Comments on: Anti-Semitism in British Newspapers

By: John Isbell

John Isbell — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Yup.

By: John Isbell

John Isbell — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

I guess I’ll add, rather tendentiously: whenever I see a letter on black issues with a black signature, I tend not to read it.
Of course, black signatures are so much harder to spot. The way they blend in with the community. Jewish names you can spot a mile off.
Is all this there in that guy’s comment? I think it is.

By: mint

mint — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Oh, say that isn’t so John. It can’t be that you refuse to listen
to a biased position, which is the Observer writer’s gripe. You’ll
wind up only hearing the local official take on every subject.

By: Scott Martens

Scott Martens — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Now, if he’d just said “I tend to ignore anything written by Barbara Amiel”, well, then I would have agreed with him. She was a blight on my homeland and now that she’s moved to London with her broomstick husband Conrad Black, she can be a blight on somebody else’s.

I understand Ingrams’ sentiment - we all get tired of hearing the same lines trotted out over and over again by the same kinds of people on issues - but he still deserves to be repeatedly tongue lashed for simply saying he won’t read it if the author appears to be Jewish.

By: RA

RA — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Hello, why do you assume that a Jewish writer is necessarily biased about Israel? Or, at least, necessarily biased in a certain direction? The last time I checked, there were people with Jewish names writing from every imaginable place on the political spectrum. Check out the blog you are commenting to right now!

The organized Jewish community in Britain may have a single position, but not every Jew in Britain (or anywhere else) shares it.

Do I need to suggest that Amp add your name to the address line of his memo?

By: Ampersand

Ampersand — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

RA, I can see how you could read Scott’s post that way. Given my knowledge of Scott from reading his blog, however, I’m confident that’s not how Scott meant it; he’s well aware that there’s a range of Jewish opinion on the Israel question (and, I might add, all other imaginable questions).

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

I think RA was responding to Mint, actually (or at least, that’s how I read it…).

By: Larry Lurex

Larry Lurex — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

My own take on this is that while I disagree with Ingrams, I think that there are some very scary pro-Israel people out there. I wrote on a web site about some horrific pictures of the Holocaust were, and something to the effect that Israel shouldn’t use violent means to achieve her ends. Well, wasn’t I accused of anti-Semitism?

BTW, I’m probably one of the few people blogging who *has* visited Belsen. It is deeply sad.

I have sympathy for the idea of the state of Israel, in common with many British people, but sympathy also for the Palestinians, who have suffered a lot. I think it is time for a permanent settlement.

By: Scott Martens

Scott Martens — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Uh, I hope RA didn’t mean me, since I was trying to say that Ingrams is wrong. Ingrams is wrong even though a letter to the editor on Israel written by someone with a Jewish last name is more likely to be pro-Israel than a letter written by someone with an Arab last name. I would say exactly the same thing if someone wrote that they don’t read letters to the editor about Israel written by people with Arab names.

By: blunted

blunted — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been accused of being anti-Semetic… and it’s usually by the same people who accuse me of being unpatriotic for not supporting the President. Since I don’t support Israel’s attacks on Palestinians, I must not like Jewish people. But I don’t support the Palestinian’s suicide bombings, so does that make me anti-Arab?

If some ill-informed (in my opinion) soul decides to be against Affirmative Action, I don’t automatically label them a racist… just like if someone says they don’t want a cheeseburger for lunch, I don’t label them a vegetarian. We all have things that we agree/disagree with, but lately there seem to be blanketing buzzwords used to label an individual with one specific belief. Think gays should be allowed to have sex? Well, my friend, you’re part of the “homosexual agenda”. Politically, we all tend to throw people into groups based on one or two beliefs expressed.

By: PG

PG — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Mr. Ingrams’s anti-semitism is the kind that is becoming common with non-Muslim Europeans. They are not anti-Jewish except when it comes to Israel.
There was a scandal recently about someone who refused to hire a faculty member because the candidate was Israeli. I don’t think this would have happened had it been an American, Australian, French etc. Jew.

