Known as the Temple Mount to Jews and Christians, and as al-Haram ash-Sharif — the Noble Sanctuary — to Muslims, the religious compound at the heart of Jerusalem’s old city was formerly the site of two Jewish temples, Byzantine and crusader churches, and today the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

From the first Arab revolts in the days of the British Mandate, the claim that Al-Aqsa was under threat was commonly used by leaders such as the Grand Mufti Haj Amin Al-Husseini to incite the Palestinian society to violence. More recently, it was the visit to the Temple Mount by Ariel Sharon in 2000 that was seized upon by Palestinian extremists to justify the wave of suicide bombings that became the Second Intifada.

While Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has been hailed internationally as a moderate counterbalance to the Islamist Hamas, Abbas has in fact also repeatedly appealed to hardline Islamic sensibilities, denying the Temple Mount’s significance to other faiths, and encouraging the hallucinatory belief that Al-Aqsa is under threat. In the West we are ever alert to racial supremacism, but when it comes to such religious supremacism we have a blind spot.

Throughout the summer tensions in Jerusalem rose as Islamist activists became increasingly aggressive in protesting against Jewish visitors to the compound. On several occasions Israeli security forces clashed with Palestinian rioters who took to barricading themselves inside Al-Aqsa.

With the onset of the Jewish religious festivals in September the violence picked up dramatically. Yet, just as tensions reached fever pitch, Abbas — Israel’s supposed peace partner — used this opportunity to fan the flames further. Abbas declared that Jews have “no right to desecrate the mosque with their dirty feet” and told his people that “every drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem is pure, every martyr will reach paradise, and every injured person will be rewarded by Allah.”

Yet astonishingly Abbas then stood before the UN and warned the world that Israel is attempting to transform the conflict from a political to a religious one, before repeating the claim that the Israeli government is acting to undermine Al-Aqsa. There is no evidence to suggest Israel has any such policy, but by repeating this allegation, Abbas was ensuring the very transition to the kind of religious conflict he accuses Israel of seeking.

Clearly, Jerusalem’s sacred compound is of overwhelming historical and religious significance to adherents of all three Abrahamic faiths, particularly Judaism and Islam. Yet the Palestinian Authority’s refusal to recognise this fact encapsulates a basic truth about this conflict and why it remains unresolved. Evidently, even Palestinian leaders who are presented as moderates in fact endorse religious supremacist notions about the holy sites that sit at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian impasse.

The post Mounting Mendacity appeared first on Standpoint.

Three important new books open up different standpoints from which to examine this unpalatable fact of life. The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life (Allen Lane, £20) summarises the remarkable life’s work of three American psychologists — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski — who have created a whole new field of research: Terror Management Theory. This is a practical as well as theoretical approach to death anxiety which, by the empirical study of its power over us, seeks to understand how so much of what we do — our creativity and our compassion, our love for others and for ourselves — is a refusal to give in to the negative thoughts, emotions and violence that grip human beings in the face of death.

Another man of medicine, Raymond Tallis, has written a more personal book: a Religio Medici for our times. The Black Mirror: Fragments of an Obituary for Life (Atlantic, £17.99) takes literally Montaigne’s injunction to “always keep the image of death . . . in full view”. Tallis imagines himself as his own future corpse (easier, perhaps, for a professor of geriatric medicine than for most of us), in an “endeavour to look at life — my life, your life, anyone’s life — from a virtual viewpoint outside it”. If this sounds morbid, Tallis is a surprisingly entertaining companion on his imaginary journey into the underworld. As a thoroughgoing atheist, “RT” (as he refers to himself) permits himself none of the consolations of faith that sustained Sir Thomas Browne, his great predecessor as a physician who tried to know himself. Instead, he faces his own finitude with the fortitude of a man who, having explored his own mortality, invites us to “come back from the dead to change the world or our lives”.

The third book to address death, however, does so from a completely different point of view — one that takes seriously the threat of religious fanatics who are (pace Keats) half in love with a death that is anything but easeful, whether it is others’ or their own. In Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence (Hodder & Stoughton, £20), Jonathan Sacks draws on an even wider frame of reference than his scientific counterparts to make the argument that we can only defeat those who kill in God’s name with their own weapons — that is, by reinterpreting scriptures that seem to exclude or demonise, by demonstrating the futility of fundamentalism in its own terms, by deconstructing the dualisms that divide and the sibling rivalries that sow hatred.

The former Chief Rabbi deploys all his exegetical subtlety on the foundational texts of Abrahamic monotheism in the Hebrew Bible, especially the Book of Genesis, to show us how figures such as Ishmael and Esau, ancient archetypes of divine rejection, are in fact the opposite. All faiths have “hard texts” that are too dangerous to read literally, Sacks suggests, but Judaism, Christianity and Islam at least share a Biblical basis for mutual toleration.

The thrust of Sacks’s book is all the more powerful because he eschews the wishful thinking that bedevils both sides of the secular/religious conflict. He makes no attempt to play down the pathology of terrorism and war inspired by the anger of those, especially Muslims, who “are determined to defeat the world by means of the word”. Now freed from the obligations of office, he can speak frankly about the betrayal by the secular West of its Judaeo-Christian values, the moral relativism that fails to defend freedom, and the “altruistic evil” of radical, politicised religion. The failure of the secular West to provide identity and meaning combines with the brute facts of demography to produce hydra-headed movements that defy even the smartest weapons and the most intelligent intelligence. After centuries of secularisation, we are witnessing the return of religion with a vengeance. The answer to the Islamists who love death more than life cannot be solely military; it has to be theological too. 

This is not an argument for failing to confront the terrorists, as well as the demagogues who inspire and the states that sponsor them. The weakest chapter of Solomon, Greenberg and Pyszczynski comes when they try to explain the response to 9/11 as the Bush administration’s “terror management” of “death fears” that “intensified Americans’ zeal to derogate, dehumanise, demonise, assimilate, and destroy.” Such views are commonplace in the academic world: Oxford’s new Vice-Chancellor Louise Richardson recently outraged Americans by contrasting British resilience with American hysteria: “The scale of the over-reaction to the 9/11 atrocity was a reflection of the fact that it was such a new experience for the US.” Both the terror management theorists and the Vice-Chancellor are mistaken. As Alexander Woolfson shows elsewhere this issue (“Rescue Iraq From Obama’s Folly”), the Islamists are indeed a mortal threat to the West that cannot be appeased, but must be defeated. Victory, however, will only be final when the West wins the battle of ideas. Jonathan Sacks gives us the intellectual tools to finish the job.

The post The Mark Of Cain appeared first on Standpoint.

Take, for example, the case of Karel De Gucht. He is a leading Belgian liberal politician, who served as foreign minister and then as a European Union commissioner from 2009 to 2014, responsible for aid and trade. Two of the Belgian prime ministers under whom he served, Guy Verhofstadt and Herman Van Rompuy, also became high EU officials and it is fair to assume that De Gucht’s outlook is typical of the European political elite.

Yet in 2010, this supposedly liberal representative of this supposedly liberal union of supposedly liberal nations told Belgian radio: “Don’t underestimate the opinion . . . of the average Jew outside Israel. There is indeed a belief — it’s difficult to describe it otherwise — among most Jews that they are right. And a belief is something that’s difficult to counter with rational arguments. And it’s not so much whether these are religious Jews or not. Lay Jews also share the same belief that they are right. So it is not easy to have, even with moderate Jews, a rational discussion about what is actually happening in the Middle East.” Washington was controlled by Jews, De Gucht declared, even in the Obama era: “Do not underestimate the Jewish lobby on Capitol Hill. That is the best organised lobby, you shouldn’t underestimate the grip it has on American politics — no matter whether it’s Republicans or Democrats.”

It is revealing that De Gucht not only got away with this public outburst, but that it is not even mentioned in his Wikipedia entry under the heading “Controversies”. Such views are indeed seen as uncontroversial by many Europeans who consider themselves liberal. To utter them in public is a breach of diplomatic etiquette, but certainly not a resigning matter, and De Gucht in fact faced no serious consequences. At a public event just after the De Gucht incident I asked Peter Mandelson, a former EU commissioner who happens to be Jewish on his father’s side, what he thought about it. Lord Mandelson looked uncomfortable with the question and gave a non-committal reply, but later in private he made it clear that he was indeed disgusted by De Gucht’s conduct. Should the commissioner resign? “That is for him to decide,” was the reply. The fact that De Gucht came under no pressure to resign suggests that his brand of “soft” anti-Semitism is ubiquitous in Continental corridors of power.

Yet the greatest danger to Jews today comes from a different quarter. Anti-Semitism has mutated again and is now a particular problem among Muslim communities in Western Europe. According to the study by Günther Jikeli, “Antisemitic Attitudes among Muslims in Europe”, Muslims show consistently higher levels of anti-Semitism than the general population in every country that has been surveyed. In the UK, for example, a Pew survey in 2006 showed that 46 per cent of the Muslim population had an unfavourable view of Jews compared to 7 per cent of the population as a whole. A 2008 survey comparing Christians and Muslims found that in Austria — historically one of the most anti-Semitic countries in Europe — 10.7 per cent of Christians agreed with the statement: “Jews cannot be trusted.” Among Muslims, the figure was 64.1 per cent.

In Britain, there is anecdotal evidence that polling organisations are reluctant to conduct surveys that might show the Muslim community in an unfavourable light. The most detailed work, however, has been done in France. Repeated surveys show, according to Jikeli, that the three most anti-Semitic groups in France are supporters of the far-Right (the Front National), the far-Left (the Front de Gauche) and Muslims. Of these three, Muslims “show by far the highest level of anti-Semitism” across a range of attitudes. Nearly half of all French Muslims, 46 per cent, emerge as “coherent” anti-Semites, compared to 38 per cent of Front National and 22 per cent of Front de Gauche supporters, while 15 per cent of the general population share such views — about twice as many as in the UK. Among Muslims, such factors as education, occupation and income make relatively little difference. Whether or not anti-Semites know Jews personally is also statistically insignificant — this applies both to Muslims and non-Muslims. Nor do levels of discrimination or legal restrictions on Islamic practice. There is no evidence that Muslims become anti-Semitic because they are persecuted or marginalised.

What does make a difference to Muslim anti-Semitism is religious fundamentalism. Surveys found that non-practising and non-believing Muslims were much less likely to be anti-   Semitic, while anti-Semitic attitudes are held by the great majority of devoutly religious Muslims. Hence we may conclude that anti-Semitism is not merely a transient phenomenon among European Muslims, which will pass away over time as they become more integrated, but a deeply-held conviction that is intimately connected to Islamic beliefs and the political mindset that usually accompanies them.

Where does Muslim anti-Semitism come from? It is well known that many passages in the Koran depict Jews in a bad light. But not so many people realise that the founder of Islam showed by his own example what he thought should happen to Jews who did not submit to Islam. Ibn Ishaq, his first biographer, records what happened when the Messenger (as he was known) had defeated and captured a Jewish tribe, the Banu Qurayza: “Then the Messenger went out to the market of Medina . . . and dug trenches in it. Then he sent for them and struck off their heads in those trenches as they were brought out to him in batches . . . There were 600 or 700 in all, though some put the figure as high as 800 or 900 . . . This went on until the Messenger made an end to them.”

It is not, therefore, an accident that Islamist states and terrorist organisations today execute or murder Jews wherever they can find them. The global nature of their anti-Semitism is very striking. Take, for example, Latin America, where Iranian-backed terrorists have not only carried out attacks on the Jewish community in Argentina, but have implicated successive governments in cover-ups and secret diplomacy. In India, a country with hardly any Jews, the Mumbai terrorists managed to find and kill several. In South Africa, demagogues are demanding that Jews either subscribe to their own anti-Semitic agenda, or face discrimination or even expulsion. And in Europe, we have recently seen a series of murderous attacks on Jews in France and Belgium, where they make up less than 1 per cent of the population. It is only a matter of time before such lethal anti-Semitic attacks take place here in Britain. Indeed, the level of anti-Semitic incidents has risen steadily here and last year reached an all-time high. We are dealing with an epidemic of anti-Semitism that goes far beyond anything seen in the 1930s during the fascist agitation in the East End.

What has changed? In two words, Islam and Israel. The rise of Islam in Western Europe has made anti-Semitism a useful recruiting sergeant for unscrupulous preachers and politicians. And the existence of Israel has given them a cloak of respectability, by enabling them to disguise anti-Semitism as criticism of the Jewish state. When George Galloway, for example, declared Bradford an “Israeli-free city”, the meaning and effect of the then MP’s action well understood by British Jews. But Galloway was not prosecuted because his threats were ostensibly only directed at Israelis, who are not a race but a nation. A politician who declared a British city “Pakistani-free” would, though, have been unlikely to get away with it.

Yet the truth is that anti-Semitism is not just a sub-species of racism, but something unique and different. It is a hatred — and ultimately always a lethal hatred — directed simultaneously against a people, a race and a religion. It is thus universal and ubiquitous, not particular or localised; it does not even require actual Jews.

Because the attempt to exterminate the whole Jewish people took place in Europe, the post-war nations of our continent made a collective vow never to allow such a thing to happen again. Yet today, 70 years later, anti-Semitism has redoubled its strength and has returned to Europe with a vengeance. Jews are leaving in record numbers. Governments are tacitly acquiescing in this silent exodus by making life more difficult for Jews — restricting kosher slaughter or circumcision, for example — and by failing to take adequate steps to ensure their security. Jewish Europe is vanishing before our eyes, as the Dia-spora goes into reverse.

Does all this matter? As a Catholic, as an Englishman, as a civilised human being, I feel a profound sense of responsibility towards the Jewish people as a whole, but towards my Jewish compatriots in particular. Preserving the Jewish presence in our midst is as much a solemn duty for our generation as it was for our parents and grandparents, who fought to defeat the Nazis. As the last survivors of the Holocaust and the last exiles and émigrés pass away, we must take over their role as witnesses to the truth and guardians of that moral obligation. Never again should Jews have to live in fear among us. Never again should Jews feel that their loyalty is distrusted. Never again should they lack a state that is theirs, living in peace and security within recognised borders. Britain’s commitment to defend Israel’s right, not merely to exist, but to flourish, should be especially strong: it was, after all, the Balfour Declaration that brought the Jewish homeland back to life. Britain did not cover itself with glory during the Mandate period, but we do have a chance to redeem ourselves today by standing up for Israel at the UN and other international bodies, as our Anglophone cousins in Canada, Australia and the United States generally do. When Israel responded to attacks from Gaza last year by destroying the ability of Hamas to launch missiles and use tunnels to infiltrate Israel, the Prime Minister refused to join in the chorus of condemnation. Like Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, David Cameron has proved himself a friend of Israel. If only the rest of Europe could say the same.

“Never again” must be our watchword. Never again shall we betray the people whom St John Paul — the Polish Pope and righteous gentile who himself saved Edith Zierer, a Jewish concentration camp survivor — called our “elder brothers”.

The post Europe Must Never Again Betray Its Jews appeared first on Standpoint.

In the course of her research, Helm had retraced Atkins’s steps after the defeat of Hitler when she went to France and Germany to interview the captors of the SOE operatives. Atkins had discovered that several of them landed in a concentration camp for women at Ravensbrück, near Berlin. Violette Szabo, the former shop assistant who had first departed from RAF Tempsford on  April 5, 1944, was shot in Ravensbrück in January 1945. She was awarded a posthumous George Cross. SOE agents Denise Bloch and Lilian Rolfe were executed around the same time. Cecily Lefort was gassed there in February 1945. Odette Sansom (who also was to awarded the George Cross), Yvonne Basedon and Eileen Nairne survived.

Helm then embarked on a further journey of discovery by researching the conditions for all the prisoners and guards in Ravensbrück. With the years that had passed since her investigation into Atkins, the last survivors of the camp were getting even older. Her work was a last chance to meet them. She became ever more deeply involved in a massive project which took her to, among other places, Berlin, Cracow, Warsaw, Moscow, St Petersburg, Donetsk, Odessa, Jerusalem, Bad Arolsen, Geneva, Vienna, Paris and Bordeaux, although one survivor turned out to be a neighbour in London.

Written as a collective “biography” of a camp complex in which an estimated 130,000 women were confined at one time or other during 1939-45 and where 40,000-50,000 died, her packed, compellingly written book comes to more than 750 pages. It is an indication of its power and significance that my main regret is that it frequently feels too short.

Since the author has gathered such a wealth of material, much of it from interviews with elderly survivors and from documents provided by them and their families, it is vital that she prepares for herself, for scholars and for the remaining survivors a full set of interview notes, documents and more detailed source notes for future reference. It was impractical to lengthen the book by detailing the source material, but there is a strong case for making it available, possibly online.

Though Helm has skilfully arranged her material into a chronological narrative, there is such a quantity of it covering such a variety of topics that the book is effectively a set of studies and portraits rolled into one. This is partly because Ravensbrück included such a diverse population. Women were sent there because they were German Communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, or “asocials” (prostitutes or lesbians), members of the French, Polish, Norwegian or Dutch resistance, Russian POWs, gypsies, or Hungarian Jews. She covers topics including resistance within the camp, how ingenious attempts at communication with the outside world were successful but were then ignored, cruel medical experiments, and the behaviour of the female guards.

If This is a Woman argues that research into the Holocaust and Nazi war crimes have tended to underplay or ignore altogether the dimension of gender. Of course, the experiences both of men and women varied enormously (as Helm’s book shows for women under conditions of extreme stress). Providing that sweeping generalisations are avoided, my own family experience leads me to agree with Helm that it is important to investigate the differences between male and female circumstances and behaviour under Nazi rule. Her monumental work will therefore prove vital in the future.

In its approach, Helm’s book has much in common with Sir Martin Gilbert’s classic study, The Holocaust. Gilbert based his book largely on interviews with survivors. He focused on reporting what happened rather than on analysing causes or presenting theoretical explanations. This approach is too often ignored. Like Gilbert, Helm has taken great trouble to meet and to give voice to the victims. By talking in depth to some of them, she has elicited information and opinions which standardised interviews conducted for all-purpose collections of testimonies tend to miss.

Those who have seen Helm’s recent writings on Gaza, which are highly critical of Israel, may be concerned about her credentials as an author on a Holocaust-related topic. Do her writings on the Middle East conflict mean that she has failed to draw the appropriate conclusions from her interviews with those who managed to survive the cruelties of Hitler’s concentration camp for women? Helm’s views on current Israeli politics do not impinge on her book. They are not mentioned or implied. She had been working on her study of Ravensbrück for years before recent bouts of fighting in Gaza. 

The book deserves to have a deep impact. For me it certainly has had a considerable effect because my grandmother was one of the Hungarian Jews who were brought there from Auschwitz where they had been selected as slave labourers. In the final days of the War she was one of thousands rescued by Count Folke Bernadotte in a deal with Himmler. She was taken to Sweden to recover. Like many, she died shortly afterwards. Bernadotte has never been recognised as a Righteous Gentile, an injustice which I hope will be remedied during the lifetime of his eldest son, who is now 84.

I have often discussed with my mother what happened to her and to her family in Hungary under the Nazis. The depth of Helm’s explorations have made me realise that there is so much more to ask  my mother and one of her closest friends, who was with my grandmother in Ravensbrück.

The post Bearing Witness appeared first on Standpoint.

The Ben Uri Gallery centenary exhibition at Somerset House reveals an extraordinary art collection, but it also tells us a great deal about modern Jewish art and the role of immigrants and refugees in 20th-century British art.

“Refugees”, c.1941, by Josef Herman, ©Estate of Josef Herman

The exhibition, Out of Chaos, is dominated by two waves of outsiders. First, there are the Anglo-Jewish artists who were born around 1890 and emerged just before the First World War. The Whitechapel Boys — including Mark Gertler, David Bomberg, Jacob Kramer and Isaac Rosenberg — were all sons of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Pale. They were drawn to traditional Jewish subjects: for example, Gertler’s Rabbi and Rabbitzin (1914), Kramer’s Day of Atonement (1919) and Bomberg’s Ghetto Theatre (1920).

“Ghetto Theatre”, 1920, by David Bomberg, ©Estate of David Bomberg

But at the same time they came of age during the heyday of Modernism. “The new life should find its expression in a new art,” Bomberg said in a newspaper interview in 1914. Roger Fry’s controversial Post-Impressionist exhibitions of 1910 and 1912 were held when these young artists were studying at the Slade. The Ben Uri was founded in 1915 when the École de Paris was at its heyday, just two years after the Armory Show brought Modernism to America. They were drawn to traditional Jewish subjects but it was tradition with a Modernist twist.

“Rabbi and Rabbitzin”, 1914, by Mark Gertler, ©Ben Uri Collection

However, they engaged with Jewish subjects. What is striking about the second wave who dominate this exhibition — Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied central Europe, from Adler, Bloch and Meidner to refugees who came as children like Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach — is how they avoided Jewish subjects. No images of Judaism, almost no traces of the Holocaust, hardly any engagement with Israel. Until recently, most post-war work by Jewish artists has avoided obviously Jewish subjects. But there is nevertheless something dark and troubling about the solitary figures by Freud, the urban landscapes and thick black swirls of charcoal by Auerbach and Kossoff. To use David Sylvester’s phrase, these works by Jewish artists are “The Art of an Aftermath”. 

“Portrait Of A Woman”, 1957, by Leon Kossoff, ©Leon Kossoff

The most violent images in this exhibition, however, speak more directly of the suffering and displacement of the Nazi years. Two astonishing crucifixions, one by Chagall and the other by Emmanuel Levy, two violent scenes of interrogation by George Grosz and Refugees, by my father Josef Herman, are all recent acquisitions by the Ben Uri. Put together with the work of the Whitechapel Boys and the post-war Anglo-Jewish artists, these show the variety and vitality of modern Jewish art and its complicated relationship with modern Jewish history.

“La Soubrette”, 1933, by Chaïm Soutine, ©ADGAP, Paris and DACS, London

The post Ben Uri At 100 appeared first on Standpoint.

Tenenbom has been compared to the documentary film-maker Michael Moore and described as a “gonzo” journalist, which is generally taken to mean an anti-establishment type with a cavalier disregard for facts. It is presumably why Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman declined to be interviewed by him. They may have missed a trick because Tenenbom came up with a rather different picture of his native land, and of the Palestinian territories, than might have been expected.

What he found was a country full of self-hating Israelis and foreign NGOs, often funded by the European Union, combining to promote a distorted and largely untruthful image of the place.

He described himself as a German journalist and did not reveal that he spoke fluent Hebrew. The result was that Palestinian leaders and spokemen spoke openly to him, thinking he was on their side, as Germany finances many NGOs. The result is not flattering to them, revealing for instance widespread Holocaust denial, although they were reluctant to let Tenenbom see too much for himself on the ground, so used are they to European journalists doing little more than take dictation.

Things are just as bad in Israel itself, he found. He accompanied a group of young Italians, sponsored by an EU-funded “peace organisation” called Casa per la Pace Milano, on a tour of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial museum in Jerusalem. Amazingly, their Israeli tour guide (who called himself “an ex-Jew”) used the tour to compare Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and asylum seekers with the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews in Europe: “What happens here in Israel is Holocaust,” Tenenbom quotes him as saying. Tenenbom muses: “It is interesting to see what the EU people are busy with these days, using Yad Vashem, the monument for millions of Jews slaughtered at their hands, as a platform for poisonous propaganda against the survivors of their butchery.” What impressions the young Italians took home with them are all too easy to imagine.

Wherever he goes, Tenenbom finds European busybodies monitoring Israel’s activities in the West Bank and boosting the Palestinians’ feeling of victimhood: Medecins sans Frontieres, EAPPI (the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel) and, worst of all in his view, the ubiquitous International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC): “I don’t know why a bunch of Swiss-only nationals, individuals who were never elected in any democratic process and whose meetings are secretive, have so much power,” he comments and concludes: “The age-old story of Europe’s hatred of the Jews is continuing to this very day.”

As for the NGOs, they may find life more difficult in the coming months. The new justice minister, Ayelet Shaked, of the right-wing Jewish Home party, whose appointment was greeted with horror by liberals, advocates a law banning foreign funding of NGOs, and is now in a position to do something about it. 

The post NGOs NBG appeared first on Standpoint.

She also quizzed me about my public rebuttal of the Labour party, which began in these very pages. A chance encounter with Ed Miliband had knocked at my funnybone, followed by his naïve decision (too soon and without defined borders) to back a back-bencher’s bill for a Palestinian state, and my response garnered me more unwanted PR than Russell Brand would get for leaving Katie Hopkins’s pad at dawn. I was viralled (take that and groan, my fellow pedants) into the online stratosphere with my article, based on  single issue, after a lifetime’s support for Labour. Thank you Rupert Murdoch.

What I didn’t tell the researcher was that when the postal vote form arrived, I stared at it dumbly for days, knowing the Lib-Dems and Greens are even more anti-Israel than Ed. Given the Bedroom Tax and the Mansion Tax, the growing economy and the burgeoning deficit, the choice seemed to be between the Tories, UKIP and the Cannabis Is Safer Than Alcohol Party. In my neck of the diocese the Tories need no help from me; I’d rather be trepanned than vote UKIP; and the other lot don’t hand out free samples. It pains me to admit that I voted the same way I’ve voted for the last 50 years.

Now, as I watched a Dimbleby from the lawn in Tel Aviv and wondered if my Labour vote would count, a version of the Baltimore riots was exploding in Jerusalem. A policeman beat up a young Ethiopian soldier who was in his IDF uniform and the result was the same old-same old: a peaceful demo turned violent. Predictably, it all ended in tear gas.

I have visited Ethiopia, seen its beautiful artefacts, and witnessed its poverty. The  rock churches of Lalibela are an unsung eighth wonder of the world. The Ethiopians were some of the gentlest, most hospitable people I have ever encountered. Our hosts were beautiful, with oval faces, soulful eyes and spotless white muslin clothes. The men greet each other by gracefully bumping alternate shoulders, left right left.

I was also aware of the lower echelons of their society. In the Semien Hills I was shocked at the endless lines of peasant women carrying branches the weight of a wardrobe on their doubled-over spines. Enchanting children crowded on to our bus, dazzling us with their smiles and calling in English not for pennies or food but stationery: “Pencil please, paper please?”

I was there to write a piece at the behest of my friend Irene Beard. On her own return from the country, Irene had set up a charity called Book-Link which for several years sent out half a million remaindered textbooks to Ethiopian schools from British publishing houses. I was accompanied by the distinguished photographer Fritz von der Schulenburg, and I still have a treasure trove of the most exceptional wine-gold photographs of a woman absorbing a country. The newspaper which commissioned my article used a single fuzzy black-and-white one, of me looking sheepish on a camel.

Irene invited me to the Ethiopian embassy in London to discuss boosting tourism in the country. A red carpet was laid. Twenty-five people sat around the table. Suddenly, silently, the powerful then-president, Meles Zenawi, materialised. Irene smiled beatifically as only a woman who’s about to drop you in it can, and said, “Welcome, everyone. My friend, the actress Maureen Lipman, will begin with an account of her trip to Ethiopia.”

Never has my brain emptied and my bladder filled so rapidly. “Handwoven carpet, swallow me up,” I murmured. “The country is so unspoiled — ” I began, and then stopped. The room waited. “Well, actually it could do with a bit more spoiling. There’s almost no indigenous art or available culture to be seen and what there is has zero presentation. Lucy, the oldest female skeleton ever discovered, is laid out unprotected on a plastic trestle table. The Ark of the Covenant is shielded from the eyes of tourists.” On and on I burbled. Mr Meles watched me as a cobra watches his next meal.

Back in the ’90s, though, he became prime minister when his citizens were under threat from the end of the Mengistu regime. Jewish life was repressed and only one tiny mud-hut synagogue remained. The Falashas, descended from the Biblical tribe of Dan, were declared Jewish by the rabbinate and therefore had the right of return to the Promised Land. Operation Solomon, the airlift of more than 14,000 Jews, took place on May 24 and 25, 1991. Five babies were born in mid-air. When they landed in Israel, the Falasha Jews kissed the ground.

Now, nearly 25 years later, it appears they’re not wanted in certain residential areas and barred from giving blood. This generation of black Jews feels they are treated as second-class citizens — although, ironically, the Israeli Ethiopians are accused of looking down on Sudanese asylum seekers. “Everyone’s a little bit racist,” as they sing in Avenue Q.

Oh, but how easily the word apartheid springs to curled global lips. It implies that apartheid is official government policy in Israel: I don’t believe that to be the case. It always takes several generations for immigrants to be wholly accepted; after all, “No Dogs, No Blacks, No Jews,” was a notice displayed in British hotels well into the 1950s. It’s not right, but it was ever thus. The first generation keeps their heads down, accepts institutionalised prejudice, lives in ghettos, cooks traditionally and disapproves of inter-marriage. The next generation, hopefully, begins to feel at home.

Meanwhile, Cameron’s in again despite my vote. Fifty-six seats in Scotland went to the SNP based on remorse for a lost referendum, a flurry of nationalism and stirred-up mistrust of the English. Nearly four million voted for UKIP based entirely on fear of Europe and prejudice about foreigners. Nigel Farage has just rejected his own resignation — deemed unaccepted by the unacceptable face of his party. So soon, and at our peril, we forget our history.

The post Israel And Integration appeared first on Standpoint.

Simultaneously, the SRC President at the Durban University of Technology, Mqondisi Duma, demanded the expulsion from the university of all Jews who do not publicly declare their loyalty to the Palestinian cause. Duma doubtless knew that although many Jews are willing to criticise the Netanyahu government, only a rather freakish fringe are willing to side publicly against their confreres in Israel so that in effect he was demanding that the campus be cleared of nine Jews out of every ten.

Yet not many years ago Nelson Mandela happily accepted an honorary doctorate from Ben Gurion University at Beersheva and dwelt admiringly on the fact that BGU is a world leader in combating desertification, in water purification and in assisting agriculture in harsh conditions — and that it was making all this expertise available to South Africa. Moreover, Mandela never tired of praising South African Jews for having sided against apartheid and provided so many members of the Progressive, Liberal and Communist parties. Yet Israel now lists South Africa as a country where the Jewish community is under major threat and strongly recommends that the entire community here leave for Israel as soon as possible. So how has it come to this?

The short answer is that 40 per cent unemployment and the evident failure of the ANC government has engendered a bitter, indeed toxic mood among militant black youth. They are looking round for targets. First there was the Rhodes Must Fall campaign. Then the streets erupted into murderous xenophobia against immigrant workers. Now a new target is needed. Historically, it has never been long before people in such a mood alight upon the Jews.

But there is a longer answer too. Thabo Mbeki, who became president in 1999, suffered badly from paranoia and a grandiosity complex. He wanted to be president not just of South Africa but of all Africa and even of the whole Third World. Thus he pumped life and money into the long-defunct Non-Aligned Movement so that he could preside over it. And like so many who have spent their life in the struggle, he wanted the struggle to go on. If Africa’s liberation was now complete, where else should the struggle move ? Obviously, to Israel — another mainly white implant in the Third World. And by foregrounding the Palestinians and grandstanding about them Mbeki could hope to win the support of Muslim nations for his leadership of the Third World.

So endless Mbeki cabinet conferences were devoted to the Arab-Israeli problem. This was done under the public pretence that South Africa, “the miracle nation”, would take its peace-making skills to Israel and help bring about a full settlement there at last. This was regarded both by local Jews and Israelis with complete bemusement. After all, Mbeki’s meetings included extensive representation of Palestinian groups but only a few far-left Jews were invited. Officially, Israel said nothing but made it clear privately that since the ANC wanted to see a “liberated” Israel under Hamas rule, any idea of mediation was simply laughable.

Mbeki knew that, of course, and his real objective was not mediation at all but to carry out the groundwork for an international anti-Israel campaign closely modelled on the old anti-apartheid model, with mounting pressure for boycotts, disinvestment and sanctions. The ANC was still well connected to the old international anti-apartheid network and was able to use this array of generally left-wing organisations to popularise the new cause. The result has been the mushrooming growth of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

The first fruit of this campaign was seen at Unesco’s World Conference Against Racism in Durban in 2001. The ANC had always had particularly strong networks within UN agencies — during the struggle period it had been able to get the UN General Assembly to set up a Special Committee on Apartheid and to vote through a resolution denouncing apartheid as a “crime against humanity”. This latter was pushed through by the Soviet and Afro-Asian blocs despite the strong opposition of Western nations, which argued that the “crime against humanity” category referred to atrocities such as the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide and that,  appalling as apartheid might be, it was certainly not genocidal: South Africa’s black population soared under apartheid and millions of other Africans poured into the country looking for work.

The Durban conference quickly turned into a festival of anti-Israeli feeling. At the parallel NGO conference Israeli delegates agreed to allow all manner of anti-Israel motions provided that a motion was also passed condemning anti-Semitism. This was refused and Israel, the US and Canada walked out. Washington was furious that a major UN conference had been so one-sided and blamed the conference chair, Mary Robinson, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, who, in the conference’s preparatory stages, had already shown her colours by adopting Muslim dress and agreeing to the exclusion of such distinguished human rights organisations as the Simon Wiesenthal Centre.

Within South Africa the Communist Party has controlled BDS from the first, using it to give it an entrée into the large Muslim, Indian and Coloured minorities which are otherwise in danger of leaving the ANC-SACP fold. South Africa’s BDS has adopted a tribal approach, targeting the local Jewish community rather than Israel, and trying to enforce sanctions against any local Jews who do not declare for the Palestinian cause. Its favoured target has been the Woolworths chain of supermarkets, allegedly because it sells Israeli goods. The store retorts that such goods account for less than 1 per cent of its sales, that all goods are clearly marked by country of origin, allowing customers to choose, and that the company complies with all government trade laws. But the real point for BDS is that the Susman family, which controls Woolworths, is related both by marriage and commercially to Marks and Spencer in the UK — a company which has always strongly sympathised with the Zionist cause. BDS has aggressively picketed Woolworths stores, hassling customers until prevented by court order.

The BDS campaign then switched its focus to Jewish shops and moved the action to university campuses — where the SACP, via its Young Communist League, is influential. Some may see this, of course, as merely a sub-species of the more general anti-white racism which is now prevalent in South Africa. Predictably enough, as the failure of the ANC government becomes more palpable in one area after another, the rage of the younger generation — deprived of jobs and of hope — grows. This is altogether different from anything they were promised by Mandela. In fact, opinion polls in the past have often shown a distinct layer of black anti-Semitism, the result of the formidable influence of fundamentalist Christian sects (the Jews killed Jesus, etc), but it is doubtful if South Africa’s 70,000 Jews are a sufficiently large group to attract prolonged hostility — unless it is very deliberately stirred and stoked.

But stoked it has been since the leader of the SACP, Blade Nzimande, was denied a visa to visit Palestine in April by the Israeli government. Israel justified the denial by saying that Nzimande had repeatedly demanded the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador from South Africa and that he had actively supported the severance of relations between the University of Johannesburg and BGU. Nzimande has a considerable sense of self-importance and he returned home with a burning determination to hit back.

The immediate result was a meeting of the ANC, Cosatu (the Congress of South African Trade Unions), the SACP and BDS (with the SACP in a majority in at least three of these groupings) which called for the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador, a ban on travel to Israel by any public employee, an end to automatic visas for Israeli visitors and all such visitors to be interrogated as to their links with the Israeli Defence Force, the prosecution of any South African Jews who serve in the IDF, and the expropriation of any Israeli investments in South African agriculture. This would be tantamount not only to a breach in official relations with Israel but to a ban on Israeli tourists, for almost all of them will have had some connection with the IDF. Given that there has always been an easy flow of people between South Africa and Israel, this would also amount to punishing South African Jews who would like to invite their Israeli cousins to visit them. The events at Wits and DUT have followed this script, with the student leadership signing on to the whole list of demands above.

This represents a new low, even for the SACP. Under Nzimande it has become almost completely rudderless and opportunistic. Having previously advocated the nationalisation of industry, it reversed itself once Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters took up the same call. It has taken a hyper-militant position in defence of every blunder or indiscretion by President Jacob Zuma, even staging demonstrations in favour of his use of state funds on his palatial residence at Nkandla which it attempted to depict as “rural development”. The party’s May Day statement again calls for “the defence of workers’ democracy” — yet it sided against union leader Zwelinzima Vavi’s denunciation of the “predatory elite” and firmly refused Vavi’s procedurally correct call for a special trade union congress to discuss the issue. But in pushing its BDS front organisation to target quite openly the local Jewish community, it has plumbed new depths.

The SACP’s current antics would have been anathema to the party’s previous generation, whose leadership was largely Jewish, just as today’s ANC would be an object of shame for the likes of Albert Luthuli or Mandela. Why is the SACP behaving in this disgraceful way ? The short answer is political desperation. The party has depended on Cosatu for its funding and even for its premises. Now, not only has the party failed to pay its rent but Cosatu has split, is much weaker — and can less afford the luxury of propping up the SACP. Worse still, Malema has walked off with most of the party’s natural constituency. The result is curious. Instead of rotting like a fish from the head down, the party has crumbled from the bottom up and is now left only with its top layer of leaders (including many MPs and government ministers). Many of these leaders have become fully-fledged members of the predatory elite and, whatever they may say, their behaviour suggests that their relationship to socialist values is tenuous at best. It is a strange way of dying. But death comes to us all. Disgrace need not.

The post A Grim Prospect For South Africa’s Jews appeared first on Standpoint.

During the election campaign we have had politicians doing God and churchmen doing politics, but have heard very little on the most important factor in all of this: the religious voters. As I write, hustings are taking place in churches, chapels and mosques across the country but you will hear little about it. Few focus groups will involve the faithful; few polls will exclusively target believers. The lack of reference to, or analysis of, the religious vote in the UK reflects the overwhelmingly secular mindset of most politicians, pollsters and their associates in think-tanks and across the media. Ethnicity is the preferred distinguishing mark, with “BMEs” (black and minority ethnic) the latest acronym favoured by the number crunchers and policy wonks in Whitehall. But the lumping together of ethnic minorities, and Christians for that matter, is even more problematic at election time. Can we really say that today’s ethnic minorities have a shared experience, let alone shared values, which collectively determine their partisan affiliation? Do Christians who worship under the same cross tick the same box in the polling booth?

The tendency to slice British society along ethnic lines is in fact a hangover from Britain’s outdated model of multiculturalism forged in the 1970s, which was secular in its construction and hinged on what respected sociologist Tariq Modood has called  a “white/black dualism”, one that ignored the fact that most minorities (particularly Muslims, who are an ethnically diverse group united by faith) classify themselves by their religion rather than their race. A connection between faith and party is much more illuminating than any lazy link between race and party. Among Britain’s non-Christian communities for example, there is a clear correlation between Muslim voters who tend to vote Labour, Jewish voters, once Liberal, then Labour, and now overwhelmingly Tory, and Buddhists, who side with the Liberal Democrats. Hindus and Sikhs are much more evenly split between the two main parties.

Data analysis on the religious vote over the last 40 years collated by the Christian think-tank Theos also reveals that despite growing secularisation there is still a clear political demarcation between Christian denominations and political affiliation. Unlike those on the European continent, the post-war period did not see the emergence of a singular Christian party in the UK but the continuation of historic religious-political bonds that had governed politics since the 19th century. Anglicans are still overwhelmingly Tory voters and twice as likely to vote Conservative as Catholics, who remain predominantly Labour supporters regardless of how devout they are. It perhaps does not need saying that there exists a clear political divide between churchgoers and their church leaders: “Guardian readers preaching to Telegraph readers” was how one Anglican vicar put it in the 1980s, a phrase that still rings true today in most parishes. (Incidentally, the Catholic Church often has the opposite tension.) For all their protestations, church leaders have failed to convert their congregations politically.

Britain’s Nonconformists — a shrunken army since their glory days as the spiritual force behind the 19th-century Liberal party — are now more evenly spread across all parties. Statistics for the 2010 general election, for example, revealed that while the majority of Baptists and Methodists voted Conservative, United Reform Church members favoured the Liberal Democrats, and Free Presbyterians voted Labour.

Those with no religion are less likely to vote Conservative and, significantly, are more likely to be swayed by the less established parties. The irreligious, who constitute an ever-increasing proportion of voters, are not bound by old affiliations or allegiances. Could it be that the recent rise of alternative parties in the British electoral system can partly be explained by the growing secularisation of the electorate? If this is true, the days of the two-party system may well be over.

But we must be careful not to get too carried away with such polls. Faith has always been inherently linked to class in Britain while gender, geography and age are equally important factors in determining voter allegiance. Jews in Salford, for example, are more likely to vote Labour than their London counterparts, partly because of their comparatively lower economic status. Anglican and Catholic women are both more likely to be Conservative than their male counterparts, adding substance to the oft-repeated claim that women tend to be more right-wing then men.

If religious-political affiliations are clearly evident, then what impact, if any, will the religious vote have on the 2015 election? While it will certainly not determine the outcome, its influence will be felt in three important ways. First, the alienation of Christians (chiefly Anglicans) from David Cameron’s Conservative party. Second, the switch of Scottish Catholic Labour voters to the SNP. Third, the changing nature of the British Muslim electorate.

When Parliament passed the gay marriage act, it could be said that the battle for sexuality minorities fought since the 1960s was over. In Britain, however, issues of sexuality or morality had never been partisan matters and for this reason tended not to have a prominent place during elections. In the 1960s, when Parliament decriminalised homosexuality, legalised abortion and liberalised divorce laws, it did so through a series of private members’ bills rather than manifesto pledges while MPs voted with their conscience, free from the discipline of the party whip.

The 1980s saw a new wave of social conservatism as Margaret Thatcher sought to enshrine Judaeo-Christian family values within the fiscal, legal and social fabric of the country. One result of this was Section 28 of the 1988 Local Government Act, which banned the promotion of homosexuality in schools. Section 28 pushed some key Thatcherite buttons — the rights of parents and supposed mismanagement of public funds — while it also conveniently discredited Labour-led local councils in the run-up to the 1987 election. 

In March that year, Labour’s press secretary Patricia Hewitt wrote privately to Frank Dobson MP confirming that the “gays and lesbians issue is costing us dear amongst the pensioners”. At that time gay rights was more problematic for the Left than the Right, exposing the differing priorities of old working-class voters and the new liberal Left. It was for this reason that the Labour leadership initially dithered over whether to support or condemn the clause and it was only after mounting internal pressure that Neil Kinnock came out against it. Importantly, the 1987 election would be the last time that homosexuality would be used as a political pawn by the mainstream parties.

There is little doubt that David Cameron’s promotion of legislation permitting gay marriage in 2014 was part of his attempt to “detoxify” the Tory brand and wipe the slate clean of the murky legacy of Section 28. And there are signs that he is already reaping the rewards. A recent poll by Pink News showed that the Conservatives are now on equal ranking with Labour among LGBT voters; for the Conservatives this represents a five per cent poll rise since 2010. But, just as Kinnock struggled to keep his core working-class voters onside over Section 28, so Cameron has found that in supporting gay marriage he has alienated loyal Anglican Tory voters. These are voters who would not classify themselves as homophobic but do not believe that a homosexual union should be given marriage status and resent even more a feeling that they are unable to voice their objections. In a recent ComRes poll commissioned by Premier Christian Radio, more than a third of respondents claimed that gay marriage had put them off voting Conservative.

This disaffection with the moral direction of the Conservative party is something that UKIP’s Nigel Farage has seized upon in a quest to broaden his party’s appeal beyond Euroscepticism. In UKIP, the old Thatcherite cries of moral and national degeneration are finding their voice once more. Ex-Tory voters are attracted to UKIP because of the party’s promotion of a nostalgic view of England, of which social conservatism and faith are a key element. UKIP’s wooing of Christian voters has in truth been half-hearted, not least because its leadership tends to take a libertarian view of personal morality and, like Margaret Thatcher, considers such issues as a diversion from the main cause. There is, however, a small but dedicated band of what are known as “UKIP Christian Soldiers”, although they are said to number only 1,000, and are no match for the Conservative Christian Fellowship, which works hard to ensure that the party keeps in touch with the grass roots in the pews. On gay marriage, Cameron took a political gamble; time will tell whether his decision to trade a band of hitherto loyal Christian Tory voters for socially liberal and secular floating voters will pay off.

On the surface, the politics of Scotland appear to represent a unique case, although the rise of the SNP too reflects the overall UK downward trend in old denominational identities. The recent surge of the SNP is one that can in part be explained by religion. Sectarianism, which for a long time cast a dark shadow over Scottish society and dominated its politics, has declined rapidly over the last 20 years, creating a void which has been replaced with a secular nationalism. Depending on how you see it, the Scots have either embraced national victimhood or national self-determination as their new religion, which in many respects is as unedifying and hysterical as the sectarianism of yesteryear. For a long time, the Tories and Labour in Scotland lazily fed off the sectarian divide within Scottish society while it has been the SNP which has capitalised on its decline.

This is a remarkable turnaround for the SNP, once dubbed the “Tartan Tories”, who were typified by their romantic, parochial and essentially conservative ideology and whose growth had long been stunted because of their inability to win over Catholic voters. The 1970s may have seen a limited surge in the SNP but not among Catholics. In the words of John Curtice, Professor of Politics at Strathclyde University, “At that point the concern among Catholics was that an independent Scotland might become a replica of Ulster.”

In the 1990s and 2000s, as social and economic barriers for Scottish Catholics disappeared and the SNP morphed into a left-of-centre party seemingly more in tune with traditional Scottish Labour voters than the Labour party itself, so the SNP started to make serious gains among the Catholic working-class electorate. Catholics began to see Scottish nationalism as something which embraced rather than excluded them. The narrative of the SNP championing the underdog citizen and the underdog nation is one to which all Scots, regardless of religious affiliation, can subscribe.

Equally important has been the declining importance of the Church of Scotland in both Scottish religious and political life. As a Calvinist national organisation the Church of Scotland is ecclesiastically unique, but before devolution it too held a specific duty as the seat of Scottish nationalism. The Kirk’s debates were relayed live on BBC Scotland, as moderators and elders were naturally assumed to be articulating the concerns and views of the Scottish nation. Unlike the Church of England, no one questioned whether it should be meddling in politics.

It is partly for this reason that Mrs Thatcher’s speech to the General Assembly in 1988 (in which she proceeded to lecture the Kirk on the true meaning of Christianity) proved so explosive. It was a complete affront to Scottish (religious) national identity. But, paradoxically, while the speech helped further alienate an already anti-Thatcherite Scotland from the Conservatives, it also signalled the last days of the Kirk at the centre of Scottish national life. Within ten years its role would be replaced by the Holyrood parliament while it witnessed a near-collapse in its membership. Part of the reason the SNP are such a confident and pervasive political force is that their support lies not in an ageing, devout population but in a younger, less religious electorate. While its strength can be attributed to secularisation, its rise cannot be understood without reference to the decline of old religious-political bonds.

Politics in Scotland are not complicated by a multi-faith electorate, but south of the border they certainly are. But although Jews, Hindus and Buddhists may form only a tiny fraction of the electorate, but the opposite is true of the British Muslim community, which currently makes up a third of BMEs and 4.8 per cent of the population. Between 2001 and 2011, the number of Muslims in England and Wales rose from 1.55 to 2.77 million. This naturally translates into electoral power: 26 parliamentary constituencies are now 20 per cent Muslim, while YouElect has estimated that Muslim votes have the potential to influence the result in 32 constituencies.

The legacy of the War on Terror, however, has meant that Muslim affiliation to the Labour party is no longer guaranteed. In both 2005 and 2010 a proportion fled to the Liberal Democrats; in 2015, many are undecided voters.

The main issue when speaking of the “Muslim vote” is not who they will vote for, but whether they will vote at all. Muslims in Britain are more disinclined to vote than any other minority group (an apathy which predates the War on Terror). In 2010, just 47 per cent of Muslims voted, compared with 65 per cent of the general population. If the Islamic community feels disenfranchised and victimised, then voting must be encouraged as a way of overcoming this.

More pointedly, the Muslim electorate is changing. It is now inaccurate to depict Muslims as low-skilled, low-paid and marginalised archetypal Labour voters: 43 per cent of Muslims own their own property, 47 per cent are born in the UK and only 6 per cent have English language issues. The number of those Muslims with no qualifications dropped from 39 per cent to 26 per cent between 2001 and 2011. With the emergence of a more sophisticated, heterogeneous Muslim electorate, especially one that is overwhelmingly young in composition, its allegiance to Labour cannot be taken for granted. Like the Hispanic vote in America, the Muslim vote in the UK is numerically significant and will in the long term have an increasing influence on the outcome of elections.

Is there evidence that some are pushing a distinct (and indeed negative) Muslim political agenda? In 2010, the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPAC) claimed to have successfully galvanised the Muslim vote to unseat three MPs whom they considered “pro-war Zionists” and hostile to Islam. There was in fact little evidence that the results were genuinely down to MPAC’s actions. In March this year, the Muslim Council of Britain issued a document called Fairness not Favours, spelling out the issues for Muslims at election time. Unlike the pastoral letter from the Church of England’s House of Bishops, the statement received little coverage in the mainstream press. But the tone of the MCB was remarkably similar to the Anglican bishops in advocating policies which furthered the common good, while also highlighting specific Muslim concerns such as rising Islamophobia and Britain’s policy on Palestine, its tone mirrored that of the Anglican pastoral letter in. Statistical evidence regularly points to the fact that Muslim voters are not exceptional in their voting concerns, with education, hospitals, jobs and tax foremost in voters’ minds.

Bracketing Muslims under the umbrella term “ethnic minorities” predetermined to vote Labour is problematic. So too is characterising the Islamic community as a homogenous group who thrive on victimhood and are hostile to the British political system. British Muslims need to find their electoral voice and the British political system needs to wake up and listen.

If politicians make claim to their faith, Christian or other, they do so not out of a wish to appeal to devout voters but because the majority of the British electorate take some comfort in knowing that their leaders have some (but not too much) spiritual guidance.

But unlike many Americans, the British do not vote with their Bible in one hand and their ballot paper in the other. Faith may not determine the election result, yet it is certain that changes in the nation’s religious make-up are having a knock-on effect on the political landscape of Britain. Old allegiances are dying, new allegiances are being forged. The religious vote still matters — but for how much longer?
 

The post Is There Such A Thing As A Religious Vote In The UK? appeared first on Standpoint.

While he plays no significant role in the earliest Christian documents, the Epistles of St Paul, by the time the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles came to record the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the founding of the Church, Judas was already the villain of the piece. From an early stage his act of betrayal was conflated with the rejection of the Christian Messiah by the “perfidious” Jews — a toxic cocktail that battened onto pre-existing Roman prejudice against their most rebellious subjects to produce the anti-Judaism that has disfigured the history of Christianity and ultimately fed into modern anti-Semitism.

This “troubling history of the renegade apostle” is the subject of Peter Stanford’s magnificent Judas (Hodder & Stoughton, £20). This book does several things at once: it is a study in biography, intellectual history and iconography; a personal pilgrimage to the places where the tragedy of Judas took place and traces of his life remain; and a meditation on his meaning for our time. But it does all these things with a generosity of spirit that lends nobility to what could otherwise be a tale of unremitting woe for Jews and shame for Christians. Judas was the hinge on which the fates of both faiths turned. His demonisation was the catalyst that transformed “the greatest story ever told” into the occasion for pogroms, forcing the people to whom Jesus and Judas alike belonged to dread the approach of Eastertide.

That the enduring power of Judas to inspire has been underestimated, Stanford shows by his assiduous research, much of it done on foot in such desolate sites as Hakeldema, the “Field of Blood” where the despairing disciple is supposed to have hanged himself. If Judas had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent him. Indeed, one of the most original works on Judas, by Hyam Maccoby, actually suggests that he did not exist but was invented by the early Church as a scapegoat. Stanford does not agree: some details in the gospel accounts seem unlikely to have been made up and Paul already refers to Jesus being “handed over” (he does not say by whom) to the authorities. This passage is actually the etymological origin of “traitor” (from the latin tradire).

What makes Judas a believable and even sympathetic character is his remorse, including the return of the 30 pieces of silver, followed by his suicide. (We may safely discount the alternative version of his death given in Acts, where he is said to spontaneously burst open, entrails and all.) Our natural horror of suicide has in the past been intensified by odium theologicum directed against the sin of despair. Today, however, the reaction of most people to those who kill themselves is more likely to be compassion, especially if the suicide is motivated by remorse and atonement. Stanford even suggests that Judas could become “the patron saint of those who lose a loved one to suicide”. As against this bold proposal, he quotes Benedict XVI declaring that Judas “shows us the wrong type of remorse . . . the type that is destructive and in no way authentic”, but even the Pope Emeritus concedes that by his admission — “I have sinned” — before handing back the blood money, Judas revealed that “everything pure and great that he had received from Jesus remained inscribed on his soul — he could not forget it.”

Others have cast doubt on Dante’s lurid depiction of Judas in the Inferno, frozen for all eternity in Satan’s maw, along with his fellow traitors Brutus and Cassius. In fact, Hell may be empty, for even Judas — who did repent — is not beyond redemption.

There is something about the Judas story, leaving aside issues of historical accuracy, that raises doubts about his role as the embodiment of evil. Jesus’s prophecy at the Last Supper about his betrayer (“better for that man if he had never been born”) sits oddly alongside his identification of Judas by handing him bread dipped in oil, and contrasts sharply with his remark later in the meal, quoted by John, which suggests complicity (“What you are going to do, do quickly”) and his response, reported by Matthew, to the notorious “Judas kiss”: “My friend, do what you are here for.”

If Jesus knew what Judas was doing, was his disciple really a traitor? If God needed Judas to do what he did, even if (as John tells us) “the Devil entered into him”, how much responsibility does he deserve to bear? And how, if He allows Judas to be damned as collateral damage, so enabling the rest of humanity to be redeemed by the risen Christ, do we justify the ways of God to men?

These are intractable questions. But Judas, like the Jewish people with whom his name has so often been identified, deserves a better answer — a theodicy, indeed — than he has hitherto received. Dante damned Judas and Brutus equally as traitors, but only Judas can plead that he had no choice. Thomas à Kempis’s adage “man proposes, but God disposes” applies to no one more poignantly than Judas.

The post Underrated: Judas Iscariot appeared first on Standpoint.