Letter To The “Evening Standard”
Re Ritual Murder

                                                93c Venner Road,
                                                       Sydenham,
                                                London SE26 5HU.
                                                   020 8659 7713
                              E-Mail A_Baron@ABaron.Demon.Co.UK


June 7, 2001

Sir,

Re yesterday's article "Fury at sale of 'hidden' anti-Jewish manuscript."
As usual, Jewish leaders protest too much. Ritual murder has been
practised by many societies, including by the ancient Britons, but only
allegations against Jews cause outrage. 

An infamous case occurred in the Gold Coast (now Ghana) in 1944; eight
men (all highly educated) were sentenced to death and a number were
eventually executed. 

A book on the case, "MURDER IN THE PALACE AT KIBI", was published by an
African detective whose wise words Jewish leaders would do well to heed:

87 members of the British Parliament led by the Jewish MP Sydney
Silverman supported a petition for clemency. 

Of them, H.A Nuamah wrote "Their sympathies had been enlisted largely on
the grounds that the case was an invention of those who sought to
portray the African as a bloodthirsty savage and therefore unfit for
self rule."

Mr Nuamah dismissed this, arguing:

"What nation in the world does not have, somewhere in its background,
gruesome and inhuman customs and practices? Should we say that the
British are savages unfit to govern themselves because their ancestors,
under the Druids enclosed people in wickerwork cages and burned them
alive in sacrifices, or because less than two hundred years ago they
hanged children for stealing..."

and "Within living memory in India, dutiful Hindu wives entered the
flames of the funeral pyres of their husbands. Are Indians therefore
depraved and backward?"

Burton's book was not anti-Jewish, and neither was Burton; he had many
Jewish friends in the elite circles in which he moved. And the Jews in
the 1840 case were not acquitted of ritual murder; they were convicted,
albeit mainly by induced confessions. Although European Jewish leaders
intervened, this was purely a political exercise and any subsequent
declarations of innocence must be seen in this light. The evidence for
murder and indeed for ritual murder in this case was and remains quite
strong.


Yours sincerely,
A Baron