Saturday, August 16, 2014

Who's responsible for these anti-Semitic attacks? Give me one guess...


From the Spectator:
Just pretend for a moment that of, say, 200 anti-Semitic attacks in the UK, a study discovered that 198 of them had been committed by Methodists… 
I was attacked by a swan the other day, as I walked along the bank of the River Stour in Kent. The creature climbed out of the water and lunged towards me, wings puffed up, making this guttural and hate-filled coughing noise. I kicked out at its stupid neck and told it to fuck off and the bird backed away towards the river, still making that demented hissing, like a badly maintained boiler. 
At first I was mystified as to how I had gained its enmity. I wasn’t near its mate and still further distant from its sallow and bedraggled idiot children. Nor had I advanced towards it, or even given it a threatening glare. 
And then the horrible realisation dawned on me. The swan had attacked me because it believed — mistakenly — that I was Jewish. There was no other possible explanation. 
And as I stood, a little shaken, on that riverbank, it occurred too that all of these mysterious anti-Semitic attacks which we’ve been hearing about recently, the attacks in which the perpetrators remain a complete and utter mystery, are almost certainly the work of swans. Why had I not realised this before? 
The previous day I had read a very long piece in the Guardian by Owen Jones precisely about anti-Semitism. In the course of more than 1,000 words Owen kindly cautioned us against having anti-Jewish feelings and pointed out that anti-Semitic attacks were on the rise throughout Europe and that this was a bad thing, on the whole. 
But nowhere did he say who was responsible for this nastiness and I was left with the impression that it could be any of us, just any of us, walking down the street one day and we’re suddenly possessed of the insuperable desire to torch a synagogue or knife a rabbi.
GO READ THE REST. 

No comments: