Anti-Semitism

Baroness Ludford Excerpts

Thursday 27th October 2016 Grand Committee

[Baroness Ludford (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, for initiating this extremely important debate. I found myself, in contemplation of it, recalling my own modest experience of anti-Semitism. As a non-Jew, I am not normally in the firing line. My interest is as someone who cares about the values of a free, multi-ethnic, multicultural, liberal democracy, who has as a parliamentarian taken a particular interest in justice and civil liberties—including combating all forms of prejudice, bigotry and discrimination.

However, I had a personal moment when I experienced an echo of anti-Semitism when I was a Member of the European Parliament, probably almost 15 years ago. I reacted with some frustration to what I saw as a gap in the output of the EU racism monitoring centre, the forerunner of the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights. From memory, I said that it was unfortunate in terms of the perception of balance that the EUMC had produced three reports on Islamophobia while doing nothing on anti-Semitism. I was then criticised for condemning the EUMC’s production of three reports on Islamophobia—they chopped off the final part of the sentence.

An important element that we need to bear in mind is that anti-Semitism evolves and mutates, a point picked up in the Home Affairs Select Committee’s excellent report. Old stereotypes do not disappear, and of course they still get a regular outing, particularly those linked to Jewish power, especially financial power, but new ones arrive to sit alongside them. Some are related to the State of Israel, while others seek to diminish the unique nature of the Holocaust—the Shoah—by talking about other holocausts with a small “h”, as if Holocaust Memorial Day did not also commemorate other genocides. I am mindful of the paragraph in the committee’s report that says:

“Antisemitism is a problem of such gravity that no party can afford to be complacent. It is an issue that should transcend party loyalties and inter-party conflict”.

Now I will quote the leader of the Labour Party, only to illustrate an issue. Jeremy Corbyn told the committee:

“Antisemitism is where you use epithets to criticise people for being Jewish; where you attack Jewish people for what they are”.

This is possibly where things can go wrong and it is not unique to any one party. That kind of direct racism, alarming and deplorable as it is, is in a sense easier to recognise and deal with, but it makes the contemporary kind—which tars Jews with all the perceived ills of the existence of Israel as well as the activities of the Israeli Government—easier to ignore and overlook and thus to evade responsibility for. No one thinks that the Government of Israel should be above criticism, but context is all. The blaming of Zionists for the actions of the Government of Israel is what is so pernicious. As the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, said, the disproportionate concentration on the so-called wrongs of Israel compared not only with other players in the Middle East but other Governments around the world makes it obvious that Israel is indeed held to a different standard.

I conclude by asking the Government whether they will consider providing additional funding for the Community Security Trust to work with the Union of Jewish Students to assist in an increase in the reporting of anti-Semitic incidents on campus, and what they are going to do to implement the recommendations of the Home Affairs Select Committee report, especially, as has been mentioned, the necessary resources so that students can be well informed about the Israel-Palestine issue.