What has suddenly stoked the fires of anti-Jewish sentiment in the United Kingdom - or, at least, a public debate about it? The short answer: the imminent national elections.
LONDON - Greg Rowland was so incensed that he canceled his 22-year membership in the Labour Party. It was an online election advertisement that prompted his drastic move. There was British Conservative Party leader Michael Howard - a Jew - in a pose that for Rowland had undeniable anti-Semitic associations.
The 37-year-old brand and advertising consultant was convinced Howard was intentionally being portrayed as Charles Dickens' villainous, cunning Fagin. "I knew the imagery was not entirely by accident," says Rowland, whose father is Jewish. "These things don't happen by accident. I was really upset. It seemed to me to be the worst kind of election pandering. Especially for a party that's supposed to be all about equality."
Stung by a public outcry, Labour hastily pulled the ads and insisted no racial slur had been intended. Rowland, appeased by the swift response, recanted and reinstated his membership.
A second ad, which depicted Howard and his shadow chancellor, Oliver Letwin, who is also Jewish, as pigs, also annoyed some Jews. The advertising banner - both were posted on a Labour Party Web site - alluded to the idiom "when pigs fly," and was designed to knock the Conservatives' spending proposals.
Renowned Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland was unsettled by the image: "They weren't like cuddly cartoon pigs," he says. "They were like animal pigs. Really pig-like pigs. There was something very ugly about it."
Daniel Finkelstein, an associate editor at The Times who served in the Conservative Party under John Major and William Hague, believes the ads "were not deliberately anti-Semitic, but they did make use of anti-Semitic stereotypes."
And respected lawyer and writer Anthony Julius, who is working on a book on the history of English anti-Semitism, doesn't detect any racial prejudice in the Labour ads at all. Michael Howard, he says, is depicted as a hypnotist, swinging a fob watch to suggest he is trying to "pull the wool over your eyes. Fagin wasn't a hypnotist. He didn't have a fob watch. It's ignorance on the part of Jews to think this."
The view in the Jewish community may not be monolithic, but the ads are just one of a flurry of incidents in recent weeks - few of them connected to the Middle East and not all obviously anti-Jewish - that have suddenly thrust the issue of anti-Semitism onto the front pages of Britain's newspapers and TV and radio talk shows. "I cannot recall a moment in my lifetime when there was more of a debate about anti-Semitism in this country than in the last six weeks," says Finkelstein. These incidents "have made even the non-Jewish, mainstream media ask if there has been a rise in anti-Semitism."
He is also referring to an article published by a senior Labour member, which posed the question: Would Michael Howard be able to serve and protect Muslim interests? The inference, some charge: because the Conservative leader is a Jew, he cannot.
Then there was an opinion poll in the Daily Telegraph revealing that the vast majority of English people viewed Israel as one of the most undemocratic and unfriendly countries in the world. Israel topped the list as the country where Britons least wanted to take a holiday and was beaten only by China, Russia and Dubai in the "least democratic" category.
Through much of February, the country was gripped by the Ken Livingstone furor, when the mayor of London called a Jewish reporter at the Evening Standard a "concentration camp guard," after being told he was Jewish, and then reveled in his refusal to apologize. Only news that the Queen would not be attending the civil wedding ceremony of Charles and Camilla squeezed the Livingstone story off the front pages.
In the midst of all this, the agency that deals with security in the Jewish community, the Community Security Trust (CST), published a report showing that anti-Semitic attacks, including cases of physical assault, in Britain had leaped 45 percent in 2004 compared with the previous year. Finally, Princess Michael of Kent entered the fray, leaping to the defense of Prince Harry, who was photographed earlier this year wearing a Nazi uniform. She told a German newspaper that media criticism of the incident was due to "the structure of its ownership" - a phrase that conjured up the old anti-Semitic canard of an international Jewish media cabal.
Jews are not panicked, but they are suddenly watchful, their gaze focused more intently on their finely-tuned, internal anti-Semitism barometers. If anything, the raging debate around the "new anti-Semitism" - vilification of the Jewish state, and Jews by extension, by the leftist elite and by Muslims since the eruption of the intifada and September 11 - appears to have cooled. Criticism of Israel - scathing in some of the left-liberal newspapers over the last four years - has subsided, for now.
The unflattering poll and the rise in attacks on Jews last year could be ascribed to the "new anti-Semitism." But the death of Yasser Arafat, Ariel Sharon's dogged pursuit of his plan to leave Gaza and uproot settlements, and a cease-fire summit at Sharm el-Sheikh where the Israeli prime minister was surrounded by Arab leaders, have provided the ingredients for a new, more upbeat story that is emanating from the Middle East. What then has suddenly stoked the fires of anti-Jewish prejudice - or, at least, a public debate about it?
The backdrop is the still-to-be-announced general election which everyone believes Prime Minister Tony Blair will declare for early May. Both Blair and Howard are already campaigning - hence the Labor ads pillorying the Conservative leader.
Opinion may be divided in the Jewish community over whether the ads were intentionally anti-Semitic, but what isn't in dispute is the electoral calculus. It's uncomplicated: Jews number fewer than 300,000, do not vote predominantly for one party as they do in the U.S., and except for a few concentrations like in Stamford Hill and Golders Green in London, and parts of Manchester, are scattered. The Muslim community is six times larger and has traditionally preferred Labour. But Tony Blair's unswerving support for the war in Iraq has alienated many of them and Labour now fears they will either vote Liberal Democrat or simply stay home on election day.
