Just another week
This week we celebrate Chanukah. The festival that remembers Jewish resistance against oppression is now almost mainstream. Party leaders vie to record the best Chanukah message and newspapers publish recipes for the best latkes. This is rightly a source of comfort and pride. Jews and our customs are part of the fabric of British life.
But at the same time, there is another story to Jewish life in Britain. This same week — as last week, as the week before that, and doubtless as next week — there has been a steady stream of stories of blatant and unashamed antisemitism, from mock-ups of “dancing Jews” and references to a Final Solution for Israel, to libels about Jews setting Grenfell Tower alight and chanting of Jewhate outside the US Embassy.
In isolation, none of these are especially earthshattering, which doubtless explains why they have received negligible media coverage. But week in, week out, the flow of such examples of public and shameless antisemitism is incessant and few of them receive much attention beyond newspapers like the JC.
A sort of “antisemitism fatigue” is at work. Such is the regularity of these stories that many news organisations have lost interest. Perhaps this is understandable — even at the JC there is a weariness at the thought of having to report ever more examples. Understandable, but wrong. We should never lose sight of what underlies all of this — hatred of Jews, which is becoming ever more open.
That is why we have put all of this week’s stories — none of which, on their own, would merit such treatment — on the front page.
Because the sum of the individual parts demands that attention is paid.
GARY LINEKER has been accused of bias after sharing a video from a notorious anti-Israel activist .
The Match of the Day presenter retweeted footage promoted by Ben White, a UK-based anti-Israel speaker and author, which showed Israeli soldiers arresting Palestinian youths. Mr Lineker described the video as “sickening”.
The post sparked a stream of criticism. One social media user described the fact that Mr Lineker had retweeted Mr White as “sickening”. Others accused him of lacking “wisdom” and urged him to “find out the facts”.
Others praised him for sharing the video.
Mr Lineker responded by saying he was unfamiliar with Mr White. “Don’t know the fella,” he tweeted. “As far as I’m concerned I’m retweeting a video of kids being put in a cage. Nothing makes that right.” The Sussex Friends of Israel group responded: “If Trump had said about Britain First ‘I didn’t know the fellas,’ would that have made his posting of their videos ok?” Lieutenant Colonel Peter Lerner, the former spokesperson for the IDF, tweeted: “Sorry, Gary, you’ve completely missed the point. Yes, the video is unpleasant but it conveniently shares only a glimpse of what happened. You should be wiser than this.”
Mr Lineker responded by stessing he was “not taking sides. I’ve tweeted vehemently against fascism, bigotry, terrorism etc but you don’t seem as interested in those tweets.”
Mr White has written that he can “understand” why some people are antisemitic as a result of the “state of Israel, its ideology of racial supremacy and its subsequent crimes committed against the Palestinians”.
In 2012 he sparked controverys when he called for a boycott of an Israeli theatre company performing in the
UK by tweeting a picture of the Jewish author Howard Jacobson, accompanied by the words: “If you need another reason to support a boycott of Habima, I present a massive picture of Howard Jacobson’s face”.