Wild David Mamet interviewed by John Gapper in the Financial Times (thx to Voskamp/Sullivan):
[H]e thinks Israel has been betrayed by the American left.
“The speeches that Charles Lindbergh made and Oswald Mosley made in the 1930s are the same speeches that are being made today, only slightly more politely: ‘The Jews are bringing us to war. Perhaps we should give their state away.’ The liberals in my neighbourhood wouldn’t give away Brentwood to the Palestinians but they want to give away Tel Aviv.”
But attitudes in Europe to the Middle East tend to be more sceptical about Israel than American ones, I interject. Does he believe that anyone who disputes Israel’s land claims and believes in reallocation of territory to the Palestinians is anti-Semitic?
…He smiles ruefully. “I love the British. Whatever education I have comes from reading your writers and yet, time and time again, for example reading Trollope, there is the stock Jew. Even in George Eliot, God bless her. And the authors of today … I’m not going to mention names because of your horrendous libel laws but there are famous dramatists and novelists over there whose works are full of anti-Semitic filth….
Mamet should read Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway and Truman Capote. There are two or three stock Jews in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. More bollocks:
“There is a profound and ineradicable taint of anti-Semitism in the British … The paradigmatic Brit as far as the Middle East goes is [TE] Lawrence. That’s just the fact. Even before the oil was there, you loved the desert. It had all these wacky characters … But there is a Jewish state there ratified by the United Nations and you want to give it away to some people whose claim is rather dubious.”
