Steven Berkoff speaks out

So Steven Berkoff says that Britons are anti-semitic. I feel the need to respond with that great American exclamation: DUH! A couple of weeks ago in the Telegraph Tim Walker reported:

"Within days of Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commisson, saying he believed that Britain was the least racist nation in Europe, the actor Steven Berkoff has claimed that its people are inherently anti-Semitic. "There is an inbuilt dislike of Jews," says Berkoff, whose production of On The Waterfront opens this month at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. "Overt anti-Semitism goes against the British sense of fair play. It has to be covert and civilised. So certain playwrights and actors on the Left wing make themselves out to be stricken with conscience. "They say: 'We hate Israel, we hate Zionism, we don't hate Jews.' But Zionism is the very essence of what a Jew is. Zionism is the act of seeking sanctuary after years and years of unspeakable outrages against Jews. As soon as Israel does anything over the top it's always the same old faces who come out to demonstrate. I don't see hordes of people marching down the street against Mugabe when tens of thousands are dying every month in Zimbabwe.""

Wasn't it Golda Meir who complained that of all the places in the Middle-East that might have been chosen to be the Promised Land, howcome we got the only one without any oil? What rotten luck for us, eh? I have been asking for weeks why people do not march in their thousands and throw shoes at the Zimbabwean embassy, or any other major international humanitarian situation. The British may be covert and civilised, but anyone who has lived there for a while knows that the WASPs will never change their minds. After all, to jew someone down is still considered a verb in England. There seems little point, however, in rehashing the whos and the whys and the hows. In the end, it is plus ca change.