“Can you imagine a journalist for a liberal newspaper referring in neutral, even vaguely congratulatory terms to an artist’s “provocatively anti-gay rhetoric,” or “provocatively anti-black rhetoric,” or “provocatively anti-Arab rhetoric”?”

But then, Z., you may have noticed that headline writers for the Independent are probably not Palestinian Christian nationalists, or proto-Palestinian Christian martyrs, or victims of a Zionist-imperialist, king of the ‘zionists’. Headline writers for the Independent are probably British university educated people in their forties who live in London. If they had an education anything like mine, then the first two main occasions on which they would have met the phrase would have been the St Bartholomew’s day massacres in Paris (Catholic on Protestant) and/or Breughel’s painting and/or Rubens’ painting. I didn’t even connect the phrase to the Herod episode until all this blew! If I had been on Univ Challenge a few weeks ago and I had been asked what M of the Is referred to, I would have been dead chuffed to have got the question because I would have barked out ‘St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, Paris, 15 hundred and er…er…er….do I have to get the exact date, Jeremy?’ The Herod episode, as far as I knew, didn’t have a name! But stick with it, z., the indie is out to get Jews. Do I detect a process here? Keep going on about the world conspiracy against the Jews and you won’t have to investigate or bother yourself too much over what some Jews (not ‘The Jews’, note) did in Gaza. You won’t have to confront the bombings and strafings and killings of a poverty-stricken people, weakened by a blockade, coralled in a space from which there was no escape. No matter what you might think about Hamas or the pretext for the Israeli attack, (which we’ll disagree about) it was a horror meted out on thousands of people, most of whom are just very, very poor civilians. And you, more than me, I suspect, regard ‘the Jews’ as some kind of family. And it was ’some Jews’ doing this stuff. So, what do you say to your family members? Isn’t that what Avi Shlaim is trying to do, (quoted above)? For which he gets called here ‘Avi Slime’!

I think it more likely a deliberate choice for the reasons I have stated.

Asserting the gravitas of Michael Rosen’s authority is not an argument.

In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not.”

In the English speaking Protestant world the verse about Rachel weeping for her children was much quoted – Rachel, not as a Jew, or a victim of a bad Jewish king, but simply as the universal figure of the mother whose children have been killed. The Protestant English speakers had a majestic translation of the Bible and if you read eg Mark Twain it is the book that most people would know, if only in fragments. They took bits of it and made it applicable to themselves. It phrases and characters are part of our language. Some figures, like Rachel weeping, become elemental and iconic.

Eg last night I was watching that excellent series John Adams, John Adams curses his son as “Absalom,” that is, after the wayward son of King David who broke his father’s heart. That curse would come naturally to an English speaking Protestant, and with no thoughts of King David being a Jew, simply as a universal father out of his mind with grief over a rebellious son.

What an Independent headline writer thinks or doesn’t think I don’t know, but I would guess there may be some bits of English speaking Protestantism swirling around in his head. Or possibly he or she had read “Massacre of the Innocents”, thought that sounded good, and bunged it down.

Oh, and a link to Thomas Tomkins’s (1572 – 1656) beautiful motet When David Heard. I suppose someone is going to say it’s antisemitic. . .

http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=Oc6v40T2cEk

BTW whatever you think about Michael Rosen’s politics, his job does require him to know a good deal about language, unless he has been swindling his employers all these years.

a) The Irish Independent

b) hardly contemporary, it is describing a situation 8 years ago.

No. The Independent did, by virtue of using it first and only of Israeli Jews.