These days, you can be quietly reading an article in a British newspaper about one of the great minds of our time, and then suddenly out of nowhere -- wallop! -- you get mugged by a bigot wielding another grotesque libel against the Jews. Today's interview in the Guardian with the eminent mathematician Sir Miichael Atiyah concludes with the following sally by the great man:

'I think Tony Blair really is in a terrible, terrible dilemma. So, of course, is George Bush, but George Bush you can make allowances for: he's just stupid. And Tony Blair is smart, and it's much more difficult to understand why he's driven himself into this position. The real fundamental cause of these things arises out of the Israeli-Palestinian problem. Much more generally, it's the influence of the west on its former colonies. The impact of the west is very complicated, some plus, some minus, but what's being implemented now is the negative part, imposing western power for economic, political, strategic reasons, which I think more and more leads to hostility, and the Israeli-Palestinian thing is at the core of that. As long as that's not stopped in a satisfactory way, the problem will continue. It is the terrible irony of the world that the Jews suffered terribly during the war in the Holocaust, and now are in some senses the cause of the next Holocaust." '

So the Jews are the new Nazis. The fact that it is Israel that has been targeted for extermination for half a century, and the Jews who have been targeted once again for extermination, and the Israelis who are being murdered in droves, somehow has escaped Sir Michael's attention. Instead, the measures Israel has been forced to take to try to prevent yet more of its people from being exterminated are the causes of hostility. Never mind the incitement against the Jews and demented libels and conspiracy theories about them now rampant throughout the Arab world, which anyone with a fraction of Sir Michael's great brain might conclude just possibly has something to do with the violence being perpetrated against them. Never mind the fact that all Israel's military action is conducted in self defence. Never mind the fact that Christians, moderate Muslims, Hindus and other creeds are being persecuted by Muslims across the world; never mind the thwarted attempt to explode a poison gas bomb in Jordan recently, or the human bomb in Saudi today, or the attacks across Asia or in Chechnya all designed to wipe out any opposition to the Islamic fascism that displays itself openly in statement after statement. Sir Michael brushes all these things aside. One thing alone he knows: the Jews are underneath the lot.

And unfortunately, Sir Michael is far from alone now in Britain in thinking such monstrous thoughts. Truly, this country is in the grip of some terrible alchemy that turns truth into lies, ignorance into erudition and the victims of fascism into its perpetrators. On such bigotry this nation now fawns.

Posted by melanie at April 21, 2004