Further Remarks on the Case of Gideon Falter

Gideon Falter: chief executive of the 

Campaign Against Antisemitism

 

In response to a recent post [1] in which I stuck up for the right to cross the road - be one a proverbial chicken or an openly Jewish individual - I had a charming email from someone telling me I'm a Zionist stooge at best and an apologist for genocide at worst. 

 

Surely you realise that Gideon Falter is an activist and provocateur and that the whole thing with him being stopped by the police was staged for the cameras?

 

Well, yes, okay - but that's not really the issue, is it? 

 

Even Rosa Parks [2] had pre-planned with others in the NAACP her courageous act of civil disobedience on that fateful day in December 1955 when she refused to give up her seat on a bus in Alabama. And she was perfectly happy to be photographed being fingerprinted when arrested for a second time, in 1956, one month into the Montgomery bus boycott that her initial arrest had sparked.

 

The fact that Parks might also be described as an activist and provocateur who understood the power of symbolic protest and how to use the media to get her point across, doesn't detract from the rightness of her actions in exposing the shameful reality of segregation.   

 

Similarly, the fact that Falter exposed that on a spring day in central London, in April 2024, a man can be stopped from going about his peaceful and perfectly lawful business and walking where he wishes to walk on the grounds that his openly Jewish appearance - he was wearing a yarmulke - would antagonise a pro-Palestinian crowd to such an extent that his safety couldn't be guaranteed by the Met police, is what matters here. 

 

At least that's what matters to those of us who value the freedom of the individual above that of a vitriolic and potentially violent mob seeking to intimidate; in other words, I don't care that it was a manufactured incident.       

Notes  

[1] See: 'Openly Jewish' (22 April 2024): click here. 

[2] Rosa Parks (1913 - 2005) was an American activist in the civil rights movement best known for her pivotal role in the Montgomery bus boycott. 

Openly Jewish (This is the Nine O'Clock News in London 2024)

An unidentified policeman prevents Gideon Falter 

from crossing the road 

 

 

I have to admit, I was never a fan of the BBC satirical sketch show Not the Nine O'Clock News (1979-82); too smug and Oxbridgey for my tastes I'm afraid [1].

 

And apart from the sketch featuring Pamela Stephenson in a white bra inviting an American Express card holder to rub her tits [2] - and the one featuring Rowan Atkinson as Gerald the gorilla (Wild, I was absolutely livid!) [3] - there is really only one other memorable sketch ...

 

And that's the one in which Atkinson plays a police inspector questioning Griff Rhys Jones's constable Savage, who has repeatedly brought ludicrous and trumped up charges against a Mr Winston Kadogo, on the grounds that he possessed "curly black hair and thick lips" [4].     

 

I thought of this sketch skewering police racism when I heard an officer (outrageously) threaten to arrest a man in central London for being openly Jewish ... [5]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The three male performers in Not the Nine O'Clock News - Rowan Atkinson, Mel Smith, and Griff Rhys Jones - were all public school boys who went on to study at Oxbridge. Most of the writers on the show, including Andy Hamilton, Clive Anderson, and Richard Curtis, were also graduates of these elite universities.     

[2] Series 2, episode 3 (1980): click here.

[3] Series 2, episode 5 (1980): click here.

[4] Series 3, episode 2 (1980): click here.

[5] Gideon Falter, chief executive of the Campaign Against Antisemitism, was prevented from going about his lawful business and threatened with arrest for potentially antagonising members of a pro-Palestinian march by his very Jewishness (Aldwych, Sat 13 April, 2024): click here.  

 

 

For a follow up post to this one, in response to an angry (and I would say antisemitic) email, click here.  

     

 

 

Political Reflections on November 9th

 

 

I. 

 

I'm sure there are reasons why November 9th might resonate within the British memory and cultural imagination; events that took place on this date include, for example, the birth of Edward VII (1841) and the murder of Mary Keller at the hands of Jack the Ripper (1888). The Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, also died on this date, in 1953. 

 

However, November 9th means far more for the Germans than it does for us Brits. For November 9th was the date of two fatally significant events in modern German history: the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 and Kristallnacht in 1938 ...

 

 

II. 

