It must be presumed that the labour Party is unable to confront biases so long as its support base comes from the Muslim community, which influences voting in many British constituencies
Britain’s labour party has frequently thrown up scandals of anti-Semitism over the past few years. The crisis reached such proportions in recent weeks that two of the main representative organisations, the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish leadership Council, called a public demonstration outside the Palace of Westminster to ensure the UK labour Party addresses the prevalence of anti-Semitism within the party and the labour movement.
Uniquely among Indian diaspora organisations, the Dharmic Ideas and Policy Foundation (DIPF), a think-tank launched in 2015 to work on policy issues of concern to Britain’s Dharmic communities, issued a statement of solidarity in support of the campaign by the Jewish community and its organisations to have the problem addressed.
For India, where Jews always received civil treatment as an integral component of its composite culture and traditions, anti-Semitism sounds unfamiliar and somewhat incomprehensible. However, its long legacy in Europe, stemming from Western Christian culture, persists despite the past century’s unprecedentedly tragic Holocaust. Time and again through the history of the West, owing to prejudices deeply rooted in the Western culture, Jewish people have been falsely accused of awful crimes that were in turn utilised as pretexts to attack them. This stigmatisation and its consequences upon the Jewish psyche is richly and evocatively presented in a TV documentary series by historian Simon Schama, The Story of the Jews, appropriately being re-run by the BBC, with an accompanying three-part book series now coming to fruition.
The hope that the memory of the Holocaust would end these prejudices has not been fulfilled in the contemporary West. Appalling crimes are being committed against Jewish people in many parts of Europe, from policies that deny the significance of the Holocaust in Poland to murder in France and elsewhere on the continent. Widespread anti-Semitic prejudices can be observed within Britain’s labour Party that demonises Jews and hinders their legitimate activities in a shocking number of universities.
The DIPF statement of April 26, supported by a wide range of other Indian diaspora bodies in the UK, notes the importance of recognising that the assault on British Jewry is becoming synonymous with the attempt to extinguish the state of Israel, created in the aftermath of the Holocaust as the only haven for the Jewish people. The attacks on the Jews are, in fact, designed to reverse the historic verdict leading to the establishment of the Jewish state by forcing the British Government to repudiate its support for its existence. Among the instruments for implementing this goal are acts of terror on British soil to intimidate the political establishment into yielding to militant Islamist demands, and the exercise of political power through a captive electoral base that dictates labour Party policy.
The assault on Jewish communities, using Israel as an excuse, is also paralleled, especially in labour Party circles, by hostility towards Indian diaspora communities; they are based on political demands that seek the dismemberment of India, echoing calls to destroy Israel by any means. The boycott of elected Israeli politicians visiting Britain is similar to the boycott advocated in left-wing circles of the visit by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who happens to be a firm friend of Israel. It will be recalled that the ban on Modi visiting Britain was a labour Party initiative. Militant Islamists seeking adherence to the Sharia’h have denied Jewish and Hindu students access to multi-faith common prayer rooms in some British universities and their meetings were banned or disrupted by them in conjunction with hard left groups. Uncomfortable similarities will be noted with recent events on Indian university campuses.
The anti-Semitism of Europe led to Jews being typecast in Christian theology. levites became identified as the priests of a false religion. As these tropes became associated in Europe with the falsehood of Judaism, the logic of the same framework led to the identification of Brahmins as the priesthood of false religion of Hinduism. It is upon this that today’s widely accepted tropes of India’s caste system, and the hierarchy and oppression with which it is associated, were built within the Western culture.
These themes have in turn informed the stereotyping of India as a culture that has a hierarchical and oppressive caste system, charges that are now levelled against the Indian diaspora community in Britain. Tropes regarding the caste system now constitute the basis of hate-speech against Indians and Hindus in particular. It is upon such false premises that the British legislation and case law on caste discrimination are built and sanctioned without demur, particularly by Britain’s labour Party leadership, which imposed three-line whips in both House of Parliament compelling its Peers and MPs to obey. It is instructive also that the leading British case law on caste discrimination derives from the same reasoning as the foundational UK Supreme Court’s JFS case in which a Christian notion of religiosity was inserted to cast the Jews as racists. The same legal precedent is now used to label the Indian community as caste-racists.
The labour Party admits the charge of anti-Semitism via the report of Baroness Shami Chakrabarti, who has Bengali parents, and the labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn. However, that a strategy exists to root out anti-Semitism is doubtful, particularly so when the most virulent streams of anti-Semitism emerging in today’s Europe are documented as emerging from within the Muslim community, some members of which have an institutionalised hatred of Jews and Judaism. Instances of such attitudes surface regularly among labour politicians.
The labour Party must be presumed unable to confront anti-Semitism so long as its support base comes from among the Muslim community, which is able to influence the vote in many constituencies in Britain. This is an issue labour leader Corbyn refuses to identify, let alone demonstrate his willingness to tackle. The party is moreover committed to tackle “Islamophobia”, which the 57-member Organisation of Islamic Cooperation insists on banning on the ground that any criticism of Islam be suppressed.
The DIPF statement, whose demonstration of support Jewish bodies have welcomed, goes on to say, “We, therefore, regard awareness of the politics of jihad against Jews and Hindus as a prerequisite for isolating its protagonists. It is in this spirit that we declare our unequivocal support for Britain’s Jewish community, which is facing growing challenges to its security and well-being. We note with profound concern the view of Jewish leaders in France and Germany that their continued survival in these societies is in doubt and an exodus from Europe is already occurring. This cannot be allowed to gather momentum in Britain.”
(Views expressed are personal and entirely of the writer, who is Reader in Culture and law, Department of law, Queen Mary, University of london)