Here’s an unsettling thing that happened recently. As I was searching the internet for a newspaper article, I was instead directed to a neo-Nazi website, where members with names like ‘Wolfslair’ and ‘Sydney Patriot’, were saying revolting things about me. It was a bit of a shock. I was no more prepared to find my name on that site than you would be. Unless maybe you’re Mel Gibson.
I was there because of a book I published a while ago about the Battle of Britain and the Blitz. It contained some stories of misbehaviour during the Blitz, of looting and ration fiddling, balanced by many more stories of stoicism and dogged survival. A couple of newspapers had turned these stories into articles, and it is one of these articles that has turned up on the site – reprinted in full – but it wasn’t there to prompt a discussion of the hardships and deprivations of life in wartime Britain. It was there as fodder to attack the Jews.
‘Levine is a typical Jew,’ wrote Sydney, ‘attempting to erode any positive national memory by doing what so many Jews do best, promoting the lowest common denominator in western history and eroding any sense of national pride that might exist.’ This was a bit rich, coming from someone whose strain of ‘national pride’ would have seen him interned as a wartime traitor on the Isle of Man.
Then Wolfslair – an East End thug to Sydney’s Oswald Mosley – put the boot in with an epic story about the ‘good thrashing’ his father once gave a Jew. ‘Who knows,’ he says, ‘it might have been one of Levine’s own family!’ Ha! Who knows, it really might!
And on it went. I was astonished. I have come across very little anti-semitism in my life. Until I was thirteen, I attended an almost exclusively Jewish school in London, where my class consisted of twenty-three Jews, and one Sikh boy who graduated with a basic knowledge of the Talmud. Not much scope for Jew-baiting there, although, if I think back, I can remember watching one Jewish school friend teasing another, by rubbing his nose with his forefinger, and chanting ‘Stinge!’ over and over again. How’s that for embracing your opponents’ worldview?
Every now and again, though, I’ve sensed the odd mood, heard the occasional exchange. Once – when I was a pupil barrister – I sat in on a meeting of board members of the Platignum pen company. After an hour of grinding tedium, someone mentioned a particular man. He was, apparently, miserly, grasping, ridiculous – and Jewish! Suddenly five dreary pen executives turned into gleeful children as they laughed at the Jews. “I’m not sure whether you’re aware that Mr Levine is Jewish,” interrupted my pupil master, and we were soon back to discussing the articles of incorporation.
In truth this incident didn’t bother me too much. Or at all. It just confirmed my belief that low-level anti-semitism is pretty widespread – even though my name usually goes before me like a leper’s bell, keeping the coast clear. But it didn’t prepare me for Wolfslair and Sydney Patriot. They are not sniggering pen salesmen. They are Nazi sympathizers, with hate to give. And they’ve been talking about me.
Now, it is never nice to discover that people don’t like you. But when they don’t know you, and their dislike is based on something beyond your control, it’s frightening too. If Wolfslair can hate me irrationally, then he and his kind might be capable of other irrational acts. Could they find out where I live? Could I become a target for physical abuse? It was now me thinking irrationally, and had the bully boys seen me, they might have claimed a victory.
But at the same time, a part of me was proud to have been attacked. I’d written a book that I wanted people to read, and my words had become the subject of strong opinions. But there’s more to it than that. My practical links with Judaism may now be tenuous, but an emotional attachment remains, as does respect for a tradition of courage, creativity and, if Shylock is right, sufferance. So besides shock at being caught with my head above the parapet, I also had pride that it was there for the snipers to hit. But there’s another question: should I even be taking these people seriously?
On the one hand, yes. Anti-semitism has not gone away. It is still rife in many parts of the world, in Eastern Europe, for example, where graves are regularly desecrated, and in the Arab world where it has a political agenda. And while it would be easy to imagine that the British National Party’s supporters are too busy hating the black and Asian communities in their midst to care much about a small number of British Jews they’ve never met, such an attitude would be complacent. Hatred is irrational, it thrives on ignorance. History offers plenty of examples of hostility flaring when danger seemed a thing of the past. Sydney and Wolfslair are with us right now, and they are not alone.
But looked at another way, we needn’t take them seriously at all. The internet is a virtual submarine which takes us down to the depths, where we come across ugly bottom feeders, all bared teeth and spines. But the point is – we can only see what we’re allowed to see. In reality, chatrooms and forums are a haven for the opinionated, who can seem much more influential than they really are. They’re also a haven for the inadequate, people keen to reinvent themselves, to pretend to be what they could never be in real life. It was clear that my new friends were opinionated, and I’d place a bet on high levels of inadequacy too.
In the end, I want to laugh at Sydney and Wolfslair. Ridicule is the most effective way of showing these half-men how preposterous, imbecilic, and narrow-minded they are. There is no contradiction in understanding how serious something is while refusing to take it seriously. So I’ll share my mental picture of Wolfslair as an online Wizard of Oz – a diabolical presence until a curtain is pulled back to reveal a pigeon-chested humbug, tapping away in a pair of lightly soiled underpants, surrounded by empty scotch egg packets. Yes, he exists, and yes, we should be aware of him. But there is absolutely no need to take him at his own estimation of himself.
I feel better now.
Joshua Levine 