Prejudice is preferable

Editorial

After an outcry over the Vancouver Olympic Organizing Committee’s use of Nazi propaganda footage in a promotional film, a short “inspirational” video about the torch relay was scrapped. So much more confusing, then, given what should have been an added sensitivity to such things, that International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge made a glaring omission during a speech last week.

Shortly before the opening of the Games, Rogge, in the presence of Canada’s Haitian-born Gov.-Gen. Michaëlle Jean, memorialized the victims of Haiti’s catastrophic earthquake last month. He also remembered the victims of an attack on the bus of a Togolese football team in Angola and the fans killed at a volleyball game in Pakistan.

How odd that, in his reflections on tragedy, Rogge said nothing of the incident that would seem most relevant in this context: the 1972 Munich Olympics, where 11 Israeli athletes and coaches were murdered by a terrorist organization linked to the Fatah movement of now-deceased Nobel Peace Prize laureate Yasser Arafat.

The tragedy of 1972 Munich reminds us that ends can always be made to justify the means for a segment of political extremists. Another such reminder came with the rioting in downtown Vancouver around the time of the opening ceremonies. Whether it is silencing a speaker by shouting him down, which has been a tactic used by anti-Israel zealots on campuses here and elsewhere in Canada, or smashing windows, as we saw on Friday, there is a willingness to cross lines of civility, decency and legality on the assumption that the cause justifies any action.

Kudos to the decent, peaceful protesters who condemned the actions of the few, though the peaceful ones should not need to apologize for the actions of the hooligans. Some of those who smashed windows and overturned newspaper boxes may not even be committed to the issues about which they were ostensibly marching. There are some people who just like wrecking things. The anti-Olympic protests may have simply provided a cover for a few destructive individuals looking for an excuse to get some kicks by destroying property.

On the subject of how a few idiots – or even one – can ruin it for their own team, comes the case of Baroness Jenny Tonge, a member of the British House of Lords, who was forced from her role as Liberal Democratic party health spokesperson after she repeated the blood libelous allegations that Israel has been using its field hospitals in Haiti to harvest organs.

The organ-harvesting story is gaining fresh life as the 21st-century blood libel. A local tempest erupted recently when a B.C. Muslim newspaper reprinted directly from the Iranian government’s official media a story alleging that

Israelis killed 25,000 Ukrainian children to use their organs. This came on the heels of a story in a Swedish newspaper making a similar claim about Israelis and the organs of Palestinians.

The allegations are a sparingly veiled transformation of the ancient “blood libel” – the mythological assertion that Jews are required to use the blood of gentile children in the baking of Pesach matza. This has been a recurring theme since the 12th-century’s notorious William of Norwich case, in which an English boy’s demise was attributed to the blood-thirst of the local Jewish community. Since then, the story has been reworked all over the world. It seems particularly popular in 2010, in a remake that twists the matza angle into organ harvesting.

Tonge, who has taken extreme anti-Israel positions in the past, said specifically that Israel should investigate the allegations of organ harvesting in order to clear the matter up. (And why, if they had nothing to hide, wouldn’t the good women of Salem consent to proving they weren’t witches?)

Among several ludicrous subtexts in the Tonge case is the gratuitous statement by her party leader, Nick Clegg.

“While I do not believe that Jenny Tonge is antisemitic or racist, I regard her comments as wholly unacceptable,” Clegg said.

There is a distinction, we acknowledge, between holding even extreme views about Israel and being in thrall to prejudice. But if one is capable of taking seriously and publicly lending credence to such crude assertions as this new blood libel, what other term is there but prejudice? To believe this ancient myth is to subscribe to the most inhuman assumptions about Jews.

The only alternative to prejudice is that Tonge and other purveyors of the new blood libel do not believe it to be factual, yet spread it nevertheless because it suits their purposes. Prejudice, at least, could manifest unconsciously, making the prejudiced individual, in a sense, as much a victim as the ostensible target. But if someone like Tonge is not prejudiced, she would have to be motivated by a deliberate viciousness, figuratively smashing windows of truth for ideological reasons.

That would be another – especially egregious – example of using ends to justify means. It would be better to be guilty of prejudice.

^TOP