Anti-semitism

For today’s young, the holocaust is ancient history – which poses huge danger

The first news about the Nazi annihilation camps began to spread in the crucial year of 1942. They were vague pieces of information, yet in agreement with each other: they delineated a massacre of such vast proportions, of such extreme cruelty and such intricate motivation that the public was inclined to reject them because of their very enormity. It is significant that the culprits themselves foresaw this rejection well in advance: many survivors (among others, Simon Weisenthal in the last pages of The Murderers Are Among Us) remember that the SS militiamen enjoyed cynically admonishing the prisoners: ‘However this war may end, we have won the war against you; none

Fraser Nelson

Why Primo Levi’s warning about the young forgetting the holocaust resonates now

One of the most thought-provoking pieces in The Spectator this week is from Alastair Thomas on why his generation don’t get so upset about anti-Semitism. He explains the phenomenon and offers an explanation: the years have passed, the memories of the holocaust have dimmed. It’s no longer the experience of someone’s grandparents’ generation, but further back. Since then, there are more recent memories: of the Israeli Defence Force and Gaza. The conflation between Jews, Israel and Zionism has restored the idea of the Jews as being suspiciously powerful – the oppressors rather than the oppressed. This certainly stands to reason. Memories of the holocaust were kept alive for my generation

The Spectator Podcast: How to Rig an Election

On this week’s episode, we discuss how elections across the world have been taken advantage of to give more power to corrupt leaders. We also talk about the international persecution of Muslims, and ask, why don’t young Corbynites care about anti-Semitism? While the world has been reeling from news of Cambridge Analytica’s political interference, two academics have been following the trail of shady election rigging across the world that go deeper than social media. Professor Nic Cheeseman, at the University of Birmingham, and Dr Brian Klaas at the LSE, have visited developing democracies from Asia, to Africa, to Europe. In this week’s cover piece, they explain the extent of election

Stephen Daisley

Labour can’t tackle anti-Semitism under Corbyn

The Labour Party brings to mind any number of Yiddish expressions — most of them involving the performance of lavatorial functions — but none more so than the proverb Der mentsh trakht un Got lakht. Man plans and God laughs.  The Almighty’s black humour is surely at work in the resignation of Christine Shawcroft, chair of the Labour Party disputes panel. The woman responsible for rooting out anti-Semitism has been caught defending a council candidate accused of posting Holocaust-denying content on social media. In a leaked internal email, Shawcroft called for Peterborough’s Alan Bull to be reinstated after suspension for ‘a Facebook post taken completely out of context and alleged

Theo Hobson

The unspoken cause of Labour’s anti-Semitism problem

There is another cause of Labour’s anti-Semitism. It is not just that Israel is seen as the last vestige of western imperialism, and that Jews are still suspected of running global finance. It is also that many on the left hate religion, and Judaism is, in some ways, the most intense face of religion. But surely it is far less threatening to the secularist than Christianity or Islam, as it does not seek universal uptake? True, but as the parent of these other monotheisms, it is seen as having a special culpability. Christians and Muslims can be seen as wannabe Jews – they have been infected by the Jewish God-bug.

Katy Balls

Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-Semitism response backfires

As MPs go into the Easter recess, Jeremy Corbyn is rounding up one of his worst weeks as leader yet. After the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council wrote to the Labour leader accusing him of ‘again and again’ siding with ‘anti-Semites rather than Jews’, both members of the Jewish community and Labour moderates attended a demonstration in Parliament Square to voice their concerns. Only some of Corbyn’s more dedicated supporters weren’t having any of that and staged a rival protest defending their leader from ‘MSM smears’. Today we begin to see Corbyn’s team’s attempt to change the narrative and tackle the issue. Corbyn has

