas … the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain.”
Germans who voted National Socialist in 1932 and 1933 were not voting for a Zionist resettlement program.GO READ THE WHOLE THING.