The War on Britain's Jews
UK's Channel 4 Mon 9 July 2007, 8pm
Richard Littlejohn argues that antisemitism, once the preserve of the extreme right, now has a foothold among other sections of society.
Excerpts from interview in UK's TotallyJewish "Richard Littlejohn Tackles Antisemitism"
RL: After 9/11, we seemed to stop talking about football, and began to discuss other things, politics, terrorism. And I became aware of a real sense of unease among a lot of the Jewish people there. People seemed to think that Jews were being targeted again, particularly in Britain.
Q: And you think that a lot of the liberal left were part of the reason?
RL: There’s nothing liberal about the left. [Observer columnist] Nick Cohen reveals in the film that he goes to dinner parties in Islington where remarks are made about Jews that no-one would ever dream of making against any other ethnic groups.
Q: Did you find people's reaction telling when they discovered you were making this programme?
RL: Definitely. People who didn't know me would say "I didn't know you were Jewish, Richard." I'd say "I'm not." And they'd say "Well why are you doing this?" But that's ridiculous. If I was making a film about cot death, people wouldn't assume I had lost a child to cot death. If I was making a film about Islamophobia, nobody would say "We didn't know you were a Muslim." But there is this assumption that anti-Semitism is something that's just made up by the Jews, and nobody else would ever really pay any attention to it.
Q: You were clearly concerned about anti-semitism in order to make this film, but did you have any inkling how bad it was?
RL: No, I had absolutely no idea. I mean, I knew things were bad. A friend of mine's wife is active in a synagogue on North London, and asked me if I'd go along to do a Q&A session. When I got up there, there were bouncers on the door. I'd never been to a place of worship with that level of security. And this was for a ladies' lunch.
But when I went up to Manchester for this film, I saw that they were putting on patrols on a Friday night so that the Jews could go to worship without being attacked. It was like when the army had to escort kids to school in Northern Ireland. Except there, the world was horrified. Yet the situation in Manchester is ignored - it's not considered a story.
If it was an Islamic school, it would be the lead story on Channel 4 and the BBC, and Panoramas about it every night of the week. Yet I didn't even know this existed. The media isn't interested in anti-semitism.
...(Belittlers will say) anything rather than acknowledge the truth. I couldn't care less. But watch the programme, read the parliamentary report, open your eyes. This is going on.
http://www.currentviewpoint.com/cgibin/news.cgi?id=11&command=printnews&newsid=943
It is vital for Americans to appreciate that the BBC, major network broadcaster Channel Four and newspapers in Britain, who give daily vent to innumerable angry Palestinians and British Israel-bashers, have added to a climate of universal condemnation. Sudan, Zimbabwe, Venezuela and Myanmar escape the attention of the British media and trade unions. I doubt your average Briton knows who Hugo Chavez is, but even a beauty therapist will lecture me about the brutality of the Jewish State and the ’genocide of the Palestinians.’
In Britain, Israel is now the national target of obsessive criticism. A recent two-hour documentary about Jerusalem by former MP and Bosnia negotiator Paddy Ashdown was a relentless, claustrophobic indictment of Israel with factual errors in the script. His show was followed by two more documentaries about the evil Israelis; not once did we see Zubin Mehta and the Israel Philharmonic, the Habima and Cameri Theatres, the Technion, Weizmann Institute or the selfless work of he Hadassah and other Israeli hospitals.
It is therefore little wonder so many sectors of British society are filled with boycott mania.
This loathing of Israel and America was brought home to me two weeks ago at a meeting of the London chapter, or ‘chapel,’ of the Journalists’ Union, which had called a special May gathering to discuss the Israel Boycott motion that had been passed on April 15 at their national delegates’ meeting.
I went along armed with a book by Hillel Halkin, ‘Letters to an American Friend: a Zionist’s Polemic,’ written after the Yom Kippur War and chronicling the agony of daily life as a Reservist in Israel -- a man who is also husband, father, son and brother. I never had a chance to read from the book because the meeting degenerated into a series of furious diatribes by NUJ members.
I heard about the brutality of Israel and every other imaginable crime against humanity. Each member who spoke made sure to tell the group that they had ‘been boycotting absolutely anything and everything from Israel for years and years,’ and the editor of the union’s ‘Journalist’ magazine spat out the comment I hear almost every day in London about ‘rich American Jews’ funding and driving Israel’s disgraceful policies. I was refused the floor when I wanted to correct the calumnies being hurled at Israel. Later I escaped to a nearby pub but the angry members piled in to continue their assault on me. One said Jews needed to ‘get the Holocaust out of their system and get that chip off your shoulder because slavery was a much worse genocide’ whilst yet another said, ‘Israel is plain thievery - you nicked their land in ‘48 and Zionism is out-and-out racism.’ All of the members were incensed that I had dared come to the meeting to defend Israel’s right to exist and their barely-contained anger was something I had not witnessed in any situation in living memory.
In ‘The Daily Express’ newspaper of May 31, 2007 one of the tiny handful of non-Jewish voices in support of Israel, Leo McKinstry, noted that a National Union of Journalists member, Pamela Hardyment, had written a letter to a communal organisation stating that Israel is ‘a wonderful Nazi-like killing machine backed by the world’s richest Jews’ whilst referring to the ‘so-called Holocaust’ and adding, ‘Shame on all Jews, may your lives be cursed.’
Notwithstanding the efforts of non-Jewish journalists Richard Littlejohn, Charles Moore, and the abovementioned Leo McKinstry to stop these boycotts, in the coming weeks it is highly likely Britain will be at the forefront of a massive labour movement campaign against everything Israeli. Monday 2nd July
The anti-Israel depiction of the British media is being foisted upon Britain's Jews in the form of antisemitic sentiment and actions.