The Spectator’s Notes | 28 March 2018

At last Jeremy Corbyn is being made to pay a price for Labour’s anti-Semitism under his leadership. It has now, for the first time, become definitely hard for him to get through mainstream interviews. He is challenged, and although his answers bend to the wind of criticism a little, this affords him no respite. His repeated response of saying how much he ‘detests all racism’ is like Sinn Fein’s traditional denunciation of violence ‘wherever it comes from’ — an evasion. His demeanour raises wider questions about whether he will ever answer anything which is difficult: there is a reason, after all, why he has not agreed to be interviewed on the

James Forsyth

Labour MPs are suspicious of Corbyn again

One of the mistakes Theresa May made in calling an early election was not anticipating the effect it would have on the Labour party. Up until April 2017, Labour had been noisily divided between the parliamentary party — the vast majority of whom had no confidence in its leadership — and Jeremy Corbyn whom they couldn’t remove because he had the backing of the membership. But the snap election changed this dynamic. Corbyn’s internal opponents nearly all went quiet once the campaign was announced. This wasn’t just tribal loyalty asserting itself. They wanted to make sure that Corbyn failed on his own terms — that there could be no stab-in-the-back

Rod Liddle

Labour, lizards and anti-Semitism

There’s a very funny moment in Jon Ronson’s book Them: Adventures with Extremists, part of which follows the New Age mental case David Icke on a tour of Canada. All the way across the great plains, Icke has been promulgating his thesis that we are the unwitting subjects of shape-shifting reptilian alien overlords. Aside from Ronson, a protestor has been following Icke, too — demonstrating outside each venue —convinced that when Icke says ‘shape-shifting reptilian overlords’ he really means ‘Jews’. Eventually, having heard Icke speak on perhaps a dozen occasions, Ronson asks the protestor, ‘Do you still think that when Icke says lizards, he means Jews?’ And the protester replies,

The Corbynasties

It took a protest of Jews in Westminster for Jeremy Corbyn to own up to the Labour party’s problem with anti-Semitism. It ‘has caused pain and hurt to Jewish members of our party and to the wider Jewish community in Britain,’ he said — an admission that has been a very long time coming. But among Corbyn’s cultish young followers, the apology was met with a shrug. ‘Problem? What problem?’ This I know, because I’m (roughly) a Labour supporter and have lots of Corbyn–supporting friends. And for Corbynites of my age (early twenties), the whole issue remains just another attempt to delegitimise Corbyn’s bid to become prime minister. That’s why

Labour’s anti-Semitism problem is nothing new

We may be witnessing a #MeToo moment in Labour anti-Semitism. Britain’s Jews, so damn accommodating and willing to extend the benefit of the doubt, have finally snapped and said ‘enough is enough’. At 5.30pm tonight they will gather in Westminster to protest in the most British way imaginable by handing the Labour Party a strongly-worded letter. The letter calls Jeremy Corbyn a ‘figurehead for an anti-Semitic political culture’ and says he has repeatedly ‘sided with anti-Semites rather than Jews’. If anything, it goes a little easy on him.  The spark was Corbyn’s defence of, and dissembling over, an anti-Semitic mural in east London but the frustrations have been building up

Anti-Semitism fatigue is now a normal part of British politics

How did it come to this? Here we are, in 2018, in modern, democratic, fair-minded Britain, and what happens when it turns out the leader of the Labour Party was a member of a secret Facebook group awash with anti-Semitic comments? Not a lot really. As the political editor of the Jewish Chronicle, I have been writing about Jeremy Corbyn’s associations with anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers and radical clerics since long before he became leader of the opposition. I have also lost count of the number of stories I have written on Labour MPs, councillors, activists and supporters linked to Jew-hate since the summer of 2015. When I saw the work

France’s Jewish population has good reason to feel afraid

In January 2016, Nicolas Sarkozy was honoured by British Jews at a ceremony in London. The former French president was thanked by Chief Rabbi Pinchas Goldsmith for his support during a decade that had seen an upsurge in anti-Semitism across France. ‘France right now is the main battleground between hope and fear for the future of Europe, especially for the Jewish community’, said Goldsmith. Two years on, and Britain has also become a battleground for Jews. Anti-Semitic attacks are now at record levels in the UK, according to a report released this week, with 2017 witnessing a 34 per cent rise in violent assaults against Jewish people. Holland and Belgium have also

