UNITED KINGDOM 2007

 

The UK recorded its second highest total of antisemitic incidents (547) since monitoring began in 1984. The number of violent antisemitic assaults was the highest on record – 114. The steep rise in antisemitic incidents logged on campus (59) was a result of improved reporting.

 

THE JEWISH COMMUNITY

The Jewish community of the United Kingdom numbers about 350,000, out of a total population of 58 million. Two-thirds of the community are concentrated in Greater London. Other major Jewish centers are Manchester (30,000), Leeds (10,000) and Glasgow (6,500). The Jewish population has experienced a decline in recent years, due mainly to a low birth rate, intermarriage and emigration.

The Board of Deputies of British Jews (BoD) is the principal representative of British Jewry. Security and defense activity is organized through the Community Security Trust (CST). The Scottish Council of Jewish Communities (SCOJEC) represents Jews in Scotland. Welfare and education are given high communal priority through organizations such as the United Jewish Israel Appeal and Jewish Care. A network of Jewish day schools operates in London and other major cities. There are also a number of tertiary centers for Jewish studies, including the London School of Jewish Studies (formerly Jews College) and Leo Baeck College, as well as the Jewish Studies departments at University College London, Southampton University and the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies at Yarnton, all leading institutions in Europe in this field. The main community papers are the 160 year-old Jewish Chronicle, the Jewish Telegraph published simultaneously in northern cities, and the Jewish News. The Jewish Tribune and Hamodia cater for the growing ultra-Orthodox community. Two Jewish websites are based in the UK: www.totallyjewish.com and www.somethingjewish.co.uk, carrying national and international news.

The Jewish Leadership Council (JLC), formed in 2003, brings together heads of major national Jewish organizations and key communal leaders with the aim of enhancing the long-term effectiveness of communal representation, and to ensure greater consultation by communal organizations and leaders.

The London Jewish Forum was launched at the end of 2006 to represent London's Jews on statutory bodies, including the Greater London Authority.

 

POLITICAL PARTIES AND EXTRA-PARLIAMENTARY GROUPS

Far Right Political Parties

The British National Party (BNP) maintained its position in local politics after the May local elections. The net gain of one seat, after it won nine new council seats and lost eight, was wiped out a few days after the election when Mark Leat, who was elected a BNP councilor in Stoke-on-Trent in 2004, was sacked from the party after accusations that he was not working hard enough. The BNP therefore remained with 49 councilors. The average vote in the 742 borough and district wards where they stood, was 14.7 percent. Despite their failure to make real advances in electoral terms, the BNP has demonstrated that its support is no longer confined to small pockets of northern industrial towns or the southeastern edge of London due, probably, to the fear of Muslims and other non-whites in adjacent constituencies.

The formal launch in February of Solidarity, the BNP trade union organization led by Clive Potter, was delayed after links were shown between some of its members and South African apartheid era white extremists living in exile in Britain. Potter was subsequently replaced by Patrick Harrington, a former National Front leader. A second initiative, Civil Liberty, designed to raise funds in the US while avoiding the legal ban on fundraising for political party purposes, was also the subject of public controversy in February. The BNP-linked Association for British Ex-services Personnel (ABEX), was re-launched during the course of 2007.

As in past years, the highpoint of its annual activity was the two-day Red White and Blue festival in August which attracted several hundred participants. The motions approved at the annual conference in November, on gun crime, secret ballots in elections and reform of tax law, among others, suggested that the party wished to demonstrate that it has moved away from its violent extreme right origins.

Shortly after the May elections, the BNP leader, Nick Griffin, faced a leadership challenge from Chris Jackson, the party’s former northwest organizer. Although the challenge failed, it proved symptomatic of rising concern within the party with its leadership. In December, several senior leaders were sacked by Griffin and others resigned amidst mutual recriminations over financial and other irregularities. During the course of the year the BNP had been the subject of an investigation by the Electoral Commission, a statutory body established to investigate breaches of election law, as well as calls in parliament for a police investigation.

The National Front (NF), led by Terry Blackham, continued its downward spiral (see previous reports). Formerly the largest and most dynamic far right party in the UK, it is now a shadow of its former self. The annual Remembrance Day march attracted no more than 30 participants, and the conference to mark the 40th anniversary of its founding, held in London, was barely more successful.

            Simon Deacon was elected unopposed onto the Markyate parish council in St Albans in the May local elections, but no other candidates were returned. As in past years, the NF demonstrated against Muslims. In June, for example, they held a counter demonstration against a Muslim rally outside 10 Downing Street (the prime minister’s residence).

Mark Cotterill and Michael Johnson, of the tiny England First Party (EFP), who were elected in the 2006 May local elections in Blackburn where the party is based, resigned prior to the 2007 elections. Cotterill, the founder and initial leader of the group was replaced by former BNP activist Steven Smith. Smith is also involved in the British People’s Party, and both it and the EFP campaign for the end of non-European immigration and the repatriation of all migrants. In 2002, Smith received a five year ban from political office when he was sentenced to six months imprisonment for election fraud while acting as the BNP organizer in Burnley in the 2001 elections.

