T he Press
8100d libels
ul Johnson The mythology generated by the media tin about the recent killings in Beirut con- CHII„es to become more dense and sinister. no-silTV, with its strong anti-Israeli bias, ,%v°Penly refers to the episode not even as ' Mass itl acre, but as 'the massacre', as in the Ivie of a recent programme, After the re74acre. No need to ask which massacre is w erred , to. An interesting example of the v,,a,aY In which the incident is being deployed I,1-,,, provided by David Lodge in the 5 ple-i.,'errlher issue of the Times Literary Sup- al.-et" (P.1207). Reviewing two books -out jam Le Old Testament, he contrived in a Ce.,--e 1°4 paragraph to introduce the sen:rge Steiner thesis that 'the Jews in a v.17:), Provided the conceptual framework link it their persecution possible', to the With a hint from Dan Jacobson that ekis"t otion of a 'Chosen People' , ence implies 't e e dis of those who are not chosen, who the Pensable' to compare the Jews with 'd, South African Boers and their .`Plorable' actions and finally to refer to Dleeee rIcr events in the Near East' as an exam- 1st e1` ;the way in which 'the history of Derbe,a -, IS an 'endless alternation of injustice 114`rated and injustice suffered'. Having are red the thought that whenever the Jews °A, Persecuted it is usually the result of their 4 ickedness, Lodge squared his yard- its rn,wiril a curious final sentence: 'And let ile;rtit -t forget that the recent massacre in 4ktio, so chillingly reminiscent of an with
.
"1"lat '1 in a Polish ghetto, was, with. ktIthLevrer connivance by the Israeli itlea,°.rities, actually perpetrated by people iitlfiable as "Christian".' fillikillinc:41 decent of Lodge to admit that the p were not 'actually' carried out by Niazi'But when he summons up the the ,he nr,';', a Peculiarly gratuitous intrusion, lirael"soried dart is evidently intended for *tit Is rather than Lebanese. If all he really Is‘'..ttleriette1:tvoasantoarPtoicilnet dealing with Christians j ew nh it ail'e.sPonsible, why bring in the episode -risand the 'Chosen People'? The analogy with the SS was particularly
inept because what the killings were 'chill- ingly reminiscent' of was not Europe 1939-45 but the Lebanon, at any time from the collapse of the Byzantine empire until the present. Any student of the history of this part of the world will know that it is an endlessly repetitive tale of massacres and counter-massacres conducted on a sectarian and to some extent a racial basis century after century. The small Jewish com- munities in this part of the world suffered in a number of these outrages; there is no record of their perpetrating one. The Chris- tian communities, too, were usually the vic- tims, for almost throughout this millennium paramount power, such as it was, rested in Moslem hands. That Christians survived at all during this long Dark Age was a tribute to their astonishing faith and courage and to the fact that, unlike the Jews of those days, they learned to defend themselves and even to hit back. The modern period of Christian paramountcy, 1918-58, first under France, then under the Maronites, was the one time when all the people of the Y civil eace and Lebanon were able to enjo
burgeoning prosperity. The latest cycle of violence began in 1970, when the Lebanon was invaded by Palestinian Moslem ter- rorists. During this cycle over 100,000 peo- ple were killed, many of them Christians, in incidents which could reasonably be called massacres. The Western media took little or no notice of any of them. Why, then, the sudden and overwhelming coverage of, and the continuing high-pressure attention to, the comparatively small-scale incident of September 1982? Because, for the first 'You're very prickly today.'
time, there was an anti-Israeli angle. There can be no other explanation.
The Israelis and the world Jewish com- munity are right to be profoundly disturbed by this selective emphasis. For it looks as if we are in at the birth of yet another blood libel. The Jews know from the experience of over 1500 years that the blood libel is the basis for violent anti-semitism. In the for- mative period of early Christianity, and throughout the Dark Ages, it was the presentation of the Jews as the murderers of Christ which in generation after genera- tion created a pathological hatred, finally boiling over, on the eve of the First Crusade in 1096, in the terrible French and German massacres, the direct ancestors of the Nazi holocaust. As the chronicler R. Solomon ben Samson put it, the Crusaders 'said to one another . . . here are the Jews dwelling in our midst whose forefathers slew Him and crucified Him without reason. First let us take vengeance on them and destroy them as a people'. In short, the first at- tempt at genocide was prompted by the mythology that Jews were murderers. This basic blood libel was followed by others. In 1144 the Jews of Norwich were accused of torturing then crucifying a Christian child (subsequently canonised). This episode, which seems to have been a complete fantasy, became the prototype of further blood libels all over Christian Europe. On innumerable occasions, in widely varying circumstances and places, the same crimes were imputed: ritual murders, usually of children, followed by blood-drinking. So far as historians can establish, not one of these incidents ever happened. Christian sovereigns, such as the emperor Frederick II and Pope Innocent IV, who had their own financial reasons for wishing to protect the Jewish communities, carried out extensive investigations which showed that the charges were completely baseless. Nevertheless they continued to cir- culate and to be believed right into modern times. Anti-semitic blood libels were par- ticularly strongly entrenched, for instance, in Catholic Bavaria, from which most of the Nazi leaders came. They were the genesis of Nazi conspiracy-theory and thus a salient element in the 'Final Solution'. What is still more harrowing is that they survived Auschwitz itself, and reappeared in Poland in 1946, leading to further pogroms and killings among the tiny Jewish community of survivors.
If experience is any guide, the most care- ful investigations absolving the Israelis from any deliberate responsibility, even in- direct, in the recent killings, will not kill the myth. That is one depressing fact. Still more depressing is the suspicion, again reflecting experience, that this latest blood libel will be used as justification for future genocidal action against the Israelis or, for that matter, the Jews still trapped in Russia. The damage has now been done, and members of the Western media — especially editors, TV executives and others in a posi- tion to exercise authority — must search their hearts and find means to contain it.
Previous page