Satire and self-deprecation

If you’re Jewish, or Jew-ish, or merely subscribe to the view that Jews should be trusted to recognise anti-Semitism rather than be accused of making false allegations to further their own malign agenda, the chances are you could do with a laugh right now. The resurgent far right’s threat feels frightening but expected, whether from torch-waving American mobs or European ethno-nationalists directing the restive masses’ anger towards the traditional target, presently embodied by George Soros. More dismaying for many have been the myriad controversies involving putative anti-racists: for instance, the Momentum activist who claimed that Jews were the slave trade’s ‘chief financiers’ and rank their suffering above other oppressed minorities’;

Italy’s road to ruin

These days it is fashionable to claim Mussolini as a fundamentally decent fellow led astray by an opportunist alliance with Hitler. Whether this revisionism is the song and dance of a minority, or something more widespread and daft, is hard to say. Italians understandably wish to view themselves as brava gente — good people — so they prefer to blame Hitler for Mussolini’s murderous 1938 racial laws against the Jews. The truth is, Nazi Germany never demanded an anti-Semitic campaign as the price of friendship with Italy. On the contrary, Mussolini resented the imputation that his anti-Jewish legislation was imposed on him from without. By the time Iris Origo’s Italian

The Spectator’s Notes | 19 October 2017

‘Persecuted and Forgotten?’ is the name of the latest report by Aid to the Church in Need. Unfortunately, there is no need for that question mark in the title. Both the persecution and the oblivion are facts. Christians have been victims of the genocide in Isis-controlled parts of Iraq and Syria. In 2011, there were 150,000 Christians in Aleppo and now there are 35,000. Persecution rises in other Muslim countries such as Pakistan, Sudan and Iran. In Nigeria, 1.8 million people have been displaced by Boko Haram. In India, there is much more harassment of Christians since Narendra Modi came to power in 2015. In China, there are now thought

Watch: Andrew Neil’s Holocaust Educational Trust speech on anti-Semitism and the left

With the Labour party currently leading in the polls, it’s easy to think that the party’s problem with anti-Semitism must have been resolved. However, Andrew Neil was on hand this week to remind the public that this is not the case. In the keynote speech at the Holocaust Education Trust dinner in London, Neil launched an attack on the left for getting away with it ‘in the way that the anti-Semitism of the far right is not allowed to get away with it’: ‘At the Labour Conference, in a fringe meeting, but official enough to be on the official programme of the Labour Party Conference, one person – a chair

Wandering Jews

Simon Schama is an international treasure. Whether on screen or in print, he is all energy, enthusiasm, dramatic gestures, emotional intensity. He clutches his readers in a tiger-like grip, then chews them up with relish until they are almost helpless with mirth or emotional exhaustion. If the first volume of his trilogy on the history of the Jews had something of the quality of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, this second, carrying the saga forward from 1492 to 1900, is no less of a Technicolor blockbuster. Here too we have a cast of zillions with all kinds of special effects. Composed of a dazzling succession of tableaux with linking

Britain has an anti-Semitism problem. Here are the numbers that prove it

A new report on anti-Semitism in Britain makes uncomfortable reading all round. The study, a joint enterprise by the Community Security Trust and the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, is an in-depth exploration of anti-Jewish attitudes, the role of animus towards Israel, and the prevalence of prejudice in 2017. It is a sober analysis and the researchers tend towards restraint – sometimes a little too much restraint – in drawing conclusions from their data. It is this very interpretive modesty that makes the findings all the more concerning. While the report caps the ‘hardcore’ anti-Semite population at five percent, it detects a further 25 per cent who feel negatively about Jews and