Churchill gets Nifonged

The Urban Dictionary defines Nifonged as: the railroading or harming of a person with no justifiable cause, except for one's own gain.
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From Reuters:

A historian has uncovered a pre-World War Two article Winston Churchill wrote about the persecution of Jews but then decided not to publish.

In the long lost article, the wartime leader disapproved of the treatment they experienced, but did say of the Jews: "They have been partly responsible for the antagonism from which they suffer."

Cambridge University lecturer Richard Toye, reflecting on his find, said: "While most people would accept that Churchill was no anti-Semite, this sheds fascinating new light on his views about Jews which were very inconsistent."

While researching in the university's Churchill archives, the historian uncovered the unpublished article in a pile of proofs and press cuttings. "It was a dramatic moment," he said […]

Quite a story if it was true.

But Toye didn’t uncover a “long lost article [by] the wartime leader;” and the article doesn’t reveal Churchill to have been a closet anti-Semite, which Toye all but says he was.

From the International Herald Tribune:

[...] Geoffrey Alderman, a British historian who is a columnist for The Jewish Chronicle in London, said in an interview Sunday that "we have known about this for some time" because the article appears in a collection of Churchill's writings compiled by Martin Gilbert, Churchill's official biographer, that was published in the 1980s.

Alderman added: "It does not challenge" the prevailing view of Churchill as supportive of the Jews. "I think it's a flash in the pan."

But Toye said Churchill had sought to publish the article in 1937 in Britain and the United States. Churchill "was apparently happy to put his name to this article in 1937" and was "happy to endorse sentiments contained in articles that were written for him," Toye said.

Gilbert said Churchill had refused to permit the article to be published. He identified the ghost-writer as Adam Marshall Diston, a member of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists. It was not clear why Churchill commissioned him to write an article in his name.[...]

And this from the TimesOnline:

[…] Gilbert said Richard Toye, the lecturer who “found” the article and includes it in a new book, Lloyd George and Churchill ( It’s to be released Mar. 16 in the UK by Macmillan. JinC), must have failed to consult Gilbert’s compilation of Churchill’s writings published in the 1980s, which describes it.

“I’m amazed. My book would have been on the shelf in the same library. I immediately recognised the name of the article,” said Gilbert, whose own new book, Churchill and the Jews, will be published this summer.

Gilbert no doubt was being more than a touch ironic when he said he was “amazed” Toye hadn’t consulted his book.

Besides having at-hand access to Gilbert's book, Toye could very easily have contacted Gilbert, the world’s leading Churchill scholar, to ask Gilbert what he knew about the “long lost article.” Serious scholars do that sort of thing all the time; and Gilbert has a reputation for being very responsive to other scholars’ inquiries.

But if Toye had consulted Gilbert’s book (I'm assuming Toye didn’t consult Gilbert’s book and then later “forget” he did.) or contacted him, Toye and Cambridge University couldn’t now be trumpting, on the eve of publication of Toye’s book, that he'd “unearthed” the “long lost aricle.”

In a TimesOnline op-ed, “Racism is too real to be used as a cheap gibe,” Stephen Pollard, Chairman of the European Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism, gives Toye some knocks and then reminds us that unjustified insinuations of anti-Semitism serve to deaden us to real instances of it which, unfortunately, are on the rise in Britian.

Scott Johnson at Powerline posted on the story. I hope you give his post a look.

In a day or two I’ll post again on Toye’s blatantly promotional claims. I'll also post asking why Cambridge University has been helping hype them.