Fighting antisemitism

A reader reports from Hungary

One of the perks of living in Hungary is not having to ask your grandparents: “What was it like living in a one-party state?” — because you already know.

You see outrageous government propaganda everywhere. You see the posters of the crowds of refugees – excuse me: “migrants” — which would have you believe that they are out for Hungarian blood. You hear the endless droning speeches denouncing the treacherous liberals, and the sinister conspiracies trying to undermine Hungary.

You turn on the TV, switch to the right wing propaganda channel of your choice, and you

Labour MP John Mann is standing down as an MP to become a Tory adviser. He will take up a full-time role as the government’s “antisemitism tsar”.

Mann’s record on other issues is so bad that his elevation is likely to do more harm than good to the fight against antisemitism.

A Bassetlaw constituent of John Mann’s got it right back in 2016, writing on an internet chat forum: “[Mann] could probably be mistaken for UKIP most of the time. He’s pretty awful, though I did enjoy him shouting and swearing at Ken Livingstone a few weeks ago.”

Theresa May appointed Mann as her adviser on tackling

On 7 June, a lesbian pride march in Washington DC, the “DC Dyke March” banned marchers who had Stars of David on their rainbow flags. The organisers said that anti-Zionist Jews were welcome, and that they banned flags with Stars of David because they wanted to exclude all “nationalist” symbols.

Lots of people are nationalists of different shades. Why should they be banned from lesbian pride marches? And Palestinian flags weren’t banned. A similar ban was imposed at a pride march in Chicago in 2017. Root-and-branch anti-Israel politics inevitably spills over into antisemitism.

Keith Kahn Harris’s book sets out to be a short analysis on what drives a lot of conspiracy theories: denial.

People deny climate change, the effectiveness of vaccines, or the Holocaust. Kahn Harris explains succinctly where some of these conspiracies are driven from — helplessness in a world that leads the less informed to believing the conspiracy of someone with an alternative agenda. But the book is short in length and short on answers.

Kahn Harris makes a distinction. “Denial” is the act of denying something, for example, claiming that you can smoke just one more cigarette and quit

According to an Institute for Jewish Policy Research (IJPR) report on “Antisemitism in Contemporary Great Britain” levels of antisemitism in Britain are “amongst the lowest in the world”.

According to a Community Security Trust (CST) report on “Antisemitic Incidents – 2018”, the number of antisemitic incidents in 2018 was “the highest total that CST has ever recorded in a single year, an increase of 16% on 2017, which was itself a record annual total.”

According to a report entitled “Institutionally Antisemitic – Contemporary Left Antisemitism and the Crisis in the British Labour Party”,

While workers were angry and willing to fight, too often their anger was aimed at fellow workers of a different colour rather than at the employers and authorities responsible for their exploitation and poverty. Sometimes this occurred in the absence of socialist political leadership, but on occasion, labour movement misleadership played a poisonous role.

On 23 January, four days before the Glasgow general strike, trade union leader Emmanuel Shinwell told a 600-strong seafarers’ union meeting that the unemployment they faced was caused by Chinese sailors joining British ships. White sailors,

Above: Gregson with Rabbi Aharon Cohen of Neturei Karta, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish group which is vehemently anti-Israel and argues that Jews "deserved" the Holocaust

Shop steward Peter Gregson’s appeal against expulsion from the GMB trade union was rejected last Wednesday (6 March).

Last year a GMB disciplinary hearing had concluded that Gregson had:

• Written and promoted antisemitic materials which were racist in nature, including claims that Israel “exaggerated” the Holocaust.

• Made “utterly unacceptable and frankly sinister attacks” on GMB organiser Rhea Wolfson, describing her as “a

In an article published online in December 2018, Joni Alizah Cohen seeks to find a link between the global rise in antisemitism and the rise in transmisogyny.

By “transmisogyny” she means the joint experience of transphobia (hostility to transgender people) and misogyny (hatred of women). The article, “The Eradication of ‘Talmudic Abstractions’: Anti-Semitism, Transmisogyny and the National Socialist Project”, situates the contemporary rise in the far¬right as stemming from National Socialist ideals and seeks to gain an understanding of the current situation through an analysis of those