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→ 26 December 2019
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Boris Johnson Hanukkah message: ‘Every decent person’ will help fight anti-Semitism | JNS

Boris Johnson, PM of the UK

“Britain would not be Britain without its Jewish community. And we will stand with you and celebrate with you,” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said in his address.

U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson delivered a Hanukkah message amid the rise in anti-Semitism, just weeks after his party won an election against the Labour Party and its leader Jeremy Corbyn, who has been accused of anti-Semitism.

“I know that recent years have not been easy ones for British Jews,” said Johnson in a video almost two minutes long. “In the media, on the streets and particularly online, anti-Semites have, in alarming numbers, been emboldened to crawl out from under their rocks and begin, once again, to spread their brand of noxious hatred far and wide.”

“Today, as Britain’s Jews seek to drive back the darkness of resurgent anti-Semitism, you have every decent person in this country fighting by your side,” he added. “Because Britain would not be Britain without its Jewish community. And we will stand with you and celebrate with you—at Hanukkah, and all year round.”

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→ 18 December 2019
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The British working class saves Britain – and its Jews | Melanie Phillips

Melanie Phillips

The relief was overwhelming. When the exit poll on Thursday evening correctly predicted a large majority for Boris Johnson’s Conservative party, British Jews allowed themselves to breathe again. Overcome by the sense of deliverance from a great evil, some wept.

Immediately before the election, both Labour and Conservative party hierarchies had been seized by the belief that Britain was heading for a hung parliament and a coalition led by Labour’s hard-left leader Jeremy Corbyn. Many British Jews were gripped by a deep sense of dread and panic.

In the event, Labour was pulverised and the Conservatives won by a majority of 80 MPs, the biggest since Margaret Thatcher’s third victory in 1987. 

The stakes in this election were enormous, not just for Britain but for the world. Labour is led by the most far-left leadership in its history, supporting terrorists abroad and incubating virulent antisemitism at home. If elected it would have wrecked Britain’s economy, attacked the State of Israel and posed a mortal threat to the security of Britain, its Jewish community and the west.

It was defeated by a seismic shift which may just have redrawn the British political landscape for ever.

What happened was something most people had believed was unthinkable. As I observed on my own blog in September, however, a tectonic shift was under way in the Labour heartlands.

The white working class, those blue-collar workers who had been tribal Labour supporters for generations, voted en masse for the Conservatives for the first time ever.

Boris Johnson effectively smashed the “red wall”, the swathes of hitherto rock-solid Labour-held seats in the north of England and the Midlands which all turned blue overnight.

Astoundingly, economically shattered communities with very high levels of poverty and unemployment, even former mining towns whose inhabitants had voted Labour virtually from the time the party was invented, all voted on Thursday for an Eton-educated, plummy-voiced toff in preference to the leader of the Labour party.

Why? Because the British working-class is deeply, passionately patriotic and attached to democracy. They are the very best of Britain. Time and again they have saved the country in its wars against tyranny by putting their lives on the line to defend what it stands for: their historic culture, institutions and values.

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→ 17 December 2019
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Boris Johnson to pass law banning anti-Israel boycott | The Independent

Boris Johnson, PM of the UK

Boris Johnson will attempt to pass a law banning local councils from joining the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel, the UK’s special envoy for post-Holocaust issues has announced.

Eric Pickles said the movement was “antisemitic and should be treated as such” during a speech at the International Institute for Strategic Dialogue’s conference in Jerusalem on Sunday.

He said the new law would not allow public bodies to work with those who boycott, divest from or sanction Israel, the Jerusalem Post reported.

It comes after Donald Trump, the US president, signed an executive order effectively definition Judaism as a nationality, not just a religion – in a move which could suppress the BDS movement.

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→ 17 December 2019
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Corbynism Lost, But its Cultists Are Still Blaming the Jews [incl. Norman Finkelstein] | Middle East Forum

UK Labour (soon to be former) leader Jeremy Corbyn

The dogwhistle attacks on Jews for Labour’s historic defeat has already begun. They will only get louder

One thing I have learnt this election: British people are a lot more anti-Semitic than I thought.

It’s been a traumatic learning curve for someone who grew up here and for whom anti-Semitism had never intruded into daily life – or not outside the context of being a journalist reporting on Israel-Palestine. That milieu meant familiarity with the kind of far-left extremists who appropriated the Labour party in 2015, when Jeremy Corbyn became leader.

I knew them well from reporting on parliamentary meetings and the usual round of academic and activist lectures: box-ticking radicals for whom the Palestinian struggle was more an ideological cipher than a real and messy conflict.

The lunatics took over the asylum and unleashed an epidemic: on social media, at least, where most of this filth was spread and amplified.

There’s something peculiarly freeing about social media’s immediacy and anonymity. For ordinary, mild-mannered Brits, it offers the chance to give full rein to instincts and prejudices usually kept safely restrained and repressed. And the engine of accusations against “enemy centrists” and Jews was constantly fuelled by agitprop from a wild pro-Corbyn disinformation sphere.

If you don’t support Labour, you hate the NHS. If you oppose Corbyn, you hate disabled people. If you’re Jewish as well, then you’re part of an organised smear campaign to malign Corbyn, the world’s bravest campaigner for Palestinian rights. And probably rich and greedy, too.