 

The Beer Hall Putsch was a failed coup d'état led by Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler (in collaboration with the famous German general and War hero Erich Ludendorff).

 

Inspired by the Fascist March on Rome the year before, around 2000 Nazis marched on the Feldherrnhalle, in Munich city centre. Here they were confronted by an armed police cordon, which resulted in the deaths of sixteen Nazis, four police officers, and one bystander.

 

Hitler escaped and hid out in the countryside for a couple of days before being arrested and charged with treason. Although things had not gone to plan, the putsch brought Hitler to the attention of the entire German nation for the first time and generated front-page headlines in newspapers around the world. 

 

His subsequent trial, which lasted for over three weeks, was also widely publicised and gave him an opportunity to promote his National Socialist ideology. Found guilty of treason, Hitler was sentenced to five years in Landsberg Prison (where he dictated his autobiography-cum-political manifesto, Mein Kampf). 

 

After serving only nine months in jail, Hitler was released on Christmas Eve, 1924. Having learned from his mistaken attempt to seize power through revolutionary force, he immediately set about transforming the NSDAP from a paramilitary organisation into a modern political party that could garner popular support and secure him victory at the ballot box.

 

In 1933, the Nazi Party won 44 per cent of the vote, which gave them 288 seats in the Reichstag. Hitler, as Chancellor, passed the Enabling Act in March of this year, which gave him the plenary powers to make laws without the Reichstag's approval. This also allowed him to destroy all opposition to his rule and by the autumn of 1934 - following the death of President Hindenburg in August of that year - Hitler was now in complete control as Führer of the German Reich.  

 

In 1939, Hitler declared that November 9th would henceforth be an official public holiday, on which to commemorate the martyrs of the Nazi movement who were killed during the Munich Putsch.

 

 

III.

 

There is, of course, another reason to remember this date: Kristallnacht - or the Night of Broken Glass - a planned and coordinated pogrom against the German Jews carried out by members of the Nazi Party's paramilitary forces (the SA and SS), in 1938.

 

Shamefully, a number of German citizens also actively participated in the orgy of violence and destruction, although most, like members of the civil authorities, simply stood by looking on (some with horror some with glee) as Jewish stores, houses, schools, and synagogues were ransacked and smashed. Even Jewish graves were violated.  

 

In all, 267 synagogues were destroyed throughout Greater Germany; over 7,000 Jewish businesses were damaged, and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps. Estimates of fatalities caused by the attacks have varied. Early reports claimed that 91 Jews had been murdered, but more recent analysis of German sources puts the figure much higher and when deaths from post-arrest maltreatment and subsequent suicides are included, the death toll reaches well into the hundreds. 

 

The world was shocked at this widely reported event; The Times declared - rightly - that it had disgraced the entire German nation. The Daily Telegraph correspondent spoke of a nauseating mix of racism and hysteria. But no one really did anything other than voice their outrage at what was, we now know, a prelude to or foreshadowing of the Final Solution and the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust.   

 

 

IV.

 

When people today wonder why they should be concerned with the surge in antisemitism and anti-Israeli hate speech following the events of October 7th and the subsequent war in Gaza, this is why. 

 

To be perfectly honest, as much as one may feel sympathy for the Palestinians, I really don't want to hear calls for Jihad and/or intifada on the streets of London; nor chants of from the river to the sea. 

 

And nor, come to that, do I think it anything other than outrageous that the Anne Frank day care center for pre-school children in the small German town of Tangerhütte - which has operated under that name since the 1970s - may be renamed after a number of migrant parents complained.

 

Apparently, these parents find the name (and story of) Anne Frank problematic - presumably in much the same way that posters featuring the faces of Jewish children kidnapped and held hostage by Hamas are said to be problematic and provocative.  

 

For officials, including the mayor, in Tangerhütte to agree to this act of historical erasure is profoundly depressing. Didn't Germany promise to never forget what had happened in the twentieth-century and never allow such things to happen again ...?

 

Predictably, however, they justify the name change on the (woke) grounds that it is important to celebrate the diversity of the children attending and not oblige them (or their parents) to have to deal with complex political issues arising from a past about which they know nothing and care even less.

