An almighty row has broken out in Norway following a monologue by comedian Otto Jespersen - and broadcast on national TV - which resulted in a man who lost nine relatives during the Holocaust phoning the police.

Here’s the joke:

”I would also like to take the opportunity to remember all the billions of fleas and lice that lost their lives in German gas chambers, without having done anything wrong other than settling on persons of Jewish background.”

That’s about as sophisticated as the interminable joke popular among American white supremacists about black people (”if we’d known they were gonna be this much trouble, we’d have picked the goddam cotton ourselves.”)

Jespersen isn’t the first European comedian to deploy antisemitism in his act - in France, there’s the notorious Dieudonne. And just as Dieudonne ran into trouble with the law, so has Jespersen.

Aftonbladet, a leading Norwegian newspaper, reports that Kurt Valner, the man who lost nine relatives to the Nazi murderers, reported Jespersen to the police on what appear to be incitement grounds. Jespersen himself has remained silent, but other comedians have jumped to his defense, along with his boss, Alf Hildtrum, who said, “The claims that Jespersen has anti-Semitic sympathies is completely false. I don’t believe it. Otto Jespersen is trying to make a point in these monologues, and the text should be judged in context. It shouldn’t be taken in isolation.”

I’m not quite sure of either the point or the context. But I am mindful of another context: the claim, documented by the scholar Manfred Gerstenfeld and others, that antisemitism, frequently blended with anti-Zionist tropes, is alarmingly prominent in Norway and the other Nordic countries.

Ha’aretz reported that a former Norwegian Prime Minister, Kåre Willoch, responded that these claims amounted to “a traditional deflection tactic aimed at diverting attention from the real problem, which is Israel’s well-documented and incontestable abuse of Palestinians” - a Norwegian version of what David Hirsh calls “The Livingstone Formulation.”

Willoch did not respond to the specific examples raised by Gerstenfeld which, interestingly, included a number of newspaper cartoons designed to raise the same dismissive, morally superior sniggering as Jespersen’s mangled joke. One cartoon showed an ultra-Orthodox Jew engraving “thou shall murder” into an alternative Decalogue. Another cartoon showed Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert dressed up as a guard at a death camp, smiling and holding a rifle.

All of this is illustrative of a wider point. These days, racist jokes about blacks and other minorities are largely - and correctly - regarded as an embarrassment, the preserve of failed comedians performing to inebriated audiences in seedy clubs. But transfer these same themes to Jews and all of a sudden, they acquire a delicious sense of toying with the forbidden. What is reactionary becomes radical, what is stupid and insulting becomes pathbreaking. Thus does the gutter enter the lofty heights of the salon.

This is a guest post by Ben Cohen at Z Word

The various attempts, as the Presidential campaign heated up, to depict Barack Obama as hostile to Israel had minimal impact on American Jews, 78 per cent of whom voted for him. Among young Jewish voters, as this informal AJC poll indicates, the percentage was even higher. Indeed, as we reported yesterday, wariness about an Obama administration is more pointed in the Arab and wider Islamic world. One reason why, today, all eyes are on Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel, who has been appointed as Obama's Chief-of-Staff.Emmanuel Obama

Emanuel is Jewish. His Jerusalem-born father, as pointed out by Ha'aretz and a number of other outlets, served in the Irgun. Among the descriptions and anecdotes about Emanuel churning through the news cycle ("tough," "bad boy," "Washington insider," "master strategist," "inspiration for the Josh Lyman character in the ‘West Wing'"), what Al Jazeera's Rob Reynolds calls his "strong links to Israel" would seem, at this moment in time, to be defining him.

Well, Israel is his middle name. For Martin Sieff, writing an informative profile on the Daily Beast, the selection of Rahm (named, apparently, for an Irgun comrade of his father's called Rahamim) Israel Emanuel, "gives the lie to an endless wild myths that political enemies have tirelessly spread during the campaign that he was supposed to be a closest America-hater and no doubt anti-Semite because of his Kenyan background and boyhood in Indonesia."

Serious observers of the Middle East know that there are enduring aspects to the US-Israel relationship which tell us more about what lies ahead than any nasty political gossip about the ethnic origins of Administration appointees can hope to do. For Ali Abunimah, though, the Emanuel selection is cast-iron proof that Obama will not break with break with "the George W. Bush Administration's pro-Israel policies."

Perspectives like these echo the basic thesis of Mearsheimer and Walt's flawed book "The Israel Lobby" - that the disproportionate representation of pro-Israel individuals and groups in the upper echelons of US government determines why the US does what it does. And that, perhaps, is a more comforting explanation than the more obvious conclusion, namely that the basic values and strategic goals of the US and Israel spectacularly coincide.

In the more sinister corners of the internet, the fingers of the hardcore conspiracy theorists are already typing furiously. A new arrival to the blogosphere, as the New York Times observes today, is former Malaysian Prime Minister and dedicated antisemite, Mahathir Mohamed. Mahathir continues to fulminate against the Jewish conspiracy - in this post here, for example, he insists that "money has been funnelled to certain individuals and parties to ensure that a well-known candidate with extensive connection to the US Jewish lobby would somehow become the Prime Minister of Malaysia."

In his latest post, in which he congratulates Obama and then predicts his failure, he leaves the antisemitic ranting to his dedicated commenters. Among the pearls they offer are these: "we know that US is indirectly controlled by the jews (sic) and hence israel;" "resistance will come from his home grounds the rich and powerful jews who will try to dictate behind close doors;" "this man (meaning Obama) says to the Jewish American that Jerusalem is an undivided Israeli capital!" And so on, ad nauseam.

Doubtless, these fellows will have a field day with Rahm Emanuel. Doubtless, some of the columnists in the Arab press will join in. That much, we can predict.