British readers may have noted the flap over last week's article in the "Daily Mail" claiming that Ralph Miliband, father of Labour leader Ed, "hated Britain"( and implied that the "apple didn't fall far from the tree"- in other words, like father, like son) because he was a Marxist academic, citing diary entries as well as a claim that we would have welcomed an Argentinian victory in the 1982 "Falklands War".
Critics have noted that reading between the lines, the article( ironically written by one Geoffrey Levy, presumably himself of "the Hebraic persuasion"- ie Jewish as are the Milibands, although they are not conventionally practising) sugested that Miliband senior( and rpesumably his son) was a quintessential unpatriotic outsider, ie a "rootless cosmopolitan" as both Nazis and Stalinists would have termed Jews.
Leaving aside the dubious history of the "Mail" in the 1930s when it not only supported Mosley's British Union Of Fascists and appeasement of the Nazis( as late as July 1939, the paper's proprietor Viscount Rothermere publicly and proudly posed for a "he's my pal" style photo with Nazi leader Adolf Hitler), the attack on a long dead family member of an opposition politician strikes me as "dirty pool". Several commentators(including several of his former students at the London School Of Economics and a biographer, neither of whom subscirbed to his politics) noted that the diary entries used to support the charge that Miliband pere "hated Britain" were cherry picked and quoted out of their immediate political context( ie as part of a criticism of the complacency of the pre-war British leadership, made also by the late George Orwell) and that he had served his adopted country in the Royal Navy when he was old enough to enlist for military service.
We may not have agreed with Miliband pere;s Marxist views but unlike his colleague Eric Hobsbawn( an unregenerate Stalinist if ever there was one), there was never the slightest evidence that he supported or defended regimes such as Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's China or Castro's Cuba( unlike the Mail's flacking for the BUF or the Third Reich- what was that about support for tyrannical ideologies or regimes?)
I admit that the charge of "anti-Semitism" or "self-hating Jew" is often bandied around irresponsibly(esp to demonize critics of the policies of the State of israel. If a given critic is a Gentile, then he or she is an"anti-Semite", if Jewish, they are "self-hating Jews"-talk about heads I win, tails you lose!), but it seems hard not to note the overtones of prejudice that Levy's article contained.
Anybody think as I do?
Terry
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