Mick Hartley

Arab News have an unpleasant review of Richard Littlejohn’s recent documentary on the growth of anti-Semitism in the UK. After some throat-clearing (“Of course, it is imperative to deplore unprovoked attacks on Jews and to condemn anti-Semitism in all its forms…”) we get this:

If anti-Semitism is resurgent, it is almost certainly because residual popular prejudice against Jews has been reinforced by the widespread perception that Israel enjoys a license to attack defenseless people, be they in the occupied territories or in Lebanon. Yet Littlejohn’s strident claim that it is now “open season” on British Jews is hard to swallow and smacks of alarmism. Britain’s oldest racial minority, Jews are also its most successfully assimilated minority and often boast of so being. It is a measure of how well Jewish concerns are officially represented that the smallest evidence that Jews are being targeted by racists quickly hits the headlines.

What Littlejohn never acknowledged is that there are occasions when anger about Jewish conduct may have understandable, if not justifiable, causes. For example, in Stamford Hill in the London borough of Hackney, the home of Europe’s largest community of Orthodox Jews, there is at present unrest about the community’s demand that it be given exemption from planning restrictions when it comes to building house extensions…

It is, moreover, conveniently forgotten that there are many instances where British Jews benefit from “positive discrimination”, from the institutionalized reluctance of mainstream society to voice any critical comment whatsoever about Jewish behavior and to display toward Jewish people a degree of indulgence that would be unlikely in the case of any other group. This week came news that Jews in Hertfordshire, just north of London, have been granted the right to establish an “eruv”, a special religious zone marked out by high poles joined by wire, despite opposition from local people who believe that, aside from being an eyesore, this will amount to the creation of a “Jewish state” and could generate needless tension between different communities. This is the third British eruv that has been established in the teeth of local protests.

Anger against Jews is understandable, if not justifiable. Ah yes. Of course.

So, who are the real victims of British intolerance? You know, if we look beyond the “stereotype of the Jew as victim”?

There can be little doubt that at present Muslims are Britain’s most embattled, most misunderstood and most threatened minority. Many believe that the image of British Muslims has suffered profound damage following the recent failed terrorist attacks in London and Glasgow, for which a number of non-British Muslims have been arrested. How curious that Littlejohn’s portrait of a Britain seething with anti-Semitism should have been broadcast at the very moment when it is great numbers of law-abiding British Muslims, not British Jews, who plainly have most to fear.

Presumably it’s due to some Zionist plot that we never read about these attacks on British Muslims. Or maybe it’s because they’re not happening. The line about an embattled Muslim minority, though, threatened and misunderstood, is such a standard among many Muslim commentators (and indeed plays a not insignificant part in recruiting young Muslim men into Islamist jihad) that it survives independently of any actual evidence. Criticism of Muslims? – yes, that happens, but typically the article’s silent on why criticism might be justified. The line between threats and criticism is intentionally blurred, so that an entirely reasonable concern about Muslim apathy in the face of mass murder, justified in the name of Islam, is somehow worse than the physical threats and abuse to which Jews in Britain, shamefully, are now exposed.

Intentionally or not, his [Littlejohn’s] Channel 4 “documentary” chimed with the US neocon point of view, with its insistence that America and Israel are engaged in fighting a “war on terror” and that Jews are in the war’s front line, standing up for democracy, human rights and the very survival of civilization. Billed as a plain speaker who spells out unwelcome truths, Littlejohn is actually the bearer of a coded message.

Neocons? A coded message? So who’s writing this stuff? Well, no, it’s not by an Arab. It’s by a certain Neil Berry, who I assume is the same Neil Berry who wrote an earlier Arab News piece, “How the Gibe of ‘Anti-Semitism’ Is Used to Stifle Legitimate Debate“. Whoever he is, he seems to be doing a Galloway here: playing on the Muslim sense of grievance with some snide offerings about Jewish privilege.

No wonder he didn’t like Littlejohn’s programme, with its central argument that it’s now largely on the Left, as they rush to make common cause with Islamists, that anti-Semitism’s to be found.