Last week was a bad one for the Jews, says David Baddiel at The Daily Telegraph. First, John Galliano was caught on camera spitting out anti-Semitic insults in a Paris cafe. Then, Charlie Sheen called his former boss Chuck Lorre "Chaim Levine" in an apparent dig at his Jewish roots. Rounding out the week, Julian Assange claimed to have identified a Jewish conspiracy to discredit WikiLeaks in the British press. Not even Pope Benedict's timely exoneration of the Jews can counteract the feeling that anti-Semitism is now "really, properly zeitgeisty" in a way it hasn't been for decades. But why do people "still harbor negative ideas about this fairly tiny racial group," asks Baddiel. Here, an excerpt:
How is anti-Semitism different from other types of racial hatred? The answer, I think, can be found in the language. To return to the high priest of drunken Jew-hatred, Mel [Gibson, who] said, in his rant of 2008: "Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world." This is key: Jews are the only race whose negative image as projected by racists is high-status.
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