Former LFI chair Dame Louise Ellman has written the below article for the Daily Telegraph. Click here to read the original.
A major terror attack on a Jewish institution – such as that which
tragically occurred at the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation last
Thursday – was both predictable and predicted.
For two years, a rising tide of anti-Jewish racism has been allowed to
grow in our country.
This festival of hate has been allowed to weave its way through local
communities – Jewish children unable to wear their uniforms outside
the school gates – and our great national institutions, including the
BBC, the NHS and our universities.
The reason this has not been confronted is simple: because the target
was Israel and those who would take oHence were the Jewish
community.
No other state and no other community in this country would be
treated this way. Nor should they be. But those who harass and
intimidate Jews appear to have been granted a warrant of impunity.
The root of the problem is that, for far too long, policymakers and the
media have accepted the myth that anti-Semitism and hatred of the
world’s only Jewish state are separable. They are not.
The crimes of which Israel has been falsely accused – behaving like
Nazis, practising apartheid, committing genocide and colonialism – are the most serious that can be levelled.
They demonise and delegitimise not just Israel and the Israeli people
but all those – including the vast majority of British Jews – who believe
in its right to exist.
With Israel portrayed as uniquely and intrinsically evil, the call to
“globalise the intifada” appears to some a legitimate response.
Anti-Semites alone are responsible for their actions. But we cannot
ignore the environment in which they operate.
Lies about Israel have been propagated by politicians, charities and
pressure groups, and elements of the media. They have been chanted
on our streets and campuses – seemingly without consequence. And
they have been peddled and promoted by far-Left and Islamist groups; the “useful idiots” of the anti-Western axis of Russia, China and Iran, who seek not only to divide and destabilise our societies but also to detract from the crimes that they are committing throughout the world.
These far-Left and Islamist groups are utterly unrepresentative of our
society – including the vast majority of British Muslims – but they have
been aided and abetted by a far wider and pernicious culture of silence. These calumnies have gone unchallenged; the perils facing Israel unacknowledged; the threat posed to our democracy by the far-Left and Islamist extremists unrecognised.
Anti-Semitism may be running at record levels but the terrible reality is that this drumbeat of anti-Israeli vitriol has been growing for at least
two decades.
I welcome the Government’s long-overdue pledge to give the police
greater powers to ban repeated anti-Israel protests, but, if we’re to
have any chance of preventing more attacks like that which occurred
last week, it needs a comprehensive approach which tackles the
interrelated challenges of anti-Semitism, extremism and the Iranian
threat of domestic radicalisation.
First, the Government should require all public bodies to adopt the
International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance deVnition of anti-
Semitism in full and without amendment. This explicitly says that
criticism of the Israeli government is not anti-Semitism – but it
provides some critical guard rails to prevent grotesque comparisons
between Israel and Nazi Germany or denying the Jewish people their
right to self-determination.
This should be allied to the establishment of an independent reviewer
of anti-Semitism in the public sector, who should be required to
publish an annual report.
As recommended by the Board of Deputies’ Commission on
Antisemitism, the Government should host a summit of NHS leaders to
tackle anti-Semitism in the NHS. When Jews are removing Star of
David jewellery before visiting the doctor, something has gone terribly
wrong. The current medical regulatory system is, the Health Secretary
has rightly argued, completely failing to protect patients and NHS staff.
A similarly robust stance must be taken towards the anti-Jewish racism
on our campuses and at the BBC.
Second, the menace of “hateful extremism”, identiVed by the
Commission for Countering Extremism in 2021, must be taken on. As
the former counter-extremism commissioner, Sara Khan, has noted,
successive governments have failed to address gaps in legislation
which allows Islamist extremists (and a host of other repellent
individuals and groups, such as neo-Nazis) to operate just beyond the
terrorism threshold. “They are carefully steering around existing laws
… openly glorifying terrorism, collecting and sharing some of the most
violent extremist propaganda, or intentionally stirring up racial or
religious hatred against others,” the commissioner of the Met Police, Sir Mark Rowley, who co-authored the 2021 report, argued at the time. This does not simply stoke violence and hatred, it also creates “an ever bigger pool for terrorists to recruit from”.
Third, Iranian ideological centres in the UK, which operate through a
network of community centres, charities and student organisations,
are promoting Tehran’s violent and extremist ideology in the UK. They
have even hosted talks by virulent anti-Semites in the Islamic
Revolutionary Guard Corps. After years of inaction by the Tories, the
Government has pledged to proscribe non-state threats, such as the
IRGC. It needs to put the necessary legislation on the statute books as swiftly as possible.
But this needs to be just the Vrst step. The Government should develop a cross-departmental task force to tackle the Iranian domestic threat, including through countering its support for radicalisation; declining extremists’ entry; and identifying and sanctioning Iranian regime oligarchs, elites and proxies in the UK. It should conduct a thorough review of links between Iran and the charitable and NGO sector akin to previous reviews of espionage and abuse in the sector carried out with regards to China.
Finally, the Government needs to actively and consistently challenge
the eHort to delegitimise Israel. It should speak out against the bigotry
of the BDS movement – including the manner in which Jewish
performers are being excluded from the arts – and make clearer that its
disagreements are with the Israeli government, not the Israeli people:
decisions such as that to suspend free trade agreement talks send the
opposite message.
Ministers should also think carefully about some of the rhetoric they
deploy given that Israel isn’t just the world’s only Jewish state, but a
key western ally and the region’s only democracy. It’s time that – above
all the hate and opprobrium – that message is h