 

If these officials get their way - although following a huge backlash this now seems very unlikely - Kita Anne Frank will soon become known as the World Explorer [Weltendecker] day care centre; a name that is as vacuous as the people who came up with it.   

 

 

Education for Death

The original poster for Walt Disney's 

Education for Death (1943)

 

I.

 

Education for Death (1943) is an animated short film produced by Walt Disney, which illustrates how to make a Nazi out of a child. Directed by Clyde Geronimi, it was based on a non-fiction book of the same title by Gregor Ziemer, published two years previously [1]. 

 

The film tells the story of Hans, a boy born and raised in Nazi Germany and enrolled (with his parents blessing) into the Hitlerjugend. 

 

The audience is told that Hans is fed a constant diet of lies and taught how to hate any non-Aryan peoples - particularly the Jews. His sacred duty is to serve his Führer and Fatherland, even if this meant sacrificing his life.    

 

In one scene, Hans and his fellow pupils watch as their teacher draws a cartoon on the blackboard of a rabbit being eaten by a fox, prompting Hans to express his sympathy for the former. The teacher, furious by this display of feeling, orders Hans to sit in the corner wearing a dunce-cap, to the amusement of his classmates. 

 

Hans thus learns an important lesson; namely, that it is right for the strong to prey on the weak and that he must show no mercy for his natural inferiors.

 

Later, Hans takes part in a book-burning, where works by Spinoza, Voltaire, and Einstein are consigned to the flames and the Bible is replaced with a copy of Hitler's Mein Kampf. 

 

After years endlessly marching and sieg heiling dressed in his Hitler Youth uniform, Hans is finally deemed a good Nazi and old enough to join the Wehrmacht so that he can fight (and if need be die) for his country. 

 

Years of indoctrination into National Socialist ideology have ensured he only sees, thinks, and does what the Party want him to see, think, and do. Hans has effectively become a hate-filled automaton, blind to the irony of the fact that in order to view Jews as subhuman, he has himself been dehumanised.

 

Ultimately, Hans and his young comrades meet the violent end they were educated for and the film ends with a row of swastika-stamped graves ...  

 

 

II.

Unfortunately, Nazis are not the only ones who educate their children for death, or martyrdom, as some would have it ... 

 

The textbooks used in the Palestinian Authority school system are full of deadly ideas and images. Expressions of hatred towards Israel - including the denial of its right to exist and praise for the armed struggle against it, as well as crude antisemitic propaganda targeting Jews in general - are so commonplace that even the UN and the EU have voiced their concern [2]. 

 

But whether some members of these organisations like it or not - and whether flag-waving supporters of Palestine care to admit it or not - youngsters in Gaza and the West Bank are educated from birth in an atmosphere of religious and political fervour, which results in (and perpetuates) a profoundly depressing cycle of violence and terrorism disguised as holy war or jihad. 

 

 

Images found in Palestinian schoolbooks showing a youth firing stones 

at Israeli soldiers and a girl laughing as the infidels burn. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Gregor Ziemer, an American author and teacher who lived in Germany from 1928 to 1939, wrote the book Education for Death after fleeing Germany on the eve of World War II. His work highlights how the Nazi Party controlled every aspect of children's education. As well as the Disney short, the book also inspired the black-and-white live action film Hitler's Children (dir. Edward Dmytryk, 1943), starring Tim Holt, Bonita Granville, and Kent Smith. It's brutal portrayal of life in the Hitler Youth was among the most financially successful films produced by RKO Studios. 

 

[2] As recently as May of this year - just five months before the present conflict in Gaza began (thanks to Hamas) - the European Parliament passed a resolution condemning hateful Palestinian textbooks and threatening to freeze funding for education, unless all antisemitic content was removed.

      Whether they'll actually do anything, however, is doubtful; the EU remains the Palestinian Authority's largest financial benefactor and this is the fourth consecutive year that the European Parliament has passed a resolution criticizing the Palestinian Authority for its school material. Nevertheless, this is the first time that an EU resolution has directly linked the deplorable stuff found in some textbooks with the role played by adolescents in terrorism.  

      For their part, the PA defends much of the material as an important part of their own cultural narrative.

