The appalling treatment of Sir Roger Scruton
by Melanie Phillips:
The shocking character assassination and sacking of Sir Roger Scruton is beyond belief.
Scruton, Britain’s pre-eminent philosopher, was interviewed by the New Statesman for its current issue.
The interviewer, deputy editor George Eaton, tweeted that Scruton’s remarks were “outrageous”. What was outrageous, however, was the use Eaton made of them. For he tweeted about what Scruton had said:
“On Hungarian Jews: ‘Anybody who doesn’t think that there’s a Soros empire in Hungary has not observed the facts.’”
But in the interview Scruton didn’t mention that Soros was a Jew. He referred merely to Soros’s activities in Hungary. Yet Eaton falsely presented this as an adverse comment about Hungarian Jews.
In the interview, Eaton observed that Scruton was “heedless of the antisemitic portrayal of the philanthropist George Soros as a Jewish puppet-master”. Yes, Soros is vilified as such by real antisemites. But Scruton’s observation about Soros’s activities was broadly correct.
Soros has an antipathy to the western nation state. He aims to destroy national borders and promote mass migration, an agenda he has bankrolled to the tune of many millions of dollars under the aegis of his multinational Open Society organisation and which Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, not unreasonably regards as a threat to the integrity of Hungary itself.
Anyone who thus criticises Soros, however, is smeared as an antisemite by those who weaponise antisemitism in order to silence criticism of Soros and demonise Orban.
Moreover, Scruton’s previous remarks about Hungarian Jews, in a controversy to which Eaton alludes, had themselves been taken grossly out of context. As I explained in my post here, far from promoting antisemitism Scruton had actually been speaking against it.
By radically decontextualising his words, his accusers had reversed their meaning. Eaton makes no mention of this, stating instead that “Scruton is unrepentant, however, about the remarks that earned him such opprobrium”.
Read also: Roger Scruton: An apology for thinking by Roger Scruton, Spectator
Roger Scruton makes conservatism intelligent again by Jules Gomes, Frontpage Magazine
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