Von Brunn reminds us that ideas really can kill

The moment the self-declared white supremacist, conspiracy theorist and hardcore antisemite James Von Brunn walked into the US Holocaust Memorial Museum earlier this month and began opening fire, he brought more than death and the shattering of innocent lives to the public consciousness.

He also shattered a number of myths and rationales that saner members of society carry around with them when not confronted with pure hatred, face-to-face.

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It’s no act, being Jewish is in my DNA

It’s been one of those weeks where synchronicity has brought three acting parts my way, each totally different and each filming in a different British city.

First, to Birmingham to play an innocent woman dubbed “The Black Widow” by her neighbours for allegedly murdering two husbands — and now seemingly attempting to murder her third.

Mid week I’m in Glasgow in the role of an aggressive, predatory female editor of a “Lads “ magazine who doesn’t know when enough is enough.

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Is this museum of tolerance being intolerant?

On a recent trip to Israel with my teenage son, I stopped at the Mamila (Muslim) cemetery, which I have always walked through en route from the headquarters of the World Union of Progressive Judaism in King David Street to my cousins’ home near Meah Shearim.

“When I was on my shnat programme, we had an interfaith project to clean up this cemetery. My friends and I would come but the Arab boys and girls rarely turned up,” remarked my 18-year-old.

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Patriotism - an unrequited love

A recent Gallup and Coexist Foundation poll shows that most British Muslims are patriotic and loyal to Britain, and respectful of its institutions, to a far greater degree than the general population, whose members wrongly tend to associate them with fanaticism and terror.

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Holocaust deniers: we’ll take your ads please!

How would you react if, on your way to work, you were confronted by a series of adverts from David Irving, telling you to look at his website for ‘The Truth’, and urging you to find out what is really happening in the world from the only truly reliable source: himself.

You’d — at the very least — wonder why Transport for London considered it appropriate to accept adverts from an antisemitic propagandist. Not, of course, that a public body such as TfL would ever accept such advertising.

But that’s, to all intents and purposes, what TfL has now done.

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How a movie trailer cured my horror fantasy

I vividly remember my first Nazi. I was sitting in my living room at about the age of 10. And, though this Nazi’s appearance was on my TV screen, I am not talking about an Anton Diffring, “Achtung, schweinhund”, British Second-World-War movie character. This was the real thing. I was watching footage of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. The film was overlaid with Richard Dimbleby’s famous eye-witness radio broadcast. I watched as well-fed Germans lifted dead bodies by their spindly arms.

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No Muslim should deny Holocaust

Last month, on a beautiful, sunny day, I visited Auschwitz with five other members of the Muslim-Jewish Forum of Greater Manchester. In the trees, the birds were singing — which felt wrong. In a place that is now a monument to the evil of which man is capable, I felt that cold rain or snow should be pouring out of a dark sky.

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Bibi’s red lines are not thought through

Netanyahu’s speech on Sunday night anything more than posturing, or is there, as they say in Israel, real “tachlis” in his approach to the Palestinians?

Many commentators are unsure. The approach, they say, is vintage Bibi: a lot of fancy phrases with not much substance at the bottom.
The problem appears to be that while Mr Netanyahu’s “red lines” — in particular, extremely limited sovereignty for the Palestinians — appear to have played well inside his government, not a lot of thought appears to have been given as to how they translate into action.

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Who cares if the Arabs accept Israel as the state of the Jews?

On the face of it, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s insistence that the Palestinians recognise Israel as a Jewish state seems like political tactic.

Failure to recognise Israel as a Jewish state, he could argue, would indicate that the Palestinians were not serious about an agreement. On the other hand, recognition would make his acceptance of a future Palestinian state something of a quid pro quo.

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A dupe, not a villain

Was Rudolf Kasztner a traitor to the Jewish people, who saved a few friends while allowing more than 400,000 Jews to be deported to Auschwitz, knowing their fate, but refusing to warn them? Films, plays, books and articles portray his actions in this way.

The truth is very different. Kasztner was not a villain, but a victim, who was cruelly deceived by the mastermind of mass murder, Adolf Eichmann.

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