A sober, moderate, reasoned author incurs the wrath of a fashionable political agenda and is cancelled out of craven cowardice.
It is an all-too-common tale for our times, which almost robbed us of Harry Saul Markham’s carefully considered exploration of the forces of extremism which threaten our society and in particular the Jewish community today.
The manuscript was completed just two days before October 7, 2023, and the original publisher apparently felt compelled to drop it due to the “sensitive nature” of the issues it addresses.
Happily, Markham, a young and articulate champion of Enlightenment values, was able to find another outlet for his sure-footed extended essay mapping how we got to our present predicament and the possible way ahead.
He faces uncomfortable questions head on, perhaps most important of all “why has this intolerance been tolerated?”
The answer lies in part in the “delusions of liberal-minded leaders”, and the effects are mapped out in unforgettably vivid details, both anecdotal and based in deeply researched hard data.
From British classrooms to the ganglands of Malmo and Paris’s banlieues, he outlines an overwhelming abundance of evidence for an explosion in antisemitic hate across Europe over the past two decades.
Markham draws rewardingly upon his own experience and that of his family, and with spritely energy garlands the unrelentingly grim subject matter with humour whenever possible.
Looking back to simpler times, when his parents were growing up “antisemites tended to be neo-Nazis” with “disastrous haircuts”.
The very different current state of society and the forms extremism now takes is epitomised in a protest in 2017 against the visiting Israeli Ambassador at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.
Markham sums up the assemble alliance between Islamist extremists and far-left radicals with a devastating turn of phrase as the “Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of our age”.
As to the way ahead, first must come a reckoning with the facts, particularly in recognising that multiculturalism or at least “the absence of togetherness” claim a price in social cohesion as divisions spring out of control.
Even with the text revised in the wake of October 7, Markham offers if not optimism at least some form of hope. On a visit to Israel he finds what he believes other nations have lost: “mutual responsibility, a shared identity, a belief in a collective purpose”.
The message will alarm all moderate-minded readers, but there is considerable reassurance in the measured calm of Markham’s wise and civilised discourse. The melted pot of society may be restored yet.
The Melted Pot, by Harry Saul Markham, is published by Academica Press
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