The right-wing British newspaper columnist Richard Littlejohn is outraged by the way Jews in Britain are being treated, and doubly outraged because the British public appears indifferent, if not blind, to the anti-Semitism which he insists is raging all around it. Introducing his documentary, “The War against Britain’s Jews?” on Channel 4 television last week, this self-styled people’s tribune expressed amazement that the common reaction when he explained he was making the program was: “I never knew you were Jewish”. Littlejohn, who is not Jewish, was making the point that Gentiles are so steeped in anti-Semitism that they cannot understand why anyone except a Jew would be remotely concerned about Jewish suffering.
Littlejohn talked to a rabbi who had been viciously assaulted by a gang on his way home from the synagogue. The rabbi’s fear of being assaulted again was underlined by his refusal to expose anything except the lower part of his face to view. He also visited a Jewish graveyard that had been all too evidently desecrated and went and stood outside a Jewish school in Manchester that had been turned into a veritable fortress, on account of the perpetual threat of violence faced by its pupils from Jew-baiting thugs. The impression conveyed by the program was that multiracial Britain has become an exceptionally unsafe place for Jewish people — which is, incidentally, precisely the impression which has been formed by neoconservative opinion-makers in the United States and which they have been busy fostering. A Jewish student to whom Littlejohn spoke takes such a pessimistic view of the predicament of British Jews that in his opinion the best course for them now would be to get out of Britain altogether.
Yet it is not just the threat of physical attacks on Jews that bothers Littlejohn. He is also appalled that it is no longer the brutish, traditionally anti-Semitic far right that is the chief source of anti-Jewish hostility in Britain. Anti-Semitism is endemic too, he maintained, among large sections of the liberal intelligentsia. Littlejohn interviewed fellow newspaper columnist Nick Cohen, who discussed the phenomenon of liberal leftists who purport to be opposed to Israeli foreign policy but who are, in his view, more or less knowingly implicating themselves in the public expression of hatred toward Jews. Cohen is disgusted at those on the British left who marched against the Israeli intervention in Lebanon last summer alongside supporters of Hezbollah. He finds it extraordinary that leftists should be making common cause with Islamists who detest everything that they stand for. Littlejohn agreed that this was taking the principle of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” to a grotesque extreme.
Of course, it is imperative to deplore unprovoked attacks on Jews and to condemn anti-Semitism in all its forms. Nor is there much reason to doubt that Jews in Britain and other parts of Europe are indeed experiencing a recrudescence of anti-Semitism, though it is perhaps not altogether easy to distinguish this from the hostility being encountered by racial minorities in general. If anti-Semitism is resurgent, it is almost certainly because residual popular prejudice against Jews has been reinforced by the widespread perception that Israel enjoys a license to attack defenseless people, be they in the occupied territories or in Lebanon. Yet Littlejohn’s strident claim that it is now “open season” on British Jews is hard to swallow and smacks of alarmism. Britain’s oldest racial minority, Jews are also its most successfully assimilated minority and often boast of so being. It is a measure of how well Jewish concerns are officially represented that the smallest evidence that Jews are being targeted by racists quickly hits the headlines.
What Littlejohn never acknowledged is that there are occasions when anger about Jewish conduct may have understandable, if not justifiable, causes. For example, in Stamford Hill in the London borough of Hackney, the home of Europe’s largest community of Orthodox Jews, there is at present unrest about the community’s demand that it be given exemption from planning restrictions when it comes to building house extensions. It is true that many Orthodox Jewish families are exceptionally large by Gentile standards, yet one may wonder why such families should be accorded preferential treatment. Indeed, many Hackney residents are unable to grasp why Orthodox Jews should be entitled to favored status in terms of housing policy at a time when great numbers of Britons are struggling to find any accommodation at all.
It is easy to imagine the mass hysteria that would be whipped up by the British media if any other racial minority were seen to be demanding unusual privileges with regard to housing. It is, moreover, conveniently forgotten that there are many instances where British Jews benefit from “positive discrimination”, from the institutionalized reluctance of mainstream society to voice any critical comment whatsoever about Jewish behavior and to display toward Jewish people a degree of indulgence that would be unlikely in the case of any other group. This week came news that Jews in Hertfordshire, just north of London, have been granted the right to establish an “eruv”, a special religious zone marked out by high poles joined by wire, despite opposition from local people who believe that, aside from being an eyesore, this will amount to the creation of a “Jewish state” and could generate needless tension between different communities. This is the third British eruv that has been established in the teeth of local protests.
Nothing if not narrowly focused, Littlejohn’s program blatantly endorsed the stereotype of the Jew as victim. The truth is that a similar program could have been made about any number of other minorities. Certainly, it would not be difficult to make a program suggesting that Britain’s Muslims are facing a rising tide of prejudice, not to mention physical violence. Yet somehow it is hard to imagine the demagogic Littlejohn speaking up for them.
There can be little doubt that at present Muslims are Britain’s most embattled, most misunderstood and most threatened minority. Many believe that the image of British Muslims has suffered profound damage following the recent failed terrorist attacks in London and Glasgow, for which a number of non-British Muslims have been arrested. How curious that Littlejohn’s portrait of a Britain seething with anti-Semitism should have been broadcast at the very moment when it is great numbers of law-abiding British Muslims, not British Jews, who plainly have most to fear.
Intentionally or not, his Channel 4 “documentary” chimed with the US neocon point of view, with its insistence that America and Israel are engaged in fighting a “war on terror” and that Jews are in the war’s front line, standing up for democracy, human rights and the very survival of civilization. Billed as a plain speaker who spells out unwelcome truths, Littlejohn is actually the bearer of a coded message.