 

Far Right Extra-Parliamentary Groups

The British People’s Party (BPP) led by Eddy Morrison, Kevin Watmough and Sid Williamson, all veteran far right activists, promotes white supremacist ideologies. The first annual congress was held in Leeds in October. Members participated in a picket outside the German embassy in London in August to protest against the imprisonment in Germany of German-born Canadian Ernst Zündel (see Germany). BPP member Frank Walsh was charged, but not subsequently prosecuted, with distributing anti-Jewish leaflets outside the Trades Union Congress conference in August

The Britain First Party (BFP), also known as the November 9th Society (named after Kristallnacht), led by Kevin Quinn, is more overtly neo-Nazi than other far right groups, but holds few activities.

The national revolutionary Third Way (TW) maintained its publishing activity, but little else. During the course of the year it added National Liberation Party to its name, explaining that it better explained its anti-capitalist British nationalist ideology.

 

Militant Islamist and Other Muslim Groups

The convictions and imprisonment of several leaders of the successor groups to al-Muhajiroun reduced their antisemitic output, but members regrouped toward the end of the year under the name of Captive Support. Their published output proved less inflammatory than previously.

The annual al-Quds Day march at the beginning of October through the center of London organised by the Islamic Human Rights Commission was attended, among others, by representatives of the Muslim Association of Britain, Palestine Return Center, Hizb ut-Tahrir, Naturei Karta, and George Galloway MP and Muslim convert Yvonne Ridley (see below). The openly antisemitic calls and literature of past years were absent as a consequence of legislation that criminalizes glorification of terrorism and incitement to racial hatred, and the focus was almost entirely on Palestinian suffering.

Respect – the Unity Coalition, a coalition of far left and militant Islamist activists, led by George Galloway MP, won three seats in the May elections, in Birmingham, Preston and Bolsover, having stood 45 candidates nationally. They also lost a seat in Birmingham. This left them with 20 councilors, over half in the London borough of Tower Hamlets. The coalition’s origins lie in the protests against the Iraq war but it also campaigns against Israel and Zionism. At the end of 2007 it split into two groups: Respect − Renewal, composed of Islamist and some far left elements including Galloway and journalist Yvonne Ridley, and Respect – the Left List, led by John Rees of the Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party.

The Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPAC), a small antisemitic group, continued its online and public activity designed to politicize young Muslims.

 

ANTISEMITIC ACTIVITIES

Violence, Vandalism, Harassment and Threats

Overall, the number of racially or religiously aggravated offenses recorded rose by 11.8 percent, from 37,028 to 41,382 between 2004/5 and 2005/6, according to the annual British Crime Survey commissioned by the Home Office. The number of racially motivated offenses, though not necessarily constituting criminal acts, was substantially higher for 2005/6, at 139,000.

The CST registered 547 incidents in 2007, the second highest after 2006 (594 incidents) since recording began in 1984. The reduction was probably due to the absence of “trigger events” that cause temporary increases. However, the 78 incidents recorded in September, which coincided with the High Holy Days, was the joint fourth highest monthly total on record. Of the 78, 35 took place during the festivals of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, when relatively large numbers of visibly Jewish people walk to and from synagogue.

The proportion of violent antisemitic assaults rose from 13 percent in 2006 to 21 percent in 2007 and was the highest number on record − 114 (112 in 2006), of which one was life threatening. This involved an elderly rabbi in northeast England who was knocked down by a car which mounted the pavement at speed, reversed and tried to run over him again. The assailant was still at large. Not only have physical assaults against Jews risen dramatically in recent years, but they are also more violent. In at least six of the incidents in 2007 the victims required hospitalization.

Incidents of damage and desecration to Jewish property fell by 11 percent, from 70 incidents in 2006 to 62 in 2007. Of these 19 occurred at private homes, 10 involved desecration of synagogues and 6 desecration of Jewish graves. There were 328 incidents of abusive behavior in 2007, a fall of 10 percent from the 365 recorded in 2006. Twenty-four antisemitic threats were recorded, a decline of 11 percent from the 2006 total of 27. Incidents of abusive behavior, including verbal and written antisemitic abuse, dropped by 20 percent to 328 incidents from 365 in 2006.

The distribution of mass produced antisemitic literature declined from 20 in 2006 to 19 in 2007, and was the third year in a row in which a decrease was recorded. Nine of the incidents involved the distribution of antisemitic literature to synagogues.

Almost three-quarters of all incidents reported in 2007 took place in Greater London (247) and Manchester (147), the two largest communities. A disproportionately high number of incidents (27 percent in 2007) continued to take place in Manchester, although only 10 percent of British Jews live there.

