The British Labor Party Doesn’t Have an Anti-Semitism Problem—It Has a Chronic Condition

As revelation follows revelation of nasty comments by Labor politicians about Jews and the Jewish state, it has become increasingly evident, argues Nick Cohen, that the problem is not one of a few bad apples. Rather, he writes, anti-Semitism lies close to the very core of the party’s dominant ideology:

[The Labor parliamentarian] Naz Shah’s picture of Israel superimposed onto a map of the U.S. to show her “solution” for the Israel-Palestinian conflict was not a one-off but part of a race to the bottom. But Shah’s wider behavior as an MP—a “progressive” MP, mark you—gives you a better idea of how deep the rot has sunk. She ignored a Bradford imam who declared that the terrorist who murdered a liberal Pakistani politician was a “great hero of Islam” and concentrated her energies on expressing her “loathing” of liberal and feminist British Muslims instead.

Shah is not alone, which is why I talk of a general sickness. Liberal Muslims make many profoundly uncomfortable. Writers in the left-wing press treat them as Uncle Toms, as Shah did, because they are willing to work with the government to stop young men and women from joining Islamic State. While they are criticized, politically correct criticism rarely extends to clerics who celebrate religious assassins. As for the anti-Semitism that allows Labor MPs to fantasize about “transporting” Jews, consider how jeering and dishonest the debate around that has become. . . .

Challenging prejudices on the left wing is going to be all the more difficult because, incredibly, the British left in the second decade of the 21st century is led by men steeped in the worst traditions of the 20th. . . . When Jeremy Corbyn defended the Islamist likes of Raed Salah, who say that Jews dine on the blood of Christian children, he was continuing a tradition of Communist accommodation with anti-Semitism that goes back to Stalin’s purges of Soviet Jews in the late 1940s.

Read more at Guardian

More about: Anti-Semitism, European Islam, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Stalin, Labor Party (UK), Marxism, Politics & Current Affairs

 

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