From the Community of the “Trembling Israelites”, Taylor-Made Nonsense attacking Isi Leibler

Owing to distance, I’ve only just received my copy of the 24 December print edition of the Jewish Chronicle, and note that the “Mick Davis Affair” rumbles on in its pages. There’s a big article in support of Davis by new boy on the payroll Orlando Radice, but it was a letter from a Derek Taylor of Hampstead attacking Isi Leibler for daring “to drag the British into his quarrel [with Davis]” that’s the unwitting star of the issue. It’s a tissue of stupidities.

Mr Taylor notes that Leibler claimed that “In the United Kingdom ... demonisation of Israel – not to mention antisemitism – has reached record levels. ”

“What rubbish!” Taylor fumes, with blinkered disregard for the facts.

“Antisemitism in Britain remains as insignificant as it always has been.

Mr Leibler might like to compare it with, for example, the ethnic cleansing of Aborigines in Tasmania in the nineteenth century.”

This childish jibe involves an allegation regarding Tasmania that is actually untrue, as Mr Taylor would know were he au fait with Australian scholar Keith Windschuttle’s magisterial The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803-1847 (2002).

“Only two Aborigines have ever been elected to the Australian Senate. How does that compare to the record of the similar number of Jews in Britain?” Mr Taylor asks, with baffling logic, and proceeds to pontificate patronisingly:

“It’s far too easy for non-British Jews to try to equate the treatment they find Jews suffering from in other countries with our situation.

It would be better if they devoted their energies to copying us.”

Mr Taylor is evidently unaware that there have been Jews in Australia from the first day of European settlement; that, just as in Britain, there have been dozens and dozens of Jewish parliamentarians in Australia from the nineteenth-century to this, including a colonial premier (V. L. Solomon), that there have been two Jewish governors-general, and so on.

I don’t know for certain whether Derek Taylor the letter-writer is the Derek Taylor who, with Lord Janner, authored Jewish Parliamentarians (2008), a book about Jewish MPs in Britain that – quite frankly – is full of regrettable and even risible errors and a marked pro-left bias which manifests itself in near-hagiography towards MPs of whose policies they approve and hatchet jobs on certain MPs of whom they disapprove. But if he is, his ignorance of the situation in Australia is underlined by the statement in the book that General Sir John Monash (pictured, who commanded Australia’s Expeditionary Forces in the First World War) was a New Zealander! Oy vey!

KO’d by his own fist, I would say of Mr Taylor – certainly he failed to land a punch at Isi Leibler CBE.