A Tide of Anti-Semitism—Is Britain Turning Nasty?
Read Time:2 Minute, 28 Second
A relatively constant news headline in Blighty of late is the clear anti-semitism in the Labour Party. A more recent headline, courtesy of the Conservatives Boris Johnson, is whether there is a seam of Islamophobia in the Conservative government.
These are worrying developments.
In the case of Labour, it is undoubtedly the ‘hard left’ causing the anti-semitism problem.
Traditionally Labour has been a socialist party – probably most akin to America’s Democrats. Socialism and liberalism being easy bedfellows.
Blair dragged them to the right. Perhaps that is why they seem to have moved now to a pretty extreme left stance. An overreaction to the Blair years?
In the red corner, we have the extreme left who are certainly not socialists nor liberal.
In the blue corner, we have the Conservatives. The party of capitalism.
They are, currently, arguably the most chaotic government in living memory and yet, Labour, who should be streets ahead are still lagging behind in the polls.
The Conservatives, given Labours hard left position, seem destined to totter on in power for the foreseeable future.
The Brits may not like the Conservatives but they damn well won’t accept a hard left government.
The problem is, now the Conservatives are getting just as nasty about Muslims as Labour are about Jews.
Boris Johnson wrote an article questioning whether a full face veil is an appropriate attire in a western democracy.
A valid question.
However, he then went on to verbally abuse Muslim women who wear the veil by writing that they looked like letterboxes or bank robbers.
Now it is fine to not like the full face veil and there is no reason to not discuss openly what your views are but, not liking the full face veil is not at all the same as verbally abusing the women who wear it.
Fearing Boris is tapping into the floating voters who fled to UKIP, some Conservatives are clearly ‘out to get him’ whilst others are applauding him. It is interesting to note that he had a meeting with Steve Bannon of Breitbart shortly before writing the offending article.
If such ‘populism’ worked for Trump why not Johnson?
It is nasty politics. It is not the politics of a civilized western democracy.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is clearly comfortable with anti-semitism in his party. A recently unearthed video from 2014 has him comparing Israeli policies with Germanys Nazis. He seems oblivious to the obvious fact that Jewish people per se have nothing to do with Israeli policy.
Conservative Boris Johnson verbally abuses Muslim women for wearing the full face veil. An awful garment certainly, and alarming at best to most westerners, but it is the garment that should be discussed and not the wearer abused.
Britain has long been a divided society. The divisions are deepening and, by any stretch of the imagination, becoming nastier and nastier.
In Case You Missed It: Donald Trump Loves Boris Johnson
Happy
0 %
Sad
0 %
Excited
0 %
Sleepy
0 %
Angry
0 %
Surprise
0 %
0
0
There are fewer and fewer things about the human race that do not bewilder me!
I’m still in the process of reading James Shapiro’s Shakespeare and the Jews and it’s an eye-opener so far, even to one who has long been aware of that thousand year or more tradition in English letters. Is today’s anti-Semitic rhetoric an emergence or re-emergence? I lean toward the latter.
There is a commonality in the truly irrational way Jews have been viewed in Europe since it was Christianized and I hesitate to see England in much different light, and I see anti-Semitism as part of Christian cultural identity from the 4th century on.
I grew up thinking of WWII as having been a well learned lesson to the world, but of course it hasn’t been. Tribal hate is based on the need for tribal hate and underlies the veneer of liberal thought. Time and the political need to hate thy brother has worn away some of that coating of decency and objectivity and ironically, has been corrosive of the Christian virtues preached on Sunday and violated on Monday.
Britons of Shakespeare’s time, even though they had long ago been expelled, imagined Jews to be very different in race, appearance, values and most every characteristic. I’m not sure it’s changed. In my lifetime schoolmates were surprised to see that I don’t have black, curly hair, swarthy skin, a pronounced amor crumeniam and perhaps even horns. Surprised at the suggestion that I don’t hate Jesus or Christians or spit on the sacraments although I think most don’t still think we use Christian blood in ours.
But sometimes I wonder.
I was, perhaps naively, shocked at this rise in anti-Semitism.
Jewish people comprise such a small proportion of Britain’s population it makes no sense – neither would it, to me, if they comprised much much more.
I can follow a sort of logic regarding Islamophobia but anti-Semitism completely bewilders me.