Kevin Myers writes: Like everyone else, we had been discussing the Brian Murphy killing, when someone remarked on the Orla Kiely handbag owned by one of our visitors.
It was admired and felt. Then our weekend visitors prepared to leave. They collected their overnight bags, double-checked that they had everything, as did we. Then they went, leaving behind them, in full view on the kitchen table, the elegant bag we had been discussing and handling just minutes before.
You can't trust the human mind to remember, or the human eye even to see what it knows is there in front of it. No two eye-witness accounts of anything are the same; no individual's account will remain unchanged, and even the best memories provide a changing series of parallax views.
There is no true account of the death of Brian Murphy, nor any true account in the gospels of the death of Jesus Christ. All are contaminated by imperfect perception, hysteria, mis-memory, chaos. The two killings do have one thing in common: Brian Murphy was killed by a mob, as was Jesus Christ. Mobs are caused by hysterical group misperceptions, and the death of poor Brian is no more the responsibility of "the Irish" than the death of Jesus was the responsibility of "the Jews".
Mobs are mobs; and Jewish mobs are just as ugly as Christian mobs. The mob that killed Jesus was probably aroused by religious tribal pride, by the Passover, and the messianic passions which regularly convulsed the people of Judea. The mob that killed Brian was aroused by collegiate tribal pride, by youthful hormones, and by ludicrous levels of alcohol consumption.
Moreover, mobs are evilly powerful. They strip Judaicism from Jews, Christianity from Christians, and reason from the reasonable. So it is ludicrous for some Jews to insist that Mel Gibson's filmic declaration that Jesus Christ was killed by Jews is anti-Semitic. A handful of Jews killed Jesus. That's it. So, actually, did some Roman soldiers - but no-one insists that the savage portrayal of their role in the killing is anti-Italian.
Yet on the other hand, it's easy to understand how Jews get apprehensive about such things. The EU recently conducted a Europe-wide survey which revealed the rise of anti-Semitism across the Continent. The EU repressed it. Why? Because the survey disclosed that this anti-Semitism was largely confined to immigrant Muslim groups - and, not wishing that uncomfortable truth to emerge, the EU simply buried it.
I receive an invaluable service from the Middle East Media Research Institute, which translates material from the region. What is impossible to appreciate without such translations is the sheer scale of genocidal anti-Semitism which infuses Palestinian Authority propaganda. Jews are reviled as a species. Suicide bombers are lauded as heroes and heroines, and not just on television and PA publications, but in schools also. The PA is cultivating an entire generation of suicide bombers, who live only for martyrdom. And one of the main financial backers of the Palestinian Authority is the European Union.
This doesn't mean the EU is anti-Semitic, merely that it is stupid, confused, multi-headed, pious, weak, divided, inchoate, bloated, timid, fatuous, sanctimonious and wishy-washy. It is as unfocused as a lynch-mob is focused.
How would any member-state of the EU deal with suicide-bombers coming from a known population group across open borders? What is any society expected to do about young men and women whose sole ambition in life is to blow up as many civilians as possible with the final deed of their lives? If the intelligence, interdiction and even assassination options did not confer protection, what next? How long before the Danes or the Dutch or the Italians or ourselves decided that the only option would be physical separation of the community which produced the suicide bombers and the community which was their target?
I don't say that the wall or fence is right. I certainly can't approve the details of its route, not least because I don't know them. But if I am to condemn this Israeli measure, given that I know suicide bombers are poised and ready to exploit any chink in the Israeli armour, I must propose an alternative means of self-defence for the people of Israel. And if I'm unable to supply one, yet continue to demand the removal of the wall, even though I know that the consequence is more dead Israelis, then that really is anti-Semitism: it is a declaration that my abstract opinions are of more importance than the lives of Jews.
And that's what it comes down to: the lives of Jews. The Israeli state does not, as an expression of identity, wish to kill Arabs. But many Arabs, as a statement of identity, wish to kill Jews - Jews in Israel, and Jews abroad. Is it surprising that this raises ancient fears among the Jewish population of Israel, and elsewhere? And though Palestinian terrorists cannot destroy the Israeli state, they can certainly murder Jews and, for far too many Palestinians, that is the great ambition of their lives. What do you do with such a nihilistic, lunatic enemy, except keep him (or her) away from your schools and your bus-queues by rigorous separation?
The wall is not a "solution", merely a measure. It reduces the likelihood of terrorist murder, but doesn't eliminate it. Only a political settlement can do that, and no such settlement is remotely possible while that psychopathic and murderous buffoon Yasser Arafat, the Idi Amin of the Arab world, remains chairman of the Palestinian Authority. Hence, in the interim, the wall: what alternative is there?