Exposed! – Board of Deputies sleight of hand
On 27th October The Board of Deputies of British Jews launched a new edition of its Employer’s Guide to Jews and Judaism at a “Strengthening the Jewish Way of Life and Combatting Antisemitism Conference”, hosted by John Mann the UK Government’s supposedly Independent Adviser on Antisemitism.
As the guide says:
Jewish people work in every area of industry, trade and the professions, participating fully in working life while embracing Jewish practice and identity in ways that reflect the wide diversity of Jewish life in Britain.
Some Jewish practices may require additional thought on the part of both employers and employees; this guide is intended to explain the parts of the Jewish way of life that might interact with the workplace and to offer support for their navigation.
But the Guide has been around for a while. You can see the previous version here.
So why a new guide? The only thing that seems substantively different is that this new version includes the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism as a large double page spread. (Strange that this document whose adoption the Board and other legacy Jewish institutions often claim as vital to protect Jews from the scourge of antisemitism was only mentioned casually in passing in the earlier guide…)
Here is the spread:
Notice anything? Its presentation has been doctored!
In the original it says, after providing its inadequate, confusing, non-definition-of-a-definition:
To guide IHRA in its work, the following examples may serve as illustrations:
Manifestations might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. However, criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic. Antisemitism frequently charges Jews with conspiring to harm humanity, and it is often used to blame Jews for “why things go wrong.” It is expressed in speech, writing, visual forms and action, and employs sinister stereotypes and negative character traits.
Contemporary examples of antisemitism in public life, the media, schools, the workplace, and in the religious sphere could, taking into account the overall context, include, but are not limited to…
This is then followed by eleven bullet points. That at least has the merit of making clear that any use of them as examples (most of which relate in some way to Israel and are highly disputed) has to take into account the overall context.
The whole section has now been presented as 14 equivalent bullet points and the qualifying phrase about taking into account the context is buried in bullet point 3!
On a causal reading it is very unlikely that the qualification will be noticed at all, let along taken as applying to every single bullet point that follows!
This doctoring isn’t as blatant as that carried out by Luke Akehurst of We Believe in Israel a decade ago when “Contemporary examples of antisemitism in public life, the media, schools, the workplace, and in the religious sphere could, taking into account the overall context, include, but are not limited to:” was amended in a model motion presented to local authorities for adoption to “The guidelines highlight manifestations of antisemitism as including…”
What is the Board playing at? All we know is that the Board has a record of playing thick and fast with how it defines antisemitism depending on circumstances as pointed out in this post, Board overboard?, on JVL back in 2020.
It is worth spelling out, yet again, that the IHRA definition has no practical value in the fight against antisemitism because it is too vague and indefinite to define anything in particular. Its function, rather, is to encourage the presumption that criticism of Israel is antisemitic until proven otherwise, and thereby to chill discussion and debate, to prevent people raising criticism in the first place.
Faced with genocide denial we are seeing the IHRA definition wheeled out more and more in an attempt to suppress dissent, particularly in the fields of health and education.
Aha. I thought that the slight of hand may have been relation to the Bell Report [where the report compares 2 different questions as if they are the same]; viz:
Compare results for this [previous] Q:
“Are you just as open to having Jewish friends as you are to have friends from other parts of British society?”
to this one :
“Are you comfortable spending time with people who openly support Israel?”.
When looking at antisemitic attitudes. Though I haven’t checked this back to the original source[s].
Who should I address the following question to? “Are you comfortable spending time with people who openly support the Palestinians?”. What should I do if the answer is no?
One problem with unleashing this much contested IHRA WD is that the majority of those accused with such apparent certainty are likely to be innocent, and such certainty is not reflected in the correctly presented official text.
As an example in a Jewish Policy Research article they claimed that most of those endorsing the statement ‘Israel is Apartheid’ were antisemitic. However our analysis showed that according to JPR’s own survey only 9% would have been considered antisemitic. Legitimate motivations (as with the UN assessment) are often ignored deliberately when the whole point is to silence critics of Israel or the Labour Government complicity in barbaric Israeli war crimes.
Are we really going to allow freedom of speech in schools, the NHS, Universities and elsewhere in Britain to be sacrificed to protect a genocidal Israel?
We must indeed fight all forms of prejudice in our society together, but without a manipulated political definition of antisemitism, and an unjustified hierarchy, undermining our democracy.
About 10 years ago I saw, on the United Nations website, the original draft of the IHRA definition of anti semitism. The committee it came from was writing a series of equality statements regarding different faiths, race etc. Two Jewish men wrote the anti semitism definition – which I saw. I have their names. It was fairly simple and short and followed the lines of the other statements -clearly setting out instances of discrimination against individuals or groups. At the end was written a codicil: However the state of Israel can be criticised as you can any other state. ‘’ I remember it clearly. The present IHRA is a complete travesty of the original.
Lest we forget; to quote AI; “The status of the definition has been a point of heavy controversy. Critics—including civil rights organizations, academics, and Kenneth Stern (the lead drafter of the original text)—have argued that treating a flexible “working model” as a rigid standard or incorporating its Israel-related examples into codes of conduct has been used to stifle political speech and criticism of Israeli government policies.”
Israel and its Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians, has caused anti Semitism to rise.
“Please tell me if I’ve got this wrong in any way”.
I frequently write this on Facebook, Substack, BlueSky X etc. Whenever someone quotes that this or similar statements, that it’s the Jews in Israel murdering the Palestinians. I tell them that they are Not Jews, Jews follow Judaism, which forbids murder, never mind a Genocide, they are Zionists, they call themselves Jews, so as to hide behind anti Semitism.