buttal he thinks it is. Of course a black person is "just as capable of unthinking bigotries" as anyone else. No one's denying that.
Baddiel makes a number of interesting mistakes here, but I’m going to start with the one I took personally: some Jews aren’t white in any sense of the word. I, for instance, am mixed race, but my skin is closer in colour to my father, who is black. And because not every racist who hates Jews hates black people, and the Jew-hater tends to have a very specific image of a Jew in his head, sometimes my black skin does provide me with security. Do I therefore have “black privilege”?
The answer of course is that in a complicated and interconnected society we all have privilege, and we all suffer disadvantage, depending on the situation. What matters is not what privileges we may have in one situation or another, but the rights we are owed as human beings and the obligations we have to others.
Baddiel’s failure to understand that is the failure that runs through this book. He is so concerned with asserting his own lack of privilege that he forgets his obligations to others: not least to talk and to listen to them. His book’s thesis is twofold: that “progressives” turn a blind eye to and dabble in just one form of racism, and that the experiences he grapples with would not occur if he were black, Asian or from another ethnic minority.
This is just blather. Bush simply hasn't understood the point Baddiel is making. Antisemitism has been acceptable on the left because Jews are supposed to be rich and powerful, and because antisemitism was only something that happened in the past, with people wearing swastikas on their shirts. And because – the Livingstone formulation – it's always assumed to be a bad faith argument used to silence criticism of Israel.
All of which has completely passed the Times reviewer by…
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