      As for the United Nations, in 2019 a panel of independent experts submitted a report containing unprecedented criticism of the Palestinian Authority, finding that they had failed to implement UN treaties on racism. 

      The committee also reported the existence of hate speech in media outlets (particularly those controlled by Hamas), in statements made by public officials, and in school curricula and textbooks. It called on the PA to combat such hate speech and to remove derogatory comments and stereotypical images from school textbooks that perpetuate racial prejudice.

 

On the Art and Necessity of Coffin Sleeping

Sarah Bernhardt (1880) and Toyah Willcox (1979)

demonstrate the art of coffin sleeping

I.

 

An anonymous reader writes with reference to a recent post which can be read here:

 

 

'I know you sometimes like to present yourself as a "thanatologist", but, really, to celebrate someone such as Sarah Bernhardt - the world's original ham actress - due to the fact they sleep in a coffin is a little pathetic. 

      There's nothing in the least amusing about her morbid behaviour and hysterical exhibitionism and one suspects that Shaw was quite right to identify Bernhardt as ultimately nothing more than an attention-seeking egotist who never explored or revealed anything of the characters she played on stage and film, but simply turned them all into manifestations of her self.'   

 

I have to say, I suspect that's a little unfair on Miss Bernhardt - and it also gives a false impression of the post I wrote in her memory. For whilst I do mention the coffin sleeping - alongside her love for a pet lizard whilst a child - what I actually celebrate is her stoicism, courage, and endurance; for the fact that she dared to live dangerously and love fate, as famously advocated by Nietzsche.     

 

And, whilst we're on the subject, let me further add that I admire Bernhardt for her defiant Jewishness in the face of violent antisemitism. For although she was raised as a Catholic (receiving her first communion in 1856), Bernhardt never denied her Jewish heritage; even when crowds threw stones at her whilst on tour in Russia, or when the right-wing French press attacked her for her passionate defence of Alfred Dreyfus.  

But, to return, briefly, to the subject of coffin sleeping ... 

 

When, in 1880, she allowed herself to be photographed stretched out in a coffin with her eyes closed and covered in flowers - a coffin in which she would also relax when learning her lines (perhaps fearful that she might one day die on stage) - Bernhardt undoubtedly knew this would add to her reputation [1]. 

 

And one suspects that - almost a hundred years later - the English singer and actress Toyah Willcox was also very aware that she'd be able to grab some headlines by claiming to sleep in a coffin, although, in her case, one suspects she genuinely did so in order to keep warm at a time when her restricted financial means meant she had no bed to sleep in at the South London warehouse she was squatting [2]. 

 

For sleeping in a coffin is certainly preferable to sleeping on a cold concrete floor and poverty, rather than a desire for publicity, is more often the reason why people resort to this practice. Indeed, one is reminded of the fact that the first homeless shelters which opened in 19th-century London were known as coffin houses ... 

 

 

II. 

 

Operated by the Salvation Army, these institutions were established primarily to provide food and assistance. But, uniquely, the poor and destitute would also be allowed to sleep in a coffin-shaped wooden box and generously provided with a tarpaulin with which to cover themselves. 

 

Although such places sound grim and, indeed, were grim - they proved to be very popular and remained in operation into the early 20th-century. Supporters of coffin houses argued that not only were the homeless able to find rest, but they were also afforded the chance to find God - provided they had the fourpence admission fee ...    

 

 

 Men preparing for another night's kip 

in a coffin house (c. 1900)

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Having said that, however, Bernhardt did seem to have a taste for the morbid and macabre, even once visiting the Paris morgue in order to learn how better to feign the signs of death.  

 

[2] See the interview with Titbits (Nov 1981) in which Miss Willcox discusses why she slept in a coffin: click here.  

 

 

Rutiluphilia (Reflections on Redheads)

Emma Hack: 'The Redhead' 

from the series Beautiful Women (2013)

emmahackartist.com.au 

Naturally red hair is an uncommon condition, even amongst the native peoples of north-western Europe, such as the Celts, in whom it occurs more frequently. In Ireland, for example, the most redheaded nation on earth, no more than 10% of the population are blessed in this manner, although over 1-in-3 carry the recessive ginger gene variant.

