It may well suit the British State if Jews are afraid
JVL Introduction
Joseph Finlay’s thoughtful piece looks at how useful it is for the right wing to have Jews be afraid, to be talking about rising antisemitism. This has, for example, been a factor helping the Tories to use the Prevent programme and even to clamp down on protest. He notes that it may even be in the interest of organisations set up to record and combat antisemitism to stoke the fear. The all too common conflation of antisemitism and antizionism is an obvious was to do that. While the pinnacle of the antisemitism scare may have been the relentless attacks on Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party and its members, including Jewish ones, of course, while he was the Leader but “This process of instilling fear didn’t begin with October 7th, it didn’t even begin in 2015 when Jeremy Corbyn was elected Labour leader. If I had to put a date to it, I would suggest 2001; 9/11, the start of the war on terror and the breakdown of the Oslo process…..(and) in 2007, the far-right newspaper columnist Richard Littlejohn would produce a television documentary entitled ‘The War on Britain’s Jews’.
Finlay notes: “If you are afraid, … it’s because you’ve been repeatedly subject to material that tells you that you should be.” He reminds us that there was a JPR survey which noted that there was a low level of antisemitism which did not match the level of concern about antisemitism among most of the Jewish community.
Will we see this change under Starmer’s leadership, sadly I doubt it”
LL
This article was originally published by Torat Albion on Substack on Fri 13 Sep 2024. Read the original here.
Crossing the Narrow Bridge
On Diaspora Jewish Fear and Those Who Stoke It
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As with so many articles on this site, this is wonderfully lucid and clarifying, over issues that people overwhelmingly sense to be very real and very relevant. But these issues never get brought into the open in a manner even vaguely resembling honestly, and are never discussed in a balanced and rational manner by the cowardly mainstream. Thank you for this.
My former wife was a stress counsellor.
One of her key themes was, that, in many cases:
“You make your own stress”
I’m sure that she was right, sand that the same can often be said for fear.
Absolutely excellent analysis By Joseph who was part of the original Free Speech on Israel group which became JVL. And the American article Joseph recommends on ‘The Jew as reactionary in the US media’ is absolutely brilliant and echoes many thoughts that friends have voiced.
This is brilliant. I remember meeting a prosperous and liberal Californian Jewish couple in early 2020.
We agreed that Bernie Sanders would make a great president. Then they shocked me: they said they were glad Johnson had won the UK general election because of “Corbyn’s antisemitism”.
They sounded genuinely frightened of what would have happened to Jewish people under a Labour government. That’s the level of unnecessary fear that was created – it spanned oceans and continents.
How sick would you have to be to want to create a global terror?
This has merit, but misses the key point that Zionism has always, right back to Herzl and even before, tried to make Jews afraid so that they would join the Zionist project. The way this is done may change, but the key message of Zionism has always been ‘you will never be safe in the diaspora’, come to the (future or present) Jewish State. And where Jews did feel safe, a few bombings might help dissuade them as in Iraq and Egypt.