Jose Saramago's Anti-Semitism

Jose Saramago is dead at 87. After winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998, Saramago proceeded to put his new-gained fame to work to support a cause close to his heart: anti-semitism.

Jose Saramago is dead at 87. Saramago, not previously well known outside his native Portugal, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998. Saramago proceeded to put his new-gained fame to work to support a cause close to his heart: anti-semitism. Over the last 12 years of his life, Saramago not only routinely joined the wildest condemnations of Israel, but went out of his way to express dislike of Jews as Jews. (His most notorious remark: "They have learned nothing from the Holocaust." And do only consider the trouble Europe took to administer the lesson! What a sad waste that the Jews should not have benefited more from it.)

I will have more to say about him in my National Post column tomorrow.