Whilst red hair is associated with other physical characteristics - such as fair (often freckled) skin and light (often green) coloured eyes - so too is it rich with cultural significance and subject to both positive and negative stereotyping.

Redheaded women, for example, are said to be fiery of temper and sharp of tongue.

But they are also regarded as morally suspect and bestial in nature, which is why, for example, during the Christian Middle Ages red hair in combination with green eyes was taken as a sure sign of a witch, a werewolf, a vampire - or a Jew. Such fear and mistrust of redheads - particularly in fatal combination with antisemitism - led to their persecution as heretics during the Spanish Inquisition. 

Not surprisingly, red-haired women also feature in the pornographic imagination as unusually passionate and promiscuous. Perhaps this is due to the vividness of their colouring; or perhaps it's their sensitivity to ultraviolet light and other forms of stimulation that makes such vixens of them.

Or perhaps all such ethno-sexual stereotyping is just nonsense ...     

Jews of the Wrong Sort: Notes on D. H. Lawrence and Anti-Semitism

Honor Blackman as Mrs Fawcett in The Virgin and the Gypsy 
dir. Christopher Miles (1970)

An angry email arrives in my inbox (not for the first time):

"Dear Stephen Alexander,

I was extremely disappointed to find the expression 'Jews of the wrong sort' appearing in one of your recent posts (Orophobia, 16 Nov 2017), without any word of commentary or any condemnation of this racist phrase borrowed from D. H. Lawrence, a well-known antisemite. This kind of indiscretion brings shame on you and what is, in many respects, an excellent blog."*    

There are several things I'd like to say in response to this ...

Firstly, like Sylvia Plath, I'm someone who writes and identifies as a bit of a Jew, as I make clear in an early post where I reveal that key influences on my thinking include Jacques Derrida, Malcolm McLaren, and Larry David: click here. I'm certain that, for some, these three figures would also represent Jews of the wrong sort, i.e. provocateurs who gaily deconstruct the metaphysical illusions and sentimental ideals by which the majority choose to live.

Secondly, Lawrence - if it is in fact Lawrence speaking in The Captain's Doll and not an anonymous narrator offering either an indirect rendering of the thoughts of the protagonist or their own (ironic) commentary - is, like me, clearly in favour of sardonic individuals who seek to curb the enthusiasm of Bergheil romantics, such as Hannele, and encourage the difficult descent into the what Heidegger terms the nearness of the nearest (even if this risks a fall into gross materialism).

Thus Lawrence's attitude with reference to this question, as to many others concerning race, is ultimately complex and ambiguous (sometimes outrageously inconsistent) and The Captain's Doll is a text that remains highly resistant to any final interpretation.

Personally, I would argue that, for Lawrence, Jews of the wrong sort are people very much of the right sort. That is to say, very much his sort (just as they are my sort). And this is so because his status as an outsider obliged him to identify with groups and individuals whom society often holds in contempt; not just Jews, but also Gypsies, for example.

Thus, in The Virgin and the Gipsy (1930), it's clear where Lawrence's sympathies lie; with a 36-year-old Jewish woman, Mrs Fawcett, who has abandoned her husband and two young children in order to be with a much younger man; and a good-looking traveller, called Joe Boswell, who takes a shine to the 19-year-old daughter of an Anglican vicar.

It's the narrow domesticity and mean-spirited authority of the familial regime that imposes moral restrictions on life in the name of propriety, which Lawrence despises and mercilessly lampoons throughout the novel. He instinctively sides with all those who are, due to their marginalization and difference, implicitly opposed to such. This makes him a far more radical figure than many of his critics wish to concede ...            

See:

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Captain's Doll', in The Fox, The Captain's Doll, The Ladybird, ed. Dieter Mehl, (Cambridge University Press, 2002).

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Virgin and the Gipsy', in The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories, ed. Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones, and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Ronald Granofsky, '"Jews of the Wrong Sort": D. H. Lawrence and Race', Journal of Modern Literature (Indiana University Press), Vol. 23, No. 2 (Winter, 1999-2000), pp. 209-23. 