For some in the Jewish community - and many in the Conservative Party, not surprisingly - this electoral math explains the Labour ads, as well as the recent article in a Muslim publication in which Labour Energy Minister Mike O'Brien posed the following question: "What will Michael Howard do for British Muslims?" The accusation: Labour is pandering to the Muslims in a desperate bid to win them back.
Writing in the Spectator, a high-brow, right-wing weekly, journalist Rod Liddle posits that there are at least 13 "extremely marginal parliamentary seats in which the Muslim vote could swing the result," and seven more where the Muslim vote is over 25 percent of the total electorate. His conclusion: "If there's no point in courting the Jewish vote, then equally there is no harm in offending Jewish people if electoral advantage can be gained among another section of the population by doing so."
"There are no opinion polls," he continues, "which show that Muslim voters, moderate or less moderate, leap up and down with glee when Labour politicians gratuitously offend the Jews. But my guess is that they do. Is it possible, or even likely, that Labour has made the very same guess?"
Having been generally labeled as anti-Jewish, the ads have clearly become a political football. Labour insiders insist it was the Conservatives, trying to sully them, who "built up" the anti-Semitism charges. "The accusations of anti-Semitism from Conservative quarters are designed to shut down any criticism of Michael Howard," says one.
For the Guardian's Freedland, the ads say something broader about anti-Jewish prejudice in England. "Here's a Jewish party leader and that somehow creates an opening to hint that these people, Jews, are different from you," he explains. "It works on a subliminal level. It's not in-your-face anti-Semitism.
"People think that because we have big Holocaust memorials, it means we have exorcised anti-Semitism from the British body politic. People don't think anti-Semitism is a real, existing form of prejudice, but some kind of universal parable for prejudice. They think you have to be dressed in a Hitler uniform with a mustache and be doing `sig heils' for it to be anti-Semitism."
Michael Howard is not the first Jewish politician to be subjected to Fagin-type allusions - intentional or unintentional. At the Jewish Museum in Camden Town, an exhibition on Benjamin Disraeli - marking 200 years since his birth - contains a series of sepia-colored political cartoons reacting to events at the time. In some, the Conservative Party prime minister (1874-1880), who was born Jewish but was baptized into the Church of England at the age of 12, is depicted as Fagin, his nose enlarged. While Disraeli was not short of admirers, including Queen Victoria - after he became prime minister in 1874 she was criticized for "going ostentatiously to eat with Disraeli in his ghetto" - he might never have become prime minister if he had not been baptized as a child, because of a restriction barring practicing Jews from serving in parliament, which was only lifted in 1858.
Michael Howard might face many problems in his battle to become prime minister, but few in the community believe his ethnic background is his main impediment. The opinion polls have narrowed, but with Labour holding a huge majority in parliament and the Tories still not trusted to do a better job on public services, few believe he can unseat Blair in the coming election.
In fact, the Conservative Party's choice of a leader who is Jewish and the son of an immigrant - it is the party of the traditional elites - illustrates the extent to which Jews have integrated, says Rabbi Jonathan Romain, who heads the Maidenhead Reform Synagogue. "The community has reacted with a kind of nervous pride. It's a sign of integration - what better proof that we've arrived. But there's also a slight nervousness - that if he becomes unpopular it might reflect on the community."
"Obviously most people are comfortable with a Jew leading the party - that's the good news," says the Guardian's Freedland. "It's an amazing achievement. His father was an immigrant. But enough persists in the culture for an ad agency to make an ad with a Fagin likeness."
Howard's response to the Labour ads and the O'Brien article has been not to respond. Some suggest he doesn't want to remind parts of the electorate that he is Jewish. But Julius thinks it has nothing to do with his Jewishness: "Howard doesn't respond because he doesn't want to be seen as the victim. He wants to be the prime minister. He doesn't want to be someone moaning about the horrible gentiles being nasty to poor little Jewish Michael Howard."
Howard did, however, sound off on Ken Livingstone's broadside to the Jewish reporter at the Evening Standard. "It is important for all politicians to be mindful of their language, and I think that it is a matter of great sadness that we are not seeing that from the Labour Party," he told the Jewish Chronicle.
Melanie Phillips, a Jewish and unstintingly pro-Israel columnist for the Daily Mirror, who has been on the frontline of the Middle East debate since the start of the intifada, is amazed by the sudden public discussion of anti-Semitism. The Labour ads, she says, represent "the kind of anti-Semitism people can relate to - a pandering to anti-Jewish prejudice. When it's associated with criticism of Israel, the public can't see it as anti-Semitism, but when it's the old-style racist stuff, they do."
A calmer situation in the Middle East, she says, has dampened the debate over Israel. "It has been parked to a certain extent," she says. "But if things break down, then Israel will be blamed. Sharon has received no credit for the risks he is taking - not the national risks, not the political risks and not even the personal risks - Sharon is necessary for Britain and Europe - he provides justification for anti-Jewish feeling."
But Freedland, whose newspaper, along with the BBC, has faced strong, persistent charges of anti-Israel bias by Jews, is getting a different reading from his own, personal barometer - he is receiving far fewer email messages from Jews, who perceive him as an ad hoc address for complaints about Israel-related articles in the Guardian. "When things calm down in the Middle East, they calm down in reaction to the Middle East," he says. "You can't be more anti-Israel than the Palestinians, you can't be more Catholic than the pope - Abu Mazen is talking to Sharon.
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