Anti-Semitism

Luciana Berger Excerpts

Thursday 20th January 2011 Westminster Hall

[Robert Halfon]

My hon. Friend, who spent many a Friday night at my house in our childhood, and who knows a lot about the Jewish community, is exactly right. He has been a great friend of the Jewish community for many years. What happened to his son is a tragic symbol of an incident that happens all too often. I should mention that the kind of people concerned do not just attack Jews; they then move on to the next thing. It is noteworthy that the words written were “Jew” and also “gay”.

The usual excuse for what is happening is the state of Israel, or the Iraq war. That is the reason that we are given for Islamism. However, I believe that that worldwide movement of extreme intolerance uses Israel and Gaza as an excuse for anti-Semitism and violence. Of course there are difficulties between the Israelis and Palestinians, but that is not the root cause of extremism. The reality is that even if the Gaza conflict were to be solved tomorrow, with Israel retreating mostly to 1967 borders, the Roshonara Choudhrys of this world would still exist. The objective of extreme Islamists is not a peaceful resolution to the middle east situation, but jihad; it is an ideology that believes that Israel and, by extension, Jews should be wiped off the map. President Ahmadinejad, as I have mentioned, makes no local distinction between the west bank and Tel Aviv. It is the catch-all Zionist entity that must be destroyed. When Ehud Barak offered almost everything to Yasser Arafat at Camp David in 2000, far from discouraging Islamists, it emboldened them. Extreme Islamism exists because of dogma and ideology, not policy goals. Our public institutions must stop appeasing that threat.

There are now security guards outside many synagogues and Jewish schools for 24 hours a day. The Education Secretary has had to spend £2 million to fund tighter security measures for Jewish faith schools in the state sector. Is it tolerable in a free democracy that a religious minority is under threat? I remember being in a London synagogue—not as recently as I should have been—where the rabbi said to the congregation “Please do not congregate outside, because of the terrorist threat.” That was in London. I thought, “How can it be that you go to synagogue and cannot walk outside, like any normal religious faith, and chat outside with family and friends?” When I think about it, it makes me weep. I thought it was wrong of the rabbi to say it, despite the security threat, because we do not live in 1930s Germany. We live, proudly, in the Britain of 2011.

I welcome the Government’s response to the all-party inquiry into anti-Semitism, which contained many strong and positive measures, such as the £2 million from the Education Secretary to protect Jewish faith schools in the state sector, and £750,000 to educate British students about the holocaust, through organisations such as the Holocaust Educational Trust. I did not agree with the previous Prime Minister on much, but I very much respect the work that the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown) did in that respect. However, at the same time there is quite a lot of Sir Humphrey—or perhaps in this case Sir Humphrey Cohen—with draft scoping documents, diagnostic toolkits, cross-Government working groups, focus polls of staff and students about their experiences of higher education, self-audit performance schemes, conferences, and stakeholder engagement forums. I am sure that some of that will be valuable, but the original report of the all-party inquiry put a heavy emphasis on the problems on university campuses, and that is where the Government need to take bold action.

The academic Michael Burleigh wrote in The Spectator, in January 2010:

“Waffling on about free speech and forming committees is no way to deal with nascent terrorists”.

He went on:

“Last weekend, it was revealed that British students have been visiting Somalia to fight for the extremist group Al-Shabab…while the Sunday Telegraph reported that Yayha Ibrahim, an extremist preacher barred from America and Australia, was planning a speaking tour of British campuses. This just weeks after underpants bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, an alumnus of University College London, attempted to murder 289 people on a Christmas Day flight to Detroit.”

The writing is on the wall. The problem is clear. If we delay action, we will allow it to continue. The poison of extreme Islamism is not something that can be talked into submission or bubble-wrapped in bureaucracy. Its imams are preaching the most ideological and embittered form of anti-Semitism in the UK. The fundamental right of Israel to exist and of Jewish families to live in peace should not be a matter for debate.

The Education Secretary has often said that a democracy can be judged by how a country treats its Jews, and I completely agree with him. When it comes to extremism and anti-Semitism, the time for words and appeasement is over. Extreme Islamic groups must be proscribed. Hate preachers must be prevented from coming to the UK by a zero-tolerance policy. The Charity Commission needs to improve the monitoring of these extreme groups’ finances, as many have charitable fronts. Finally, there must be a financial penalty for university campuses that do not put their house in order.

[Luciana Berger (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab/Co-op)]

In trying to tackle race hate on campus, does the hon. Gentleman not agree that more needs to be done to prevent blame shifting from university authorities to the student unions?

[Robert Halfon]

The hon. Lady is exactly right. The blame lies squarely with the university authorities for allowing this sort of thing to go on.

Finally, as Golda Meir once said, pessimism is a luxury that no Jew can allow himself or herself. I do not want to be pessimistic, but I am very worried. I hope that the Government will respond with real action to some of the suggestions that I and other hon. Members have made today.