Judith Ruderman, Race and Identity in D. H. Lawrence: Indians, Gypsies, and Jews (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
 
*Note: The author kindly gave me permission to quote from her email, but asked that she remain anonymous.

Jüdische Insekten or Himmler's Lice

Antisemitic poster from 1942 used in German occupied Poland to warn against the 

supposed connection between Jews, lice and typhus; for the Nazis, Jews infected 

with the disease were metaphysically indistinguishable from its insect carriers.  

To paraphrase Shakespeare, if I may: Some are born insects, some wish to become-insect, and some have insecthood thrust upon 'em. 

Take the Jews, for example, in Hitler's Germany. When not being described as a cancer to be cut out of the body politic, or portrayed as a plague of sewer rats, they were obscenely characterised as parasitic lice or giant cockroaches in need of extermination. For racism loves to dehumanise and to operate in terms of pest control and personal hygiene.

In a speech to his fellow officers in April 1943, SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler openly declared:

"Antisemitism is exactly the same as delousing. Getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology. It is a matter of cleanliness. In just the same way, antisemitism, for us, has not been a question of ideology, but a matter of cleanliness ..."

To be judenfrei was, in Himmler's mind, to be deloused - i.e. free of blood-sucking, disease-carrying insects that infest individuals and threaten to spread throughout the entire population; creatures that cause feelings of revulsion and which deserve to be eradicated. 

Of course, Jews are not actually insects; they're human beings. And there are moral and legal prohibitions on the premeditated killing of human beings; we even have a special term for it - murder. And it's difficult to persuade people to commit murder. Thus the Nazis had a problem ...

The solution, as the quotation from Himmler demonstrates, involves pushing a metaphor - the Jews are inhuman vermin; the Jews are disgusting insects - beyond its own limit, transforming it into a pseudo-scientific fact and a deadly piece of doxa. Genocide ends with a pile of corpses, but it always begins with an abuse of language that allows us to kill in good conscience. As Hugh Raffles writes:

"There is no doubt that this happened in the Holocaust. ... Explaining it is at the heart of understanding the fate of the Jews, who, after all, would be killed like insects - like lice, in fact. Literally like lice. Like Himmler's lice. With the same routinized indifference and, in vast numbers, with the same techologies."

Raffles also suggests - and one suspects this might very well be the case - that Himmler in his speech was "indulging in an intimate irony with his men"; making a little joke at the expense of those murdered in the gas chambers:

"As is well known, prisoners at Auschwitz were treated to an elaborate charade. Those selected for death were directed to 'delousing facilities' equipped with false-headed showers. They were moved through changing rooms, allocated soap and towels. They were told they would be rewarded for disinfection with hot soup. ... The prisoners massed uncertainly in the shower room. Overhead, unseen, the disinfectors waited in their gas masks for the warmth of the naked bodies to bring the ambient temperature to the optimal 78 degrees Fahrenheit. They then poured crystals from the cans of Zyklon B - a hydrogen cyanide insecticide developed for delousing buildings and clothes - through the ceiling hatches. Finally, the bodies, contorted by the pain caused by the warning agent ... were removed to the crematoria.
      In this grotesque pantomime, the victims ... move from objects of care to objects of annihilation. To diseased humans, delousing promises remediation, a return to community, a return to life; to lice, it offers only extermination. Too late, the prisoners discover they are merely lice."

One of the reasons that the language of National Socialism continues to fascinate (and to appal) is because of the way it conflates and confuses metaphor, euphemism and a brutal literalism into a witches' brew that is vague and void of meaning on the one hand, whilst paradoxically transparent and full of deadly intent on the other.    


Afterword

There are, thankfully, far happier and more positive associations between Jews and insects. In fact, several species of the latter have been named after celebrated Jewish figures; there is, for example, the Karl Marx wasp and the Sigmund Freud beetle - not to mention the Harry Houdini moth, the Lou Reed spider, and the Carole King stonefly.   

See: Hugh Raffles, Insectopedia, (Vintage Books, 2010); particularly the chapter entitled 'Jews', pp. 141-61, from where all of the lines quoted - including those from Heinrich Himmler - were taken. 

Those interested in knowing more about the insects (and other organisms) named after famous Jewish figures, should click here.