The truth is that where Muslims and Jews are concerned British politicians operate flagrant double standards - double standards that are unfortunately part of the very fabric of British political culture.
Considering the key role he has played in the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair, Lord Levy has kept a remarkably low profile. The tycoon who has bankrolled New Labour and served as Blair's "personal envoy" in the Middle East cannot be accused of having courted publicity. Indeed, it is safe to say that until recently many British people were barely aware of his existence. It is also safe to say that Levy would have preferred to keep things that way. For the peer at the center of the "cash for honors" enquiry that is clouding Tony Blair's last days in office finds himself all too much in the news, having been twice arrested by the police - in the latest instance on "suspicion of perverting the course of justice".
Such has been Levy's avoidance of the cameras that the news media has had to scour their archives to find footage of him with which to illustrate their bulletins. One old clip that has been endlessly recycled shows Levy and Blair sharing the euphoria of electoral success. Neither would appear to have much cause for celebration now, though Blair at least - notwithstanding that he too has been twice questioned by the police - seems determined to keep smiling.
Whether there is evidence to justify charging anybody in the Blair government with having committed the possible crime the police are investigating - that of offering honors in exchange for large donations to the Labour Party - remains to be seen. Rumors have been circulating that Blair's inner circle have been using a special (encrypted) e-mail system, and there is feverish talk of a British "Watergate", of charges being brought with respect to a cover-up. Yet there are also suggestions that the enquiry may prove futile, leaving the police with a lot of explaining to do. Meanwhile, the mere fact that the police investigation has widened to include the prime minister himself is doing incalculable damage not just to the current British government but to the British democratic system itself. The blight on Blair's own character is all the worse because the politician who once proclaimed himself to be a "pretty straight kind of guy" has become the first British leader to be subject to police interrogation. The irony is that Blair would never have got into this fix in the first place had he kept his original promise to reform the honors system and turn the House of Lords into a wholly elective body.
As for the sullying of Levy's reputation, it is bound to be a matter of keen dismay to a businessman who has hitherto been a respected member of the image-conscious British Jewish community. Many of Levy's fellow Jews are appalled that a figure previously seen as a credit to British Jewry has ended up so compromised. Even if he is cleared of all suspicion of malpractice, Levy will be lucky if he is not forever remembered as the New Labour fixer who assisted Blair in the transformation of a party of the British working class into a party abjectly beholden to big money.
Levy's predicament raises the wider issue of the question of Jewish influence in high places that has in the past been such a fertile source of anti-Semitism. The British weekly newspaper the Jewish Chronicle has acknowledged the potential of the cash for peerages affair to injure the standing of British Jews in general. The other week the paper's editor David Rowan invoked the larger history of Jewish involvement with the British establishment, mentioning the money-lender Augustus Melmotte in Anthony Trollope's satirical Victorian novel The Way we live Now, a character presumed to be a Jew who makes himself indispensable to the British establishment, only to suffer ultimate ruin and disgrace. Rowan's point was that, precisely because he was seen as a Jew, Melmotte became the scapegoat for the wider moral corruption of British society. He seems to fear that Levy may be viewed as the personification of the "financial lust" that has polluted the New labour project, with possibly unhappy consequences for Jews in general. Rowan's concern may well be justified - though it is worth noting that his paper was recently pleased to report the number of rich British Jews who are currently bankrolling the Conservative Party: There is a perhaps a sort of Jewish schizophrenia at work here - on the one hand an impulse to rejoice at the association between Jewish wealth and high politics, on the other an anxiety that it may revive vicious old anti-Semitic stereotypes.
What makes Levy vulnerable to just such stereotyping is that his role as New Labour's principal financial patron has been so blatantly bound up with his political ambitions. It is scarcely conceivable that he could have become Blair's personal envoy in the Middle East had he not made himself indispensable to the party by virtue of being an exceptionally rich man moving in a world of exceptionally rich men and able to prevail on them to assist the Labour Party. The fact is that Levy has no background in politics, and it is hard to quell the suspicion that he in effect bought both his title and his role as Blair's personal envoy.
It is equally hard to suppress the feeling that rather more would have been said about this had not the conventions of public discourse made any such suggestion taboo. Not that those conventions would have stopped right-wing commentators from raising questions about a close relationship between the British prime minister and a Muslim businessman who contributed to Labour finances and in the process secured a position of political influence for himself. But then, the question is entirely hypothetical, since it is barely conceivable that any Muslim, no matter how rich and politically motivated, and despite the fact that the British Muslims are far more numerous than British Jews, could get as near to a British leader as Lord Levy has done.
Events of last week underlined just how far Muslims are from enjoying the kind of rapport with the British establishment that has made Levy's political career possible. Against the background of the arrest of fresh Muslim terrorist suspects, a report was published indicating that by contrast with their parents' generation many young Muslims are utterly alienated from British society. At the same time, in a much-publicized denunciation of multiculturalism, the Conservative leader David Cameron deplored Muslim separatism and talked of fanatics who are determined to impose Shariah law on Britain. That there are potentially dangerous Muslim fanatics in Britain is not in doubt, but it is perhaps understandable if members of the law-abiding Muslim majority wonder why they are endlessly accused of refusing to integrate with mainstream Britain and portrayed as the "enemy within", when other religious groups can adopt blatantly separatist postures without evoking any censure whatsoever. Some point to Britain's uncompromisingly nonintegrationist Orthodox Jewish community; they also ask why nothing is ever said by leading politicians about British Jews who openly endorse Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories, with all the brutality it entails, or about the young British Jews who actually go and serve in the Israeli Army and who may be felt to nurse conflicting national loyalties.
The truth is that where Muslims and Jews are concerned British politicians operate flagrant double standards - double standards that are unfortunately part of the very fabric of British political culture.
