When will the mainstream media stop treating Britain’s Chief Rabbi (Ephriam Mirvis) as a neutral political commentator in the argument about the Labour Party, antisemitism and the controversial IHRA document?
He nailed his political colours to the mast, and simultaneously displayed an appallingly narrow and selective attitude to anti-racism, back in May 2016, just before the London Mayoral election.
The story about that election for anyone concerned with racism was the disgraceful dog-whistle Islamophobic campaign run by the Tories for Zac Goldsmith against Sadiq Khan. It included repeated inferences about Khan’s alleged links to Islamic terrorists and extremists, and leaflets were distributed by Goldsmith’s campaign targeting Hindu voters warning of a plan by Khan to tax jewellery. Some mainstream commentators even compared it to the infamous racist Tory campaign of the 1960s, scaremongering about “coloured neigbours”, that unexpectedly unseated Patrick Gordon Walker.
On the day before the mayoral vote, Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis was handed space on the front page of the Tory-supporting Daily Telegraph. He penned an unbridled assault on Labour under Corbyn, attacking the left in general for opposition to Zionism and criticism of Israel. Mirvis made the fatuous claim that Zionism (a political ideology) was an intrinsic part of Judaism, and managed to label and libel all opponents of Zionism as antisemites. Of the Tories’ racist innuendo against Sadiq Khan in the mayoral race, the Chief Rabbi uttered not one single word.
The Telegraph received a letter signed by more than 50 Jews (at very short notice) condemning the Chief Rabbi’s “party political intervention”, which was “selective in its anti-racism”. It accused him of adding to the “sensationalist allegations of antisemitism in the Labour Party, where the headlines’ decibel level is in inverse proportion to the evidence to back them up”, and utterly condemned his silence both about “the disgusting dog-whistle campaign by Zac Goldsmith’s Tory team against a Labour candidate of Asian Muslim background” and recalled the “callous, racist and bigoted comments of Tory politicians, calling refugees ‘a swarm’ and ‘a bunch of migrants’”.
Bundist slogan
It concluded with a pertinent piece of history, reminding the Chief Rabbi that, “The vast majority of Jews who perished in the Holocaust were indifferent to Zionism and many opposed it. In the last municipal elections in Europe’s largest Jewish community, in Poland, just before World War 2, Poland’s Jews voted overwhelmingly for the secular, anti-Zionist, socialists of the Bund, while Zionist parties got derisory votes.” (The religious parties’ vote also declined significantly from previous elections). The letter concluded by asking: “Is Rabbi Mirvis recasting those victims of the Holocaust posthumously as enemies of Judaism and therefore as antisemites?”
I don’t know if Chief Rabbi Mirvis ever read it. He never responded. The Telegraph refused to publish it, though the Guardian printed a version of the letter a few days later (signed by even more Jews – though no doubt the “wrong” kind of Jews). The specious claim that opposition to Zionism was antisemitic, effectively libelled all Palestinians dispossessed by Zionism as antisemites, simply for seeking redress for their injustice. That point was made succinctly by the respected Palestinian academic Dr Kamel Hawwash. The Telegraph refused to print his letter too.
The current attack on the Labour Code of Conduct, made simultaneously today, by three Jewish newspapers makes the same fatuous claim that anti-Zionism is “political antisemitism”, that Rabbi Mirvis made two years ago. It was wrong then. It is still wrong today.
rebel notes 