So you can't wait to see Galliano's new show?
mainChristian Dior has cancelled the Galliano show in Paris Fashion Week, according to latest reports, replacing it with an off-catwalk presentation on Sunday.
photo: enjoyfrance.com
Dior is scrubbing references to Galliano off its website. The man is in rehab, his lawyers are on the case and the fashion world is doing its level best to return to frippery as normal. In the London Evening Standard, which has treated the scandal as little more than a celebrity tiff, a second columnist argued yesterday that it’s now up to Kate Moss to save the designer from his demons by getting him to do her wedding dress. Where do these people live? In another article, slightly weightier, Brian Sewell defended Galliano as a latter-day Richard Wagner: the art is greater than the man. Come off it.
In yesterday’s Guardian, Jonathan Freedland argued persuasively that anti-semitism is always with us. It has been dormant awhile. Now it has reawakened.
I take a different view. In a front-page JC commentary today I suggest that Galliano’s alleged offence is a symptom of a dangerous new form of anti-semitism, licensed by Islamist propaganda and leftwing fellow-travellers, which maintains that the Jews have got it coming.
The Jews deserved their fate in the past. And, as middle-class demonstrators chanted outside the synagogue in Tunis, the Prophet will inflict it again quite soon. Their rallying cry is “Khaybar Khaybar ya yahud, Jaish Muhammad saya’ud,” which means “Jews, remember Khyabar, the army of Mohammed is returning.”
Here’s the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXr9Crc_RLc
Nothing about the Galliano outrage can be taken lightly.
It’s very simple, Norman. If the pro-Zionist Jewish Board of Deputies claims to speak for Jewry as a whole in supporting the actions of the Israeli government, it cannot object to Zionism and Judaism being confused in public discourse. Those of us who belong to Jews for Justice for Palestine and Independent Jewish Voices are very clear. Not in our name. We are Jews who work on behalf of those oppressed by the Jewish state. If you wish to curtail the resurgance of anti-Semitism, address its causes not its symptoms.
Dennis: That comment amounts to inverted racism. Jews in Britain, American or anywhere else have no more reason to apologize for actions of the Israeli government than third-generation people of the Chinese diaspora should for the actions of Beijing. To suggest that they must join an anti-Israel organisation before they have the right to live free of insult is perverse when it comes from the Left and self-hating when it comes from a Jew.