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Antisemitism? What antisemitism?

November 24, 2016 22:54

In his piece this week, the editor of this here newspaper, Stephen Pollard, asserts that:

For too long, our community has not wanted to make too much of a noise. We have talked to each other, we have moaned to each other, and we have gone through the back-channels of government, but - a Trafalgar Square rally apart - we have not really had the temerity to make ourselves properly heard lest we be thought trouble-makers.

But perhaps the issue is that people aren't making too much of a noise not because they don't want to be "trouble-makers" but because there isn't much to make a noise about.
Britain, if anything, is probably one of the least antisemitic countries. The author Pollard is praising, Baroness Ruth Deech, would hardly have reached her positions, a former head of an Oxford college, BBC governor and chair of the Human Fertilisation & Embryology Authority, and now a crossbencher in the House of Lords, if antisemitism was prevalent.
Let's consider the evidence. No other non-Christian denomination has its leader sitting in the Lords like Lord Sacks and his predecessor, Lord Jakobovits.
Every year, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography publishes an online supplement of new entries of persons deceased five years earlier. In recent years, between six and ten per cent of all them entries were Jewish. Out of a total of one-half of one per cent of the entire population.
Six of the 24 current members of the Order of Merit are Jewish, as have been three of the five most recent Lord Chief Justices.
You are far more likely to face discrimination if you are Asian or Afro-Caribbean.
Pollard complains that no one really wants to stand up as an "antisemitism champion" because:

Not because of the reaction outside the community but because of how they will be treated within it. If they are female, they will be criticised for being too shrill. If they are male, they will be told they are hot-headed.

But those who do go shouty on antisemitism are like the boy who cried wolf. Too many times the allegation of antisemitism has been made when it is criticism of this or that Israeli policy. The problem is that when real antisemitism does raise its ugly head, no one believes the shouters, because they have form and have been too quick to appropriate and cheapen the term.
So "antisemitism champions" are not what this community needs. What it needs are leaders who are level-headed and know how to distinguish between antisemitism and opposition to Israeli policies.

November 24, 2016 22:54

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