CKNW Editorial
for April 25, 2000

David Irving is acknowledged by his peers to be the best historical researcher on earth. But being an historian involves more than just unearthing documents and reporting on them – it requires the much higher art of putting things into proper perspective and making the correct evaluations. This is where Irving has come a cropper for he has been an open admirer of Adolf Hitler and a denier of the holocaust.

His love for Hitler apparently stems from the notion that if Churchill had made peace with Hitler in the summer of 1940, or even as late as the Spring of 1941, Hitler would have polished off Russia and thus ended once and for all the threat of communism. It never occurs to Irving, or the one or two other revisionists with the same view, that Hitler would scarcely have stopped at Russia, where he would have inherited the vast Russian petroleum reserves but certainly would have grabbed Iran, the source of much of Britain’s oil supply, captured the Suez Canal then, as sure as anything in life is, have turned back on Britain.

Irving’s Anti-Semitism seems pretty deep rooted and started, much like Doug Collins did, denying the extent of the holocaust moving to where in recent years he has denied it even took place.

An author declared that Irving was an Anti-Semite and Irving sued her and Penguin Books for libel and received much funding from clearly Anti-Semitic sources often masking themselves as mere supporters of free speech. He lost the case at a cost of about $5 million, which he doesn’t have and, perhaps worse was confirmed as an Anti-Semite by the judge.

This demonstrates once more to me that creeps like Irving, Collins, Zundel and the lot are better left to spout their arrant and admittedly hurtful rubbish rather than be suppressed. That way men and women of good sense will be able to deal with their rubbish out in the open.

There is Anti-Semitism in our world, big time. There has been for eons. The musical Fiddler on the Roof which the New Westminster Theater is doing – and a very good production it is – is about pogroms and forced evacuation from Russia in the last century. Anti-Semitism is no longer official and, the saints be praised, no longer unofficial as an unwritten rule of clubs and societies. But it remains and one must ask why.

I think there are two reasons. The first is the huge success Jews have had in two walks of life – the arts, broadly speaking, and in finance. This is resented but because it is so obvious it becomes great fodder for any who want to see some Zionist conspiracy afoot.

The second is the association of Jews, in the minds of many, with the State of Israel especially when Israel does something seen as bloody-minded.

There is no doubt that there is a disproportionate number of Jews in the arts and in finance. And there is a very good reason for that. The Jews possess one of the world’s great religions which even in its most diluted form and even, oddly enough amongst Jewish atheists, acts as a tremendous bond. It also, over the centuries since Christ, brought with it huge opprobrium from the Christian religion. In the middle ages Jews were even expelled from England and everywhere they settled after they were chased from Palestine were discriminated against. Because, unlike the earlier Christian Church, they were not forbidden to lend money with interest, they quite naturally became very good bankers and that became part of the Jewish culture. The Jews were denied political rights and in many places until recently even the right to own property. Unsurprisingly, they became leaders in that which they were permitted to do, the arts.

Do Jews perhaps have some inherited predisposition towards these things? I don’t know and that’s a mighty dangerous area to get into. Perhaps, on the evidence of their success one might be tempted to come to that conclusion much as we see Blacks as superior athletes. Not being an anthropologist I pass on the question except to observe that Blacks, like Jews denied so many rights, found athletics a way to escape their particular Ghetto. It doesn’t really matter because Society doesn’t base its judgments on what a person can do or does for a living but on what kind of a person they are.

The second point is an awkward one because there are many Jews who see criticism of the State of Israel as Anti-Semitic, a notion I’ve always condemned for the very reason I now raise it. This permits Anti-Semites to take whatever wrong they see emerging, from time to time, as being the fault not of Israel the state but Jews, period. For if being an Israeli and being a Jew are always the same thing, then sins alleged will apply to all Jews irrespective of what country they are citizens of. And there is sometimes much to complain about with Israel. In fact it was only a few days ago that an Israeli Court upheld the right of an Israeli Arab to own land in hitherto Jewish neighbourhoods – the sort of restrictive behaviour so rightly condemned by Jews when these restrictions applied to them in Canada and elsewhere.

It is on this point that people like Irving feast for material. It is wrong in the extreme to visit whatever shortcomings Israel may from time to time display on non Israeli Jews. And it is a great wrong that organizations like the Canadian Jewish Congress perpetuate by blurring into the unrecognizable the distinction between Jews and Israelis. Having felt the lash of the CJC I know how quick they are to condemn, as anti Jewish, opinions that may be contra to the current Israeli political correctness.

What is most instructive is that many Jews, perhaps even a majority, both in Israel and without see the danger of such false reasoning.

Jews tend to form strong associations one with the other wherever they live and any who have spent a moment looking at their history would have little doubt why this is. In fact it is by no means unique to Jews but encompasses all societies who are closely bound to a history and religion and who have felt the pain of discrimination, often life threatening, in lands where they have settled.

The Judge in the David Irving case has done a great service in declaring official the obvious – that David Irving is an Anti-Semite who cloaks that Anti-Semitism with otherwise good history well written. And there are lessons to be learned from this decision if the war against Anti-Semitism is to be successfully fought – lessons for Jews and non Jews alike.