By Julie Burchill
April 8, 2005
The film director Stephen Frears once allegedly annoyed the actor Daniel Day-Lewis by supposedly saying: "I knew Daniel before he was Irish." Personally, I don't understand why this was taken so adversely. If one is a Method actor in extremis so much so that you will become a cobbler for something like a year in order to hammer those nails into those soles all the more authentically -- then I suppose becoming an Irishman in order to play Gerard Conlon in the film "In the Name of the Father" and Bill the Butcher in "Gangs of New York" isn't too far a stretch.
However, it's not for thinking that he's an Irishman that Day-Lewis is currently the object of some concern among Jews over here - but rather that he seems to have forgotten that he's Jewish. Which, his mother being Jill Balcon, the actress daughter of Sir Michael Balcon, he undoubtedly is. He is also married to Rebecca Miller, daughter of Arthur, which I would have thought makes his children Jews, too. And as such, exactly the sort of children that the enemies of Israel would feel fully within their divine rights to blow to smithereens in pursuit of a pureblooded Palestinian state.
You wouldn't have thought it to see him posing on the cover of The Sunday Times recently, grinning like a groupie gone mad, surrounded by cute Palestinian boys (no girls, natch - they'll be off somewhere weeping in modestly darkened rooms while dressed up as beekeepers), some of whom with characteristic charm point toy guns at the hapless photographer. I won't quote from the accompanying piece of writing, courtesy of Day-Lewis, lest I hurl all over my expensive computer, but I urge you to seek it out.
Tragedy, comedy? You read it and then tell me. Elsewhere, the fashion designer Bella Freud has persuaded a posse of her (non-Jewish) friends to record a CD called "Hope for Palestine." Just don't ask what they're hoping for, Bella - because it'll probably be that everyone with your surname had been finished off in pre-war Nazi-occupied Europe, thus leaving their mythical homeland pure for them.
Of course, one does not expect serious thought from actors and dressmakers any more than one expects politicians to look good with their clothes off and/or cut a mean pair of culottes. But when lightweight minds collide with heavyweight subjects, what a sumptuous banquet of grotesquerie can occur. Last year saw one of the highest annual number ever of anti-Semitic attacks in Britain, on both people and property, in line with the rest of Europe.
A year before that, the European Union notoriously suppressed a study on anti-Semitism after commissioning it, at some expense, simply because it came up with the "wrong" conclusion: That is, it proved conclusively that anti-Semitic violence in Europe was committed mostly not by old fascists, but by young Muslims. Seeking to explain this rather bad show on the part of their darling Islamists, European liberals went to some lengths to protest that these vile youths don't daub swastikas on Jewish gravestones or -- as in the case of 25-year-old Riaz Burahee, convicted in London this week -- make 90 calls to synagogues threatening to bomb them and to rape and kill Jewish children because "Hitler was right," because they're anti-Semitic. No, it's because they're anti-Zionist!
Oh -- that's all right, then. Go forth and carry on, with the blessing of civilized liberal Europe! But just to make it fair, next time a mosque is burned down in a European city, might I be allowed to protest to my anti-Zionist friends that this wasn't about Islamophobia at all, but a legitimate protest against Muslim Arab atrocities against black Christians in the Sudan? It's definitely worth a try.
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