The silence that has greeted the former US president’s description of Nicolas Sarkozy in his book reflects the normalisation of casual anti-Semitism on the ‘progressive’ side of politics.
The words leap out and grab you. After all, in countless pages of prose, no other world leader is characterised by Barack Obama in anything like those terms.
But there it is, in Obama’s recently published memoir, A Promised Land: Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s president from 2007 to 2012, is, Obama tells us, a “quarter Greek Jew”. Little wonder then that Sarkozy has “dark, expressive Mediterranean features”, which resemble the exaggerated, often distorted figures “of a Toulouse-Lautrec painting”.
And little wonder too that he is “all emotional outbursts and overblown rhetoric”, while his conversation, which reflects unbridled ambition and incessant pushiness, “swoops from flattery to bluster to genuine insight”.
One might have thought Obama was deliberately directing at the Fifth Republic’s first president with a Jewish heritage the insults notoriously hurled at Benjamin Disraeli, the first person of Jewish birth to become Britain’s prime minister.
Driven by “a tenacity of purpose” that was “a Jewish characteristic”, said Lord Cromer, the Conservative prime minister, with his swarthy “Oriental features”, was consumed by an “addiction” to the “passionate outbursts” and “excesses of flattery” that were the hallmarks of his “nimble-witted” race.
Read the article by Henry Ergas in The Australian.