Londonistan

by Melanie Phillips

  Not only was Israel “the guiding hand” behind American foreign policy that was responsible for outrages like Madrid, but “middle-class Jewish homes in Britain” were also guilty of “virulent” and “destructive” Zionist complicity. Thus British Jews were lumped into the world Jewish conspiracy. Similarly, the Independent newspaper illustrated an article on the Israel lobby in America with a picture of an American flag on which the stars were replaced by gold Stars of David.

  The ancient antisemitic claim of a global Jewish conspiracy has now become a commonplace in British public discourse. When the Labour backbencher Tam Dalyell claimed in 2003 that both Tony Blair and George Bush were influenced by a “cabal” of powerful Jews—including people who were not Jews at all, but merely had some Jewish ancestry—his remarks were brushed aside indulgently as an embarrassing outburst by a venerable eccentric. The following day, BBC TV’s Newsnight—far from asking how such an ancient prejudice could have been revived—devoted a substantial item to asking whether Dalyell’s claims were true in the United States, and left the impression that there was indeed a tightly knit group of Jews in America who wielded far too much power.

  The much-abused term “neoconservatives” has become code in Britain for Jews who have suborned America. In The Times, Sir Simon Jenkins wrote approvingly of the thesis of two American authors that “a small group of neo-conservatives contrived to take the greatest nation on Earth to war and kill thousands of people,” that they were “traitors to the American conservative tradition” who achieved a “seizure of Washington (and London) after 9/11,” and that their “first commitment was to the defence of Israel.” “With the coming to power of President Bush,” he wrote, “the neocons deftly substituted the threat of Islam for the threat of communism” and on that basis “sought a ‘comprehensive revamping of American foreign policy.’ ”27

  So, according to Jenkins—who in 2006 was to write that “there never was a ‘terrorist threat’ to western civilisation or democracy, only to western lives and property’” and that “only those with money in security have an interest in presenting Bin Laden as a cosmic threat”28 —the neocons possessed extraordinary and sinister power, which they exercised in a covert way to advance the interests of Israel and harm the rest of mankind. Thus they had “seized” Washington, were “traitors” to the conservative tradition and by implication to America itself, disdained law and diplomacy because they were driven by the desire to kill people, and so “deftly” provided a new threat to terrify the world after communism. It was hard to believe that such opinions could be published in The Times, the purported notice-board of the British establishment.

  Far from denouncing the Islamists’ view of the global Jewish conspiracy, therefore, respectable commentators merely endorsed it. Such a view has brought liberals and left-wingers into an even more extraordinary alliance with the far right. Sentiments, images and tropes appearing in the literature of the left and of the Islamists are similar to—and sometimes even drawn from—the outpourings of neo-Nazis and white supremacists.

  In addition to its open support for the Holocaust denier David Irving, the Muslim Public Affairs Committee has leveled accusations of “Zionist” media and political control, listed Jewish donors to New Labour, and asked whether the Talmud is “the most powerful and racist book in the world.”29 The Muslim Association of Britain and the General Union of Palestinian Students have both published The Franklin “Prophecy,” an antisemitic hoax originally published by the American Nazi William Dudley Pelley in 1934.30 The pro-Hamas Palestine Times has promoted work by Michael Hoffman II, a revisionist historian whose website has links to Holocaust denial material.31

  The far-right British National Party advised its members to read the Guardian for information about “the Zionist cabal around President Bush.”32 The day after the BNP claimed that U.S. policy was being driven by “the Zionist and Christian fundamentalist zealots around Bush,”33 the Muslim Council of Britain described the war as “part of a plan to redraw the map of the Middle East in accordance with the agenda of Zionists and American neo-Conservatives.”34

  The British people once fought against Nazism and fascism, which were intent on annihilating the Jews as part of a bid for global domination. Now, the British appear not to care that the toxic prejudices of the far right have been infiltrated, through the alliance of Islamists and the left, into mainstream political discourse under the grotesque umbrella of a “human rights” opposition to Israel.

  Meanwhile, the Islamist agenda for global domination is sanitized out of existence. Islamists who variously subscribe to these anti-Jewish, anti-Israel and anti-Western views are regularly trotted out by the media as “moderate” spokesmen. After the London bombings, the BBC TV show Newsnight used the Muslim Brotherhood activist and Hamas supporter Dr. Azzam Tammimi as a quasi reporter. He was given several minutes of broadcasting time to narrate a film on this topic, which placed him in a much more authoritative position than a mere interviewee. He used the opportunity to argue that a major factor behind the bombings was British foreign policy—complete with an implicit threat in his payoff line that unless this policy was changed there would be more such attacks.35

  The Guardian managed to turn itself into a virtual mouthpiece for the Muslim Brotherhood. Thus Anas al-Tikriti, president of the Muslim Association of Britain, wrote in its pages that Israel’s killing of the Hamas head Sheikh Ahmad Yassin was “an example of state terrorism”; 36 Azzam Tammimi of the MAB decried the elections taking place in Iraq and the Palestinian Authority;37 Osama Saeed of the MAB claimed that it was wrong to expect British Muslims to take any responsibility for defeating Islamist terror and said that attacking the idea of the caliphate was “the equivalent of criticising the Pope”;38 Sohaib Saeed of the MAB claimed that Sheikh Qaradawi was “scholarly” and “moderate” and had been traduced by media labels of extremism.39

