There’s a story going around now that Winston Churchill wrote an article in which he laid the blame for anti-Semitism on Jews’ refusal to assimilate. The best account I’ve found is in the IHT:

“It would be easy to ascribe it to the wickedness of the persecutors, but that does not fit all the facts,” the article said. “It exists even in lands, like Great Britain and the United States, where Jew and Gentile are equal in the eyes of the law, and where large numbers of Jews have found not only asylum, but opportunity. These facts must be faced in any analysis of anti-Semitism. They should be pondered especially by the Jews themselves.

“For it may be that, unwittingly, they are inviting persecution — that they have been partly responsible for the antagonism from which they suffer.”

The article continued: “The central fact which dominates the relations of Jew and non-Jew is that the Jew is ‘different.’ He looks different. He thinks differently. He has a different tradition and background. He refuses to be absorbed.”

But it also urged support for Jews “suffering from persecutions as cruel, as relentless and as vindictive as any in their long history.”

The Guardian says the document was written by a ghost-writer who was an anti-Semite, and that the document was known about for decades.

But when The Observer contacted Sir Martin Gilbert, the eminent historian and Churchill biographer, the implication of anti-Semitism began to unravel. Gilbert, who also has a book out this summer, said the article was not written by Churchill at all, but rather his ghost writer, Adam Marshall Diston. He added that Churchill’s instructions for the article were different in both tone and content from what Diston eventually wrote, and pointed out that Diston was a supporter of Oswald Mosley, the notorious fascist and anti-Semite. Churchill had stopped its publication in a newspaper.

I’m of two minds over this. If it was written by an anti-Semitic ghostwriter, then it’s a worthless document that could frankly be thrown away and save future historians the problem of rediscovering it. If it was written by Churchill, well, what’s the point? That he felt the same way most people felt about Jews in the 1930s? That he was more progressive than some because he didn’t try to persecute or exterminate us?

It’s a lose-lose proposition. In an article called “Concerning the Jews,” Mark Twain, who was not an anti-Semite, repeated the canard that Jews don’t serve in the military in proportion to their numbers in the host country, among other things that seem, frankly, as anti-Semitic as the paper purportedly written by Churchill. That Twain (who happens to be my favorite author and literary idol) was wrong is not the point. The point is, if Churchill wrote the paper, his views are no different than Twain’s from forty years earlier. And I’m not surprised. Those views are extant today. It’s just not as PC to put them into writing.

Unless, that is, you substitute “Israel” and “Israel Lobby” for Jews, and then you’ve got the same thing all over again, written by two men named Walt and Mearsheimer.

That essay on anti-Semitism I’ve been promising for years is about ready to write, I think.

Tom Paine takes over the wheel again while Brian tends to that small package (the one that cries and wets itself) that arrived just over a bris ago.

Once again, we have truly hit our stride. All the contributors are there this week, and everyone did a great job.

If you’re not listening to Shire Network News, you’re missing, let’s see… humor, interviews with newsmakers, essays by various members of the Anglosphere on a variety of subjects, and, well, some damned good stuff.

This week my contribution features Pamela Anderson (I keep scoring these great interviews) and EATAPETA Day, while Lair talks about Second Life Terrorism and Damian Penny is after the BBC and 9/11 Truthers.

Really, I’m not saying this because I’m on the podcast. I’m saying it’s great because we really have become a cohesive group. Plus, we rock.