All the greats were rolled out to show the Jews that other Jews were telling them they were wrong, they were victims of false consciousness, right-wing shills and undeclared agents of the Israeli state – Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein and Haaretz’s own Gideon Levy, who in his bitter dotage has squandered the legitimacy he once had.

The Jewish conspiracy was alive and well and living in the mind of otherwise woke and well-meaning progressives.

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→ 12 December 2019
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With election day looming, Jews in Britain are at a loss on how to vote amid rising anti-Semitism | Washington Post

Corbyn v Johnson

Britain’s Jewish community is on edge before a pivotal vote. Thursday’s general election is a bitter contest over two radically different visions of the country, but many say Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party has normalized anti-Semitism in public debate to an unprecedented degree.

For months, the campaign has featured a standoff between Corbyn and Prime Minister Boris Johnson, of the Conservative Party, over Brexit and the aftermath of austerity politics. But constant allegations of anti-Semitism have dogged the Labour Party, which in the past has found support from many in the tiny Jewish community, which accounts for no more than 0.5 percent of the total population but finds itself in the center of the public eye.

Forty-seven percent of British Jews say they will consider leaving the country if Corbyn is elected prime minister, according to a poll conducted by the Jewish Chronicle, Britain’s most influential Jewish newspaper. According to a separate poll, 86 percent of British Jews view Corbyn as anti-Semitic.

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→ 8 December 2019
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SEVENTY Labour whistleblowers condemn Jeremy Corbyn over Labour’s anti-Semitism crisis as 53-page report claims ‘officials objected to Jewish people joining the party and asked to inspect their HOMES’ | Daily Mail

UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) is currently investigating Labour

It is probing the way in which the party has handled allegations of anti-Semitism

The Jewish Labour Movement has now handed the EHRC its formal submission

Document contains sworn statements from 70 serving and ex-Labour officials

The submission concludes Labour is ‘no longer a safe space for Jewish people’

Seventy serving and former Labour officials have condemned Jeremy Corbyn’s handling of the party’s anti-Semitism crisis in a bombshell submission to the UK’s equalities watchdog.

The Labour Party is under formal investigation by the Equality and Human Rights Commission over its handling of allegations of anti-Semitism.

The 70 current and ex-staff have given sworn statements which form part of the Jewish Labour Movement’s submission to the EHRC.

The document handed over by the JLM represents a major blow to Mr Corbyn’s general election campaign as it contains numerous accusations about him as well as the Labour Party more broadly.

It includes a claim that some prospective Jewish Labour members in one constituency were subjected to ‘home visits’ before they were allowed to join.

The JLM submission argues: ‘The Labour Party is no longer a safe space for Jewish people or for those who stand up against anti-Semitism.

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→ 8 December 2019
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There is a ‘powerful case’ that Jeremy Corbyn could be anti-Semitic, says former most senior civil judge | The Telegraph

Lord Dyson

There is a “powerful case” that Jeremy Corbyn could be anti-Semitic, the country’s former most senior civil judge has said as he revealed that he was “disturbed” by elements within the Labour party.

Lord Dyson, who was Master of the Rolls, the second most senior judicial position in England and Wales, questioned why it took Mr Corbyn “so long” to apologise for the way his party has handled anti-Semitism allegations.

In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, Lord Dyson said it is “deeply concerning” that Jewish MPs have left the Labour party.

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→ 26 May 2019
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As she resigns, British Jews thank Theresa May for being a ‘true friend’ | Times of Israel

Theresa May

British Jews thanked Prime Minister Theresa May for being a “true friend” to their community following her announcement that she is stepping down.

May on Friday announced that she will step down as Conservative leader on June 7 after failing to convince lawmakers to support her Brexit deal.

Board of Deputies of British Jews President Marie van der Zyl wrote in a statement: “We sincerely thank Theresa May for being a true friend to the Jewish community during her time in office.”

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→ 29 April 2019
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An Expert on Anti-Semitism Fears for the Future in Britain | Tablet Mag

Dr David Hirsh

As a young boy growing up in the affluent North London suburb of Highgate, the writer and academic David Hirsh was always dimly aware that something was different.  An uneasy family history lay behind his pleasant existence. Behind the joy there was trauma. He could sense it. Now, over forty years later, he worries that for young Jewish children, the type of idyllic childhood he enjoyed may one day be impossible.

Hirsh is one of the UK’s leading Jewish intellectuals and he is speaking out on the growing problem of anti-Semitism in this country. Above all, he fighting a strain of Western history’s oldest hatred coming from the unlikeliest of sources. Britain’s Labour Party, once the political home of much of the country’s Jewish population, is now led by the far-left, anti-Semite Jeremy Corbyn, and an inner circle dominated by extremists.

And, Hirsh, a true and lifelong a man of the left, is very, very worried.

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→ 8 April 2019
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Labour’s hate files expose Jeremy Corbyn’s anti‑semite army | Sunday Times

UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn

The Labour Party has failed to take disciplinary action against hundreds of members accused of anti-semitism under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, according to internal documents leaked to The Sunday Times.

A hard drive of emails and a confidential database last updated on March 8 reveal how the party’s system for dealing with such complaints is bedevilled by delays, inaction and interference from the leader’s office. They reveal members investigated for posting such online comments as “Heil Hitler”, “F*** the Jews” and “Jews are the problem” have not been expelled, even though the party received the complaints a year ago.

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