There was an excellent post here, some time back, about distinguishing between those who are anti-semitic and anti-Israel.
But these Europeans make it hard to draw a line between the two, because their anti-semitism is based in their anti-Israelism. They try to excuse what has grown into bigotry because they claim it is politically based.

By: PinkDreamPoppies

PinkDreamPoppies — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

I’m not supporting Mr. Ingram’s comment at all, but I do want to clear something up. There’s been some mention that Mr. Ingram wasn’t reading letters from people on the subject of Israel if the letter was signed by a person with a Jewish name. This isn’t what he said. What he said was that he didn’t bother to read letters in favour of the Israeli government that are signed by people with Jewish names. This doesn’t make it any more appropriate (and I wholeheartedly agree with Amp’s sentiment that the man should go fuck himself) but let’s be sure to ridicule him for what he actually said.

By: Aaron

Aaron — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

I think PinkDreamPoppies may have a point about the Ingrams quote. But I don’t read things written by people with Pink, Dream, or Poppies in their name so I wouldn’t have the slightest idea what was written.

By: Kevin Moore

Kevin Moore — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t read letters written by anyone with the last name of Moore. They’re all idiots.

By: Tom T.

Tom T. — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

How can Ingrams know whether a letter supports Israel unless he reads it? Or at least some of it. It strikes me that he’s not even being honest about his prejudice; it just wouldn’t sound as loftily dismissive for him to say that he reads these letters and then gripes about them in a nasty way.

By: Joe Grossberg

Joe Grossberg — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

I wonder if, whenever Ingram sees a feminist article/letter, he’ll disregard it if the author is female.

After all, “too few people in this modern world are prepared to declare an interest when it comes to this kind of thing”.

Kudos, Amp.

By: Amy S.

Amy S. — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

I’m changing my last name to “Smith” in hopes that fewer crackpots will respond to my letters in the local paper, thus greatly diminishing my customary take of dead fetus pictures, bible tracts, and long rants in orange Crayola about myself, the Pope, Elmo and Sharon all uniting to destroy the Aryan race’s purity.

By: mint

mint — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

RA, I’ve no idea whether the Observer writer’s insinuation, that
all mail about Israel he receives from people with Jewish
sounding names is biased, is true or not. That’s not my problem.
It would not surprise me if a large majority of such mails were
biased in favour of Israel, it’s policies or even the IDF and I
wouldn’t mind. I would expect him to voice conflicting, and biased,
opinions equally, and certainly not to exclude a commentator on the
basis of his name.

By: r@d@r

r@d@r — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

I have a feeling Dick Ingrams is going to be getting a whole lotta letters to ignore in the near future.

Apropos of nothing, I have at least once been met with surprise by people who share my last name (of rather nondescript German origin) when I informed them that sadly no, I did not have the honor of calling myself a fellow Jew. Maybe I should send Mr. Ingrams a letter so that he’ll ignore my goyishe opinions as well.

I also feel completely free to criticize the policies of the state of Israel along with my many Jewish friends who passionately and wholeheartedly do the same.

By: Mary-Jane

Mary-Jane — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Till I moved to the US, I was a regular reader of The Observer, so I should point out that Mr Ingrams is the paper’s resident right-wing lunatic, and is (if letters to the Editor are any indication) either ignored or detested by most of its readers. He regularly writes anti-feminst (in fact, anti-just about everything which has happened since 1950) tracts too. Because so many people ignore him, he will occasionally write something more nasty and bigoted than usual, just to get a reaction (and raise his quota of outraged letters from readers, no doubt.) I think it’s probably better to just pretend that he doesn’t exist, as he seems to be one of those conservatives who thrive on annoying anyone to the left of Strom Thurmond.
But I do agree that he’s plumbed new depths with this latest screed. Shame on him, and shame on The Observer (which, even though it’s supposedly a liberal paper, has been drifting rightwards since supporting the invasion of Iraq) for providing him with a platform for hate speech.