Time to stop the point-scoring

IN THE AFTERMATH of the Paris outrages an unseemly row has broken out about the safety of Jews in the UK. On January 14, under the headline “Majority of British Jews feel they have no future in UK,” the Independent ran a story based upon surveys carried out by YouGov on behalf of the Campaign Against Antisemitism. The findings appeared to indicate that over half of the Jews living in the UK feel they have no future here, and that large proportions of British citizens (Jewish and non-Jewish) agreed with at least one of several supposedly “antisemitic” statements placed before them: 25 per cent of those surveyed agreed with the idea that “Jews chase money more than other British people, ” while 20 per cent accepted as true that “Jews’ loyalty to Israel makes them less loyal to Britain than other British people.”

The CAA is a newcomer to the AngloJewish scene. It was established last August in reaction to vicious media coverage of Israel’s military operations against Gaza, and to a variety of other anti-Jewish manifestations, including the failure of the authorities to take legal action against those who exploited pro-Palestinian demonstrations to give public expression to undisguised anti-Jewish invective. Since its foundation the CAA has engaged in a variety of online activities and has also sponsored a number of highly successful events, most sensationally a rally in London (August 31) at which the president and senior vicepresident of the Board of Deputies (Vivian Wineman and Laura Marks) were booed as they ascended the platform.

The Anglo-Jewish Establishment does not welcome newcomers – new lobby groups, over which it has little if any control, and which threaten the Establishment’s own status in the eyes of the goyim. Last year the CAA put the Establishment to shame. So naturally it was not invited to participate (January 13) in a meeting of communal leaders with prime minister Cameron, orchestrated by the JLC. But never mind. Had not CAA chairman Gideon Falter already (January 8) secured a private audience with home secretary Theresa May? Were not the Director of Public Prosecutions and the CEO of the College of Policing also present during these discussions? And were not the Board of Deputies, the JLC and the CST somehow absent from these deliberations?

So we can certainly understand the intense irritation of the Establishment when the Independent ran the CAA survey story. Something had to be done. That same day, the CST’s deputy director of communications, Dave Rich, posted a blog entitled “We must ensure that antisemitism gets no foothold in Britain” – as if antisemitism currently had no foothold here. That same day the Institute for Jewish Policy Research posted on its website a scathing denunciation of the CAA’s survey of British Jews (“professional social researchers build credible surveys and analyse the data with an open mind; the CAA survey falls short both in terms of its methodology and its analysis”). And that same day, in response to an article the Spectator had commissioned from me, in which I used the CAA survey as a peg on which to hang some observations about the undeniable growth of anti-Jewish prejudice in this country, a member of the CST warned me of the need to engage with “reputation management” before using the CAA’s survey results.

Look, the methodology behind the CAA’s Jewish survey could have been improved: its web-based randomness militated against any claim to be scientifically representative. But even the Survation poll commissioned by the JC found that 34 per cent of respondents felt that “life in general” is getting “slightly worse” for British Jews, and that another 9 per cent felt it is getting “much worse.” Allowing for statistical error, these results could indicate that well over 40 per cent of respondents felt that, for them, life was getting worse rather than better. And I should add that over a fifth of respondents said they felt unsafe “as a Jewish person in Britain.”

These depressing results are what we should all be concentrating on, not engaging in knee-jerk point-scoring informed by more than a whiff of resentment and/or spite.

More than 40 per cent felt that life was getting worse