  The relative tolerance of the British public, in the face of such outrageous encroachment by people who, in any sane world, should be regarded as the enemies of the West and a danger to the state, is due not only to the issue of Israel but also to the impact of the war in Iraq. It is impossible to overstate the extent to which the Iraq war has poisoned British political life and shifted the political center into a dangerously irrational frame of mind. For although the running against the Iraq war has been made by the left, aided by the Islamists, profound opposition to the war is deeply entrenched across the political spectrum.

  The issue is not just opposition to the war itself but, much more remarkably, a view of the world that would once have been confined to the wilder fringes of the far left but now is commonplace among conservatively minded middle Britain, the equivalent of the “red states” in America. If one travels around Britain as a member of radio panel discussions, for example, one finds just such conservative audiences literally cheering the view that America is the fount of world terror, that George W Bush is a war criminal, and that the nuclear-armed state that poses the biggest threat to the world is Israel.

  These are the people who believe that the root of Muslim rage is Israel’s “oppression” of the Palestinians, that America is a target only because of its support for Israel, and that Britain is a target only because of its support for America. Because they are conservative in their approach, they make a fetish of “stability” and so would prefer to have Middle Eastern tyrants in place rather than upset the regional status quo. As a result, and because of the failure to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the messy aftermath of the war in which so many mistakes have been made, what started out as a perfectly reasonable difference of views about the best way to contain the threat of Saddam Hussein has mutated into a settled conviction that Saddam never posed a threat at all and the British were taken to war on a series of lies.

  This belief has become the prism through which every development in the Iraq crisis has been viewed. As a result, history has simply been rewritten and the British have been consumed by a dan
gerous climate of irrationality, whipped up by a media coverage that has been as unbalanced as it has been relentless.

  For the BBC and other media, there was always one story about Iraq from the very start. This was that the war was a criminal folly. Their original predictions that Saddam would not be toppled, of mass uprisings all over the Arab world and of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis turned into refugees proved wrong. So they kept shifting the goalposts and rewrote history to prove that Bush and Blair were malign or stupid or both. When no weapons of mass destruction were found, they seized on this to claim that the war was fought only because we were told there were WMD stockpiles. Thus Sir Max Hastings wrote in the Guardian: “Yet it bears stating again and again that we went to war, launching thousands of British soldiers into Iraq, on a pretext now conclusively exposed as false.”40

  It was not the pretext for war that was false but arguments of people like Hastings and countless other prominent journalists and armchair generals who have rewritten history. It is not true that we went to war on account of the stockpiles. From the actual speeches and written statements by Tony Blair or the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, it is clear that the overwhelming emphasis was on Saddam’s refusal to obey the binding UN resolutions, his resulting failure to prove that he had destroyed his WMD programs and renounced his intention to continue developing WMD, and the dangers posed by the axis of rogue states, WMD and terrorism.

  A genuine difference of opinion over policy is one thing. A credulity towards distortion is quite another. It is disturbing to find that when presented with the recorded facts about the case set before the public for going to war, people tend to brush them aside because they are sure that the whole saga was based on a succession of government lies. This has happened in part because of widespread distrust of the prime minister, and a resulting cynicism so corrosive that anything he says is now dismissed as a fabrication. The distortions provided by the media, which now form an impenetrable crust over the whole issue, reinforce people’s unshakeable conviction in the truth of their analysis. Refusing to accept the metaphysical wellsprings of Islamist terrorism, they believe that any terrorist threat to Britain is caused instead by the stupidity of government policy in turning Britain into a target.

  Beneath all this runs the poisonously false belief that it wasn’t Saddam who threatened the security of the world as much as Israel. Scratch an implacable opponent of the Iraq war, the kind who doesn’t just think the decision to go to war was wrong but that the whole terrorist threat to Britain has been exaggerated by Tony Blair, and you will usually find a hostility to Israel as deep as it is ignorant. Many articles denouncing the Iraq war have contained the giveaway view that it diverted attention from the real cause of global instability, the Israel/Palestine conflict. And some go further. One prominent and distinguished military historian told me that the real issue behind the Islamic jihad was Israel. “Really,” he said, “it would have been better if Israel had never been created.”41

  The effect of all this has been to create a climate in Britain that has alarming echoes of Weimar in the 1930s. There is the same combination of amorality and appeasement, of decadence and denial. The narrative of Islamists who threaten the West has been widely adopted as the default political position. Members of the intelligentsia, the class that sets the tone for a culture, support the murder of innocents whom they choose to represent instead as oppressors. Ted Honderich, for example, a former professor of logic at University College, London, has written:I myself have no serious doubt, to take the outstanding case, that the Palestinians have exercised a moral right in their terrorism against the Israelis. They have had a moral right to terrorism as certain as was the moral right, say, of the African people of South Africa against their white captors and the apartheid state. Those Palestinians who have resorted to necessary killing have been right to try to free their people, and those who have killed themselves in the cause of their people have indeed sanctified themselves. This seems to me a terrible truth, a truth that overcomes what we must remember about all terrorism and also overcomes the thought of hideousness and monstrosity. 42

