British politician makes anti-Semitic remark

[JohnLocke]

British politician makes anti-Semitic remark
Douglas Davis -- Jerusalem Post
Thursday, March 11, 2004
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Scottish police are investigating allegedly anti-Semitic remarks made by the chairman of Britain's ruling Labor Party, Ian McCartney, following a formal complaint by the London-based human-rights pressure group Liberty and Law.
In a speech to the Scottish Labor Party conference late last month, McCartney described Oliver Letwin, the economic spokesman of the opposition Conservative Party, as a "21st-century Fagin," a reference to the despised Jewish character in the Charles Dickens novel Oliver Twist.
"This 21st-century Fagin will pick the pockets of Scotland's pensioners by abolishing the pension credit and then plan for a new generation of poor pensioners by abolishing the second state pension," McCartney said of Letwin, the descendant of Jewish refugees from eastern Europe and a former director of the London-based bank NM Rothschild.
(...)
He was also disturbed that, "if you make anti-Semitic comments from the Left you seem to be immune from prosecution." There was, he added, "a tendency to regard the Left as socially progressive and, therefore, to regard criticism from the Left as legitimate."
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Read the rest here.

[JohnLocke]

1. He shouldn't be prosecuted for this.

He has a right to say whatever bigoted crap he lets fall out of his mouth. However, I do feel that because of this remark, his political career should be over.

[DarkPhenyx]

3. Why?

He didn't say Jews were trying to steal your pension money. He didn't say all Jews should die. He made a reference to a literary character who ran a band of pickpockets. PLEASE! there was absolutely nothing anti-Semetic about it.

[DarkPhenyx]

2. How iin the HELL was this anti-Semetic?

Like I said before people are way WAY too eager to label you anti-Semetic.

[MrPrax]

4. What a Stretch...LOL

and the report manages to get the current 'meme' about the Left being anti-semtic in as well...LOL

Besides...the Fagin character wasn't all 'despised'...the kids liked him

[DarkPhenyx]

5. An Fagin liked the kids...

...in that Michael Jackson kinda way apparently.

[MrPrax]

6. Well...

In the movie I saw they did...
He was like their Dad!!!

In fact 'better than most dads' coz he sang and danced them!!!
LOL

"and standing over them, with a toasting-fork in his hand, was a very old shrivelled Jew, whose villanous-looking and repulsive face was obscured by a quantity of matted red hair. He was dressed in a greasy flannel gown, with his throat bare; and seemed to be dividing his attention between the frying-pan and a clothes-horse, over which a great number of silk handkerchiefs were hanging." Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

[DarkPhenyx]

7. You know better than to trust movies based on books.

Tehy leave so much out. Yes, indeed it is true. Fagin was a pedophile. One of the little known bits of trivia from Mr. Dickens books.

[mobuto]

9. Have you actually read Oliver Twist?

Or is your knowledge of things Dickensian limited to stage/film adaptations? Fagin is evil and his Jewishness is central to that evil. This was most definitely an anti-Semitic slur.

[MrPrax]

12. Yeah...of course

Oliver Twist is a great read...as most Dickens

And YES I think Dickens wrote it as an anti-semtic character and NO I don't think the ref to Letwin was anti-semtic...

So there...

[number6]

8. so, is Charles Dickens anti-Semitic ?

??

[Jack Rabbit]

10. About as much as most nineteenth century Englishmen

From the BBC Online

Dickens: Ask the expert
By Andrew Xavier

Fagin was the name of one of Dickens' fellow workers at the blacking factory, but in Oliver Twist he was turned into a Jew. Surely Fagin is an Irish name? Dickens was said to dislike Jews, and there are rumours that Jacob Marley of A Christmas Carol was supposed to have been Jewish. Was this just the fashionable anti-Semitism of the time or did he have a particular experience that made him that way?

Dickens was relatively free of the conventional anti-Semitism prevalent among early Victorians. As a Christian of broad views, he was disgusted by sectarianism and debates about doctrines, so had no strong theological reason to be hostile to Judaism. However, you rightly point out that some of his writing is not free of anti-Semitism. Fagin, of course, draws upon many stereotypes. On selling the lease of his residence Tavistock House to a Jewish banker and his wife Eliza Davis, Dickens was to realise the "great wrong" he had done with his depiction of Fagin. In an 1867 revision of the text of Oliver Twist he took out most references to Fagin as "the Jew". Similarly he created the sympathetic character of Riah in Our Mutual Friend. Riah speaks eloquently on prejudice: "...it is not in Christian countries, with the Jews as with other peoples. Men say, 'This is a bad Greek, but there are good Greeks. This is a bad Turk, but there are good Turks.' Not so with the Jews... they take the worst of us as samples of the best; they take the lowest of us as presentations of the highest; and they say 'All Jews are alike'."

[mobuto]

11. Absolutely

[Darranar]

13. He probably was...

but that doesn't make this particular comment anti-semitic.