"You should write about it," my husband advised me, no doubt fed up with my banging on about how revoltingly unfair it was that tiny Israel was invariably singled out for monstering when there are so many barbaric, genocidal, undemocratic countries in the world, and that anti-Semitism was surely the only reason for this.
And Israel is not the only target. In recent years, under the cack-handed guise of anti-Zionism, driven by Islamist nutters and followed by useful Anglo idiots ("The sinister leading the silly," the late Christopher Hitchens called the we-are-all-Hizbollah-now mob, and that about sums it up), there has been a sharp upswing in anti-Jewish attacks in this country: something that the anti-racist movements seem on the whole to regard with an eerie and quite vile lack of concern.
Me, I wouldn't insist on anti-Semitism being the only reason for the singling out of Israel for monstering; a confusion of other motives is also at work. But more important is that this singling out is itself a form of anti-Semitism since no principled basis has ever been set out for judging the Jewish state by a harsher and more punitive standard than other countries. There are those in the boycott crowd who do not hate Jews; yet they behave as if they do, and that is the crucial point.
As for Julie's phrase 'eerie and quite vile lack of concern': in the face of anti-Semitism today this is, unfortunately, spot on with regard to a sector of self-styled anti-racist opinion. It has an alibi, you see - Israel. Oh, and why should Israel be singled out for specially unfavourable attention? Er...
