So where were the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council when the right launched its vicious and ugly anti-Semitic campaign against Ed Miliband, then Labour leader?
If you don’t remember it, or didn’t notice it, that’s because it was never called out. No press statements, no demonstrations outside Parliament or the offices of the Daily Mail, no angry spokespeople saying no Jew could ever vote Conservative again just before an election.
In fact, a leading official of the Board of Deputies went on the radio to try to defend the Daily Mail’s contribution – on behalf of his employer, the Daily Mail.
Yet it was unmistakeable. The subtext to the media campaign against Ed Miliband for failing to eat a bacon sandwich elegantly was just as clear as was the anti-Semitic nature of that picture which Jeremy Corbyn, to his shame, endorsed without looking at properly.
Cirbyn has apologised, rightly. The Daily Mail has never apologised for an article about Ed Miliband’s father which told us, correctly, that Ralph Miliband was an immigrant Jew who fled Nazi persecution. A couple of paragraphs further on, in case we have forgotten that he wasn’t really English, we read about “the immigrant boy whose first act in Britain was to discard his name, Adolphe, because of its associations with Hitler, and become Ralph”.
It followed Ralph Miliband to Cambridge, where he was no doubt taught by several tutors, but only one of them is mentioned: the Jewish Harold Laski, “whom some Tories considered to be a dangerous Marxist revolutionary . . . One is entitled to wonder whether Ralph Miliband’s Marxism was actually fuelled by a giant-sized social chip on his shoulder as he lived in his adoptive country.” What exactly is the purpose of the last seven words of that sentence?
Calling Ed Miliband “weird” was another code, and the argument that we should have had David Miliband, not Ed, because he looked and sounded less weird, was a coded way of saying that he looked and sounded less Jewish.
Yet the only notice anyone from the Board of Deputies of British Jews seems to have taken was when one of its senior officials, Alex Brummer, tried to defend the Ralph Miliband article on the rad
Brummer was, and is, the paper’s economics editor, and he was presumably put up to do the media interviews because, unlike the editor and political editor, he is Jewish, and a Jewish community leader at that.
Anti-Semitism is loathsome, wherever it is found. All I am asking is that the Board of Deputies should seek to hold the right to the same standards to which it seeks to hold the left.
As no less an authority than Deborah Lipstadt, the pre-eminent historian on Holocaust denial, has said, “It has been so convenient for people to beat up on the left, but you can’t ignore what’s coming from the right.”