HOW TO BE A CONSIDERATE ANTISEMITE

An Arab owned bookstore in central London has just removed copies of an Arabic translation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf from its shop window.

Call me a wide-eyed optimist, but if that isn’t a reason to celebrate I don’t know what is. Huzzah! In fact make that two huzzahs.

We cannot, of course, be sure that the shop in question didn’t remove the books in response to mounting criticism of its decision to put them there in the first place. No. one wants bad publicity. But I prefer to believe that the proprietors realised the hurt that the conspicuous display of Hitler’s memoirs was causing passers-by who didn’t want to be reminded of the Holocaust on their way to the nearby synagogue each morning. Blessed are the empathetic.

To readers who go on wondering why the shop, which is also a publisher, saw need for a new Arabic edition of Mein Kampf in these fractious times, or why the jacket had to show the Fuhrer in a pose of preposterously camp militarism (see below)

I have no answer. I possess an early English translation that makes do with a black swastika against a white background. What else do yiou need? But we must assume that publishers know what sells. Perhaps there is a market today for books depicting Hitler in full regalia, giving a salute straight out of The Producers.

To be clear, I am all for Mein Kampf being available to the curious reader. We should read the worst as well as the best. And if more people had made themselves familiar with Mein Kampf when it was first published in 1925 - some eight years before its author became Chancellor - it’s possible there would have been greater educated resistance to his rise. Forearmed is forewarned, is it not? A sentence, such as this, for example - ‘The ruinous moral and physical results of this Judaization of our life and the mammonizing of our mating instinct meant the corruption of future generations’ - must surely have given readers pause. Who, after all, would vote for a politician standing on a platform of de-mammonizing our mating instinct?

But I began this post in a spirit of rejoicing, and I mean to hold on to it. In the same spirit may I make a number of suggestions as to how this latest advance in amicable relations between Jews and Arabs can be consolidated. . .