![]() Hope hit the big time with The Prisoner Of Zenda and its boffo sequel Rupert Of Hentzau, two rip-roaring yarns in which an English dilettante twice contrives to save from usurpers the throne of Ruritania. One of my favorite all-but-unknown books is The Heart Of Princess Osra, written by Anthony Hope in 1896. Absent that, then like the Lost Tribes of the ancient Kingdom of Israel, what remains of less ancient but still venerable kingdoms will be held by Lost Tribes of England, Lost Tribes of France, Lost Tribes of, fleeing their homelands and wandering the earth. ![]() The mobs chanting "Gas the Jews!" outside Sydney Opera House and " Kill them all!" in downtown Montreal are the future of the west, absent serious, sustained course correction. But the central thesis has broadened, too. ![]() This is a column almost two decades old, beginning with some literary citations that stayed with me: The Heart of Princess Osra led to my own Prisoner of Windsor and Roumanian Journey became a Tale for Our Time. For (back to self-quoting), as I wrote a long time ago, "in one of history's bleaker jests, in the coming Europe the Europeans will be the new Jews." The polytechnic left marching for the Palestinians won't cut them any slack in the long run. 'And this anti-racism will be for the 21st century what Communism was for the 20th century: a source of violence.' 'The lofty idea of "the war on racism" is gradually turning into a hideously false ideology,' he said in 2005. I'm doing way too much self-quoting these days, so just for a change of pace let me re-quote my quotation of somebody else - another French Jew, the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut: If a white six-year-old bears the sin of what white men did in the eighteenth century, then why wouldn't a French Jewess in Lyon not be a legitimate target for those who wish to protest the Gaza "occupation"? This is the hideous dehumanising logic of "identity politics". If a white girl in kindergarten is already an avatar of "white privilege", then we are all not our brother's keeper (for this, sadly, is an age of only children) but our great-great-great-grandfather's keeper. So a murdered Israeli baby can never be a victim, because, even at four months old, he is part of the oppressor class. The latest adaptation is "the oldest hatred" meets the new religion of "identity politics" - which is Lenin's old who/whom paradigm applied to every one on the planet. ![]() And, if Hamas get their way and destroy the Jewish state, the few who survive will be hated for something else. So they became a conventional nation state, and now they're hated for that. Once upon a time on the Continent, Jews were hated as rootless cosmopolitan figures who owed no national allegiance. The truth has already started blowing apart both.Īh, but, in the malign alliance between Islamic supremacists and the polytechnic left, who's playing whom? As I have said for decades, " The 'oldest hatred' didn't get that way without an ability to adapt": The rest of the world uses them as human shields against their own conscience ('I'm not an anti-Semite, I'm pro-Palestinian'). The difference is that Hamas uses Palestinian human shields against the IDF. The rest of the world uses them as such, too. Hamas are not alone in cynically using the Palestinians as human shields. Israeli Steyn Clubber Dafna Breines adds: In Nineteen Eighty-Four Britain is known as 'Airstrip One'. In our comments, Ian Cory, a First Day Founding Member of The Mark Steyn Club from southern England, put it this way: But there is blood-lust in the air - I don't mean in Gaza (it's always in the air there) but in the streets of western cities. ~Yesterday's observation that we should nix the cheap Nazi comparisons because they are insufficient to the moment prompted a lot of reader response, a big chunk of which was along the lines of: Are you serious, Steyn? You're saying we're in for millions of deaths? I'm off to my New Hampshire doctor, but I'll be back live around the planet at 3pm North American Eastern/8pm GMT on Wednesday. Trump's contempt for his New York judge is getting close to rivaling mine for my DC judge, so we'll certainly have a word on that. Programming note: Last week's midweek Clubland Q&A seemed to go down well with listeners, so we'll try it again tomorrow and address all the hot topics.
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