Has anyone seen the Labour Party's new election poster, with its pictures of two flying pigs, with the faces of Michael Howard and his shadow chancellor (i.e. opposition economic spokesman) Oliver Letwin superimposed on them, and the slogan "The day the Tory sums add up"? Apparently the Tory candidate for Finchley and Golders Green, with its large Jewish community, thinks they are tasteless and offensive to Jews. This is actually not the first time people have been accused of anti-Semitism for insulting Jewish politicians. Last February a senior Labour politician compared Letwin to Fagin, a Jewish character in Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist who employs children to carry out thefts for him. The problem is that most people have never read Oliver Twist, the book, but have seen the film in which the anti-Semitism is edited out. Dickens' books are notoriously dense and hard reading.
Even the politician behind this affair admits that the people who designed the poster had not intended to offend Jews or the politicians' Jewish sensitivities, but simply not thought it through. Still, it seems like an attempt by this Tory to appeal to his Jewish constituents by "playing the race card". Calling someone a pig is in my experience a very mild insult; I can't count the number of times my mother called me a little pig. To call a woman a "stupid cow" is much more severe!
Why do imams call jews sons of pigs and monkeys?
Mustapha: because of a passage in the Qur'an in which we are told that a group of Jews who broke the Sabbath were turned into such creatures. This, of course, doesn't mean that all Jews today are the descendents of those people (especially given that some of the people who use this insult also allege that the Jews of today are in fact descendents of the Turkic Khazar tribe who converted to Judaism ...)
I did wonder, actually, if the people who designed this ad were actually appealing to this sentiment among Muslims. Certainly it's widely known in our community that Howard is Jewish, although Letwin's background is less well-known - or at least was, before someone kicked up a stink over the Fagin comparison. (A lot of Welsh names end in -wyn; I wouldn't always know which is which, except that Letwin resembles Litvin which is a well-known Jewish name.)