A clearer picture of the antisemitism that exists in British higher education venues emerged during the year as a consequence of improved reporting. This showed a 228 percent (59 incidents) rise over 2006 in incidents against Jewish students. Thirty-one took place on campus; 28 off campus. In August, crude antisemitic leaflets claiming that Jews were killing innocent children in Gaza and describing them as “a race of cruel bloodsuckers” and “worthless idlers” were sent to national union of students offices in Scotland and Wales.

A group of Arsenal football club members threatened to sue the club management in November over claims that the team’s supporters regularly chant “Yiddos” at supporters of Tottenham Hotspur during joint fixtures, and that this was a cause of antisemitism. Government and football association funded schemes to combat racism in football have been successful in reducing racist tension in the sport but evidence suggests that antisemitism remains at professional and amateur level matches.

 

Propaganda

The mass retailers Tesco and WH Smith removed antisemitic publications, including The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Henry Ford’s The International Jew, from their website sales lists when these were brought to the stores’ attention. However, the Protocols subsequently reappeared on the WH Smith site.

Allegations that the Saudi government-funded King Fahad school in west London used textbooks that teach pupils to hate Jews and Christians (with canards describing the Jews as “sons of apes” and Christians as “pigs,” for instance) were made by a former teacher at the school in February, and widely publicized in the press and on television. The school confirmed the allegation, but added that it omitted the relevant sections as they worked against its ethos which is to promote tolerance. The head-teacher stated that he had subsequently withdrawn the books after the schools minister instituted an inquiry, but later media allegations suggested that the books continued to be used.

Concern over malign Saudi influences in Britain were further highlighted in TV programs and in a research report, “The Hijacking of British Mosques,” published in October by Policy Exchange, a conservative think tank.

 

Public Opinion Poll

According to a poll conducted by the public opinion agency Populus and published in June, 86 percent of respondents said that they thought that the boycott of Israel proposed by the University and College Union earlier in the year “flies in the face of academic freedom”; only 38 percent, however, stated that it was antisemitic.

 

ATTITUDES TOWARDS THE HOLOCAUST

Holocaust Commemoration and Education

The national Holocaust commemoration event on February 27 was held in Newcastle, focusing on “The Dignity of Difference.” Key speakers were Ruth Kelly, then minister for communities and local government, and Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks. It was attended by 1,250 participants. Over 600 other events, many attracting over 1000 people were organized by municipal authorities throughout the country.

Several prominent speakers chose to highlight the inclusive nature of Holocaust Memorial Day, which also embraces other genocides, and criticized the Muslim Council of Britain for abstaining. They included the prominent Muslim MP for Dewsbury Shahid Malik. It should be noted that later in the year, in December, the Central Working Committee of the Muslim Council of Britain finally voted to participate in Holocaust Memorial Day, although many prominent Muslims have always participated and have organized trips for members of their communities to Auschwitz and Yad Vashem.

Also at the end of the year, the Scottish government announced plans to create a Holocaust museum in Glasgow.

The Holocaust Education Trust, the Jewish community’s lead agency launched a new educational initiative, together with the National Union of Teachers, to coincide with the national event. Distributed in all schools, it describes the story of a 10-year-old German Jewish boy who cared for his mother in Bergen Belsen.

An academic study of the teaching of sensitive subjects in the English school system for the Department for Education and Skills published in March indicated that the Holocaust is well taught. However, the misinterpretation by several newspapers of the report that one high school had removed mandatory Holocaust education from its syllabus because of the perceived likely reaction from Muslim parents, sparked off an international campaign of complaints. These were rebutted by the department, the British consul general in New York, and spokesmen for the Holocaust Education Trust and CST.

 

Holocaust Denial

British Holocaust denier David Irving resumed his self-publicizing activities on his release from prison in Austria. In October, he was invited to address the Oxford Union together with BNP leader Nick Griffin. The union is open to past and present members of the university but is wholly independent of it. A large protest organized by the Union of Jewish Students and others forced the organizers to host the speakers in different halls. At the same time Irving threatened to sue the Jewish Chronicle for calling him a Holocaust denier, a claim which the paper rebutted in a series of feature articles quoting his denial allegations and litigation failures over the years. He also threatened to serve a writ on Professor Deborah Lipstadt during her November public speaking tour in London, but failed to do so.

A speaking engagement in Barcelona in December, in which he allegedly stated that Hitler was unaware of the Holocaust and that only two or three million Jews died, led the Spanish police to submit a report to the prosecutor of the Catalonia High Court (see Spain).

 

War Crimes

According to a statement made by the minister responsible for policing in February, the police war crimes division was continuing to investigate over 1000 former members of the SS known to be living in the UK. Their enquiries revealed that 1450 veterans of the SS Galician Division were resident in Britain in 2003 and that the police had requested assistance from the German and US authorities, although no war crimes had yet been disclosed.

 

RESPONSES TO RACISM AND ANTISEMITISM

Legislation

The delayed Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 came into force in September, and amended the existing Public Order Act 1986. The act created a new offense of intentionally stirring up religious hatred against people on religious grