Scaremongers
Gideon Falter and his Campaign Against Antisemitism are in the news this week for a publicity stunt that went wrong. They also claim two thirds of Britain’s Jews are considering leaving the country. The statistics tell a different story …
This Saturday Gideon Falter will be walking in central London during the latest demonstration calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
The chief executive of the Campaign Against Antisemitism has said these demonstrations mean central London has become a “police-enforced Jew-free zone”.
Falter says that at the previous march on April 13 a police officer had told him he was “openly Jewish” and that he would be arrested if he didn’t leave the scene.
A video of the exchange was later challenged by a Sky News report which showed that the police officer intervened after Falter entered the march.
Falter’s claims that London is a Jew-free zone during pro-Palestinian demonstrations is literally incredible — hundreds if not thousands of self-identifying Jews, both pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel, were present either on the marches or on the fringes.
As of this evening, the CAA had not answered two important questions:
— why did it take six days before the video was released?
— were the men who accompanied Falter hired bodyguards?
The delay in releasing the video suggests that the CAA had difficulty in editing its original footage to produce the 55-second clip that gave the “right” impression.
Why did Falter need protection — was there a plan for him to provoke violence with marchers and then use the bodyguards to escalate the fracas?
One of these bodyguards has been identified as Vicentiu Chiculita, a contract manager for the SQR security group, founded by two former officers of the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad.
“Faltergate” continues to unravel — good summaries of the story so far can be found here, here and here.
Falter’s claims about London being a “Jew-free” zone form part of a long-standing campaign to persuade British public opinion that Jews are considering leaving because of antisemitism.
Defending Israel has always been a key component of the CAA’s mission. It was formed in August 2014 partly as result of the British media’s alleged misreporting of Israel’s assault on Gaza.
Gideon Falter told the Jewish News:
… the obsession of the media, the fastidious disregard for the facts and the insistence on holding Israel to exceptional, impossible standards, helped to feed the oldest hatred. If you wanted to follow the news in Israel, it was almost impossible to do so by reading the British press; there were too many missing facts.
(Amnesty International estimated that more than 2,000, including some 500 children, were killed during Israel’s “Protective Edge” operation in July 2014.
These figures are dwarfed by the current catastrophe in Gaza with Israel killing more than 30,000 Palestinians — including a substantial number of innocent women and children.)
A year after its formation, the CAA settled on one of its main themes — that one in four British Jews have “considered leaving the country in the past two years” as a result of antisemitism.
By 2017 the organisation said the figure had risen to a third.
This claim came under fire from the Jewish Leadership Council. The JLC said the research was unrepresentative of UK Jewish opinion and expressed fears that the statistical analysis amounted to “scaremongering”.
Undeterred, the CAA continues to insist these figures hold good. Its website currently states that 42 per cent of “British Jews considered leaving Britain in the past two years, 85 per cent of them due to antisemitism in politics”.
The latter comment is mainly a reference to the CAA’s allegation that Labour under Jeremy Corbyn was institutionally antisemitic.
What’s the reality?
Every year, Israel produces statistics about immigration from the four countries with large Jewish populations: USA (6.3m), France (c440k) Canada (400k) and Britain (300k).
The figures show that the number of British Jews moving to Israel is low and has remained at virtually the same level throughout the last decade.
These figures also throw light on what was happening in the period Jeremy Corbyn was Labour leader. The CAA was in the vanguard of those calling him an antisemite.
In the four full years of Corbyn’s leadership the average number of Jews emigrating to Israel each year was 509.
The figure for the previous four years was slightly higher at 511 and the figure for the three years since is much greater: 547.
Jews could be emigrating to other countries, of course, but there are no available statistics. There is no evidence that British Jews are moving to countries like France or North America.
One reason why Jews are not leaving Britain is safety.
In France, where four Jews were murdered in the attack on a Paris supermarket in 2015, emigration to Israel is substantial — more than 2,700 people move to Israel each year.
The USA is also more dangerous than Britain, as shown by the 2018 attack on Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in which 11 Jews perished.
And Israel, home to 7.2m Jews, is currently the most dangerous country on earth for Jews.
No Jew has been killed in an antisemitic attack in Britain in either the 20th or the 21st century. Although there are serious assaults, the number is mercifully low.
Every year, the Community Security Trust’s produces an annual Antisemitic Incidents Report. In 2023 it noted:
… none of these incidents was severe enough to be classed as Extreme Violence, compared to one incident in 2022.
(By contrast, anti-Muslim hatred is more lethal.
In 2015 an 81 year old grandfather, Mushin Ahmed, was murdered in Rotherham.
Makram Ali died in the 2017 attack near the Finsbury Park mosque in London.)
Britain’s Jews enjoy a high level of state protection. Every year the UK makes a grant of more than £18m to the Community Security Trust (CST) to help provide security at Britain’s Jewish schools and synagogues.
In addition, several high profile Jewish bodies are given charitable status and given dispensation to keep the identity of their trustees secret — including the CST and the Campaign Against Antisemitism.
The CAA does not disclose the source of its funding. Although its trustees are not identified, it does have “honorary patrons,” some of whom have been made public.
These have included, at various times, Labour MPs Margaret Hodge and Ian Austin, the Conservative MPs Sir Eric Pickles and Bob Blackman, Richard Kemp, former head of the British Army in Afghanistan, Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, and the libel lawyer Mark Lewis.
There has been criticism of some of these “honorary patrons”.
In December, in the middle of Israel’s bloody invasion of Gaza, Richard Kemp was in Jerusalem — alongside right wing author Douglas Murray — repeating his mantra that Israel’s IDF is the world’s “most moral army”.
When the CAA accused Keir Starmer of using the Holocaust memorial in Berlin as a prop for a political ad in July 2022, it was a step too far for former honorary patron Margaret Hodge.
She was, she tweeted, “fed up with the CAA using antisemitism as a front to attack Labour”.
The CAA has also been in trouble with the Charity Commission, one of Britain’s most timid watchdogs.
In October 2018 the regulator ordered the CAA to change the wording of a petition saying that Jeremy Corbyn was an antisemite and “must go”. The commission allowed the CAA to brand Corbyn an antisemite but insisted the charity to change the words “must go” to Labour “must act”.
A spokesperson said:
… there are rules that charities must follow. One of the most important of these rules is that charities must stress their independence from party politics and demonstrate party political balance.
In January last year the Charity Commission opened another compliance case against the organisation. A spokesperson said “We can confirm that the Commission is assessing concerns raised with us about the Campaign Against Antisemitism”.
Ends
CORRECTION
This article was amended on 26 April 2024 to correct the paragraph about Operation Protective Edge. This originally said 1,200 Palestinians were killed and more than 300 children over a 22 day period. In fact, the casualty figures were higher and the operation lasted seven weeks.
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