Another Anti-Semitism Scandal in Britain’s Labor Party

Yesterday, a high-ranking British parliamentarian by the name of Naz Shah was suspended from the Labor party over a series of anti-Semitic comments that recently came to light. Douglas Murray writes:

I noticed earlier this year . . . that although she had suffered some of the harsher corners of Pakistani culture, Ms. Shah was no moderate. And then yesterday morning the wholly unsurprising news emerged that she has spent recent years railing against the Jews and the state of Israel on social media. Specifically she seems to approve of a plan to remove all the Jews of the Middle East from Israel. If there is any irony to a Muslim [who represents a district with a large immigrant population] telling the Jews of the Middle East to “go back to where they came from,” then it is clearly lost on Ms. Shah.

Of course this is the same Ms. Shah who sits on a parliamentary group investigating anti-Semitism. She has already issued the pro-forma statement stressing that in the wake of this unfortunate outing of her views she will be “seeking to expand [her] existing engagement and dialogue with Jewish community organizations, and will be stepping up . . . efforts to combat all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism.” Yes—that’s it! All that’s needed is for Shah to “fight” racism just that little bit harder. Hitherto she just hadn’t been doing it quite enough. All she needs to do now is promise to crush “all extremists” a little bit more and the sunlit uplands will be reached for all of us.

But she hails from a culture and a religion where anti-Semitism is rife. Why would you expect her not to hold some of the rancid views of that culture as well as some of the nicer bits?

Read more at Spectator

More about: Anti-Semitism, Labor Party (UK), Politics & Current Affairs, United Kingdom

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society