  A number of public figures have posed as virtual cheerleaders for suicide bombers under the guise of “compassion.” The former Liberal Democrat MP Jenny Tonge was sacked by her party after she had expressed sympathy for suicide bombers. “I am a fairly emotional person and I am a mother and a grandmother,” she said. “I think if I had to live in that situation [under Israeli rule], and I say this advisedly, I might just consider becoming one [a suicide bomber] myself.”43 Within a short time, however, her party elevated her to the House of Lords. The prime minister’s wife, Cherie Blair, was forced to apologize for saying, hours after twenty Israelis died in a suicide bombing in Jerusalem, that young Palestinians “feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up.”44 But others sprang to endorse her remarks. A former Foreign Office adviser and critic of government policy, David Clark, sneered that her remark pointed up the distance the government had traveled between “emoting about the suffering of the Palestinians to falling in behind Washington’s one-sided support for their tormentors in Israel’s Likud government,”45 and thirty-seven Labour MPs signed a Commons motion supporting her.46

  Meanwhile Canon Paul Oestreicher, former chairman of Amnesty International, appeared to be endorsing the “resistance” to both U.S. troops in Iraq and Israeli troops in the disputed territories. He equated this with the French resistance against the Germans, thus also implying that the Americans and the Israelis were akin to the Nazis:Yesterday’s front page describing the crimes of the US military in Iraq and the Israeli military in Palestine denote for me, late in the day, a crossing of the Rubicon. I have until now, perhaps foolishly, been prepared to admit that in both situations one could agree to differ with the apologists. But no longer. These are not “military actions” but crimes against humanity. The occupations in both cases have no basis in law. They amount to the brutal repression of civilian populations. As a British citizen I am ashamed to be party to all that. Those old enough to remember will recollect that the French Resistance were held to be heroes when they killed the German occupiers. I did not rejoice at German deaths then, any more than I rejoice at Israeli, American and, yes, British deaths now. But there is no difference.47

  Such inflammatory and grotesquely unjust comments, the relentless demonizing of America and Israel and the never-ending uproar over “atrocities” being committed against Iraqis and Palestinians with no attempt at either balance or truthfulness, has created a dangerous eruption of hatred in Britain and an escalating subcurrent of violence and intimidation. The effect of such incendiary rhetoric upon young Muslims who were already inflamed against the West has been incalculable. Being fed a daily dose of invective about Jews, Israelis and evil Americans has almost certainly reinforced their sense of victimization and turned up the temperature of an already overheated grievance to boiling point.

  For British Jews in particular, an idyll has been brought abruptly to an end. For decades, this small community told itself that, while it knew that antisemitism never died but only slept, there was no reason to think that Jews were other than wholly accepted into British life as equal citizens and any threat to them that might arise would be seen off by their decent, tolerant, fair-minded British compatriots. They have now experienced the rudest of awakenings. Jewish nationhood is being delegitimized; antisemitic libels out of the European nightmare have become commonplace in polite society; and attacks on Jews are increasing. But the British are responding with indifference or worse.

  On campus, Jewish students run a gauntlet of insults and intimidation. They are spat at; they have to be smuggled out the back doors of meetings because of fears for their safety; they are baselessly accused of conspiracies.48 In British cities on a Saturday, you will find stalls advocating a boycott of Marks & Spencer because it stocks Israeli produce. Such stalls proclaim “End Israeli Apartheid” and “The Wall Must Fall.” One such stall in Newcastle-upon-Tyne
displayed a banner depicting a sinister, hook-nosed Jew as a truck driver with skull-shaped smoke emerging from the exhaust, and distributed leaflets stating that Israel deliberately steals Palestinian land and water, and murders “peace activists.”49

  At a social level, dinner party conversation is now likely to throw up not just the same kind of demonization of Israel but prejudiced remarks about Jews being too powerful, all sticking together and so on. Any attempt by a British Jew to challenge the current prejudice and lies about Israel is likely to provoke the accusation of double loyalty. At a debate organized by the Economist magazine on a motion suggesting that those who claimed there was a resurgence of antisemitism in Britain were “the new McCarthyites,” a former Conservative MP, Robert Jackson, accused British Jews of dual loyalty and said their Britishness was conditional on their explicit repudiation of the policies of Ariel Sharon.50 For the Jews alone, it seems, British identity now appears to depend on the opinions they hold about the policies of another country.

  Far from the British springing to the defense of the Jews against the lies and libels of Muslim antisemitism, it appears that the issue of Israel has enabled hatred of the Jews once again to become respectable. One prominent liberal editor said candidly that it was a “great relief ” that Britain no longer had to worry about what it said about the Jews because of the way Israel was behaving. “Ever since the war we were told that because of their suffering the Jews were above criticism. But now that’s no longer the case.”51