The rising tide of anti-Semitism

Andrew Gilligan in the Sunday Telegraph

Per head of population, there were four times more hate crimes against Jewish targets than against Muslims. One Jewish MP, Lee Scott, received five death threats. “They were saying things like, ‘You Jewish pig, we’re going to stone you to death’,” he says. “Always on the phone, and always on Monday evenings to my parliamentary office when they knew my staff had left.”

In parts of Britain, this newspaper has found, anti-Semitism is open, unashamed – and supported by the taxpayer. Only 25 miles north of Barnet, in Luton, one of the town’s main mosques, the Luton Islamic Centre, publishes statements on its website describing Jews as the “brethren of swine and pigs” and calling for “victory over the Jews and the rest of the enemies of Islam”.

One text on the “Palestinian Crisis” asks: “How do the brethren of swine and pigs [Jews] have the upper hand over the best Ummah among all the other nations [Muslims]?”

Another text states: “The Jews strive their utmost to corrupt the beliefs, morals and manners of the Muslims.”

After the Paris attacks, the mosque tweeted a lecture by Qadeer Baksh, its imam, saying that Muslims would be caused “much harm” by the “Christians and the Jews, the extremists among them”.

But, surprisingly given its views, an organisation closely linked to the mosque has been awarded public money for projects to rehabilitate Muslim former offenders and to “work with young people” in Luton.

The Ethnic Minority Training Project, chaired by one of the mosque’s trustees and run by an activist at the mosque, has received at least £75,000 from the local council, the Department for Work and Pensions, the EU and other bodies. According to the mosque’s website, it is a “partner” in the project with the Bedfordshire Probation Service and The Mount, one of the local prisons.

Luton is not the only place where groups with alleged links to anti-Semites have collected a subsidy. In 2013, a charity called the Peace Giving Foundation received a lottery grant of £118,000 to run a programme “empowering ethnic minority women”. At the time, the Peace Giving Foundation shared directors (and continues to share an address) with the Islamic Education and Research Academy (IERA), which sends extremist speakers to mosques and university societies.

Abdurraheem Green, the founder and head of IERA, once demanded that a Jewish man be removed from his sight when preaching at Speaker’s Corner. He has also said that the Jewish homeland is a “myth” and British public opinion is “totally hostage to the Zionist-controlled media”.

Other IERA speakers include Sheikh Abdullah Hakim Quick, who has called all Jews “filth”. Past members of the group’s advisory board are Hussain Yee, who blamed the Jews for 9/11, and Haitham al-Haddad, who described them as “the descendants of apes and pigs”.

More than £39,000 of the lottery grant has already been paid. The Big Lottery Fund said last night that payment of the remaining £78,000 had been stopped pending an investigation into the Peace Giving Foundation’s “connections”.

One step back from the open bigotry of people like this, it has long been a favourite rhetorical device of anti-Semites to associate British Jews with the behaviour of the Israeli government. 

As it happens, anti-Semitic incidents were already rising sharply in the first half of 2014, before the Israel-Gaza conflict began – but July, when the crisis started, saw an even bigger spike. That month, according to the London mayor’s office for policing and crime, 95 per cent of all hate crime in the capital was directed against Jewish targets.

Given this, Jewish community leaders in north London say they are troubled by a letter from Helen King, assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard, to a local MP saying that supporters of both sides “are increasingly incensed by new incidents in Gaza”, which has “ultimately led to an increase in anti-Semitic incidents and a corresponding rise in Islamophobic offences”.

There have in fact been almost no attacks on Muslims by supporters of Israel, let alone a “corresponding rise”. 

At the 2010 election, Mr Scott and other “Zionist” MPs were targeted for attack leaflets, telephone canvassing and pickets by the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPAC), an extremist group which has often used the Z-word interchangeably with Israeli or Jewish (it described the Talmud as a “Zionist holy book”, though it was written centuries before Zionism existed). MPAC borrows the words of Abdullah Azzam, mentor to Osama bin Laden, to describe itself as a “vanguard” of those who “sacrifice their souls and their blood in order to bring victory to our ambitions and convictions”.

Most of MPAC’s boasting about its huge electoral influence can be easily exposed as blowhard lies, but it may indeed have helped change the outcome in strongly Muslim Bradford East. The incumbent, Labour’s Terry Rooney (not Jewish, but pro-Israeli) lost by 365 votes in the 2010 general election after MPAC distributed thousands of leaflets calling him a Zionist Islamophobe and “warmonger” who could not represent Muslims.

The winner, the Liberal Democrat David Ward, has fulfilled all MPAC’s wildest hopes. In 2013, he was suspended from the Lib Dem parliamentary party after criticising “the Jews” for inflicting atrocities on the Palestinians and questioning Israel’s right to exist. 

During the Gaza conflict last year he stated: “If I lived in Gaza, would I fire a rocket? Probably yes.” His response to Paris: “Je suis Palestinian.”