Anti-Semitic attacks in the UK have increased by nearly 70 per cent in the last year, according to the Community Security Trust.
Desecrated Jewish graveyard
The CST recorded a record number anti-Semitic attacks carried out against UK’s Jewish community last year – 924 in 2009 up 55% from 546 in 2008.
Some will write off these top-line figures as simply the inevitable consequences of the conflict between Israel and Hamas from December 2008 to February 2009. Certainly, the number of incidents returned to normal rates three months after the intervention ended. But we must all remember that such a conflict, hundreds of miles from Britain, does nothing to legitimise violence, name-calling and graffiti on our streets.
Below the top-line is an important story that Nothing British has written about elsewhere. The authors noted the recent convergence between Islamist and far-right anti-Semitic discourse (and, in a few cases, the far-left). Its authors note:
“One feature of contemporary anti-Semitism is that the use of far-right references is no longer the preserve of neo-Nazis; nor is mention of Israel the Middle East restricted to Muslim or Arab perpetrators of incidents.”
While no one suggests any operational cooperation between the far-right and Islamists, there is an increasingly close ideological proximity on key subjects. It might seem absurd that non-Muslim, white-supremacists would have anything in common with Islamic fundamentalists who regard others as infidels. And vice versa. But both camps have developed strikingly similar critiques on issues of shared concern:-
- Middle East. The BNP’s Middle East policy is an exact replica of the Islamists’ – specifically, the West has waged too many illegal and immoral wars in “Muslim lands” and that the West applies “double standards” towards Israel which has “helped to incite the Muslim world against the West”. The West should withdraw its troops from these Muslim lands immediately. (The two camps also share views on American “imperialism”).
- Contemporary culture. Nick Griffin’s ultra-nationalist view on modernity are very similar to Anjem Choudury’s. Griffin describes it as “a rootless mass of Americanised consumers, without identity, without pride and without a future.” It creates little more than “Spiritual filth, such as abortion on demand and genocide through integration; cultural filth, like MTV; intellectual filth, like the claim that parliament is sovereign in a land where banks create credit and the mass media create governments; physical filth, like fast foods which have no nutritional value whatsoever.”
- Global Jewish conspiracy. By way of an example, the obsession of the BNP’s Legal Director, Lee Barnes, with a conspiracy of Jews buying political influence and running the world’s financial system and media are strikingly similar to the views of Hamas or Al-Qaeda on the same subject.
- Segregation. Both the BNP and Islamists believe the world should be divided. The neo-racist BNP believes in a “fortress Britain” where white Britons get preferential treatment. Sectarian Islamists want a Caliphate where non-Muslims are second class citizens.
It is worth remembering that British values of fairness, tolerance, freedom of expression and looking out for little guy are under attack, and that those who seek to undermine our way of life often resort to the same arguments. The Jewish community is not the only victims of racial abuse in our society. But the CST’s well-organised collection of anti-Semitic figures act like a canary in a coal mine. And today’s figures suggest that the enemies of the British way of life have rarely been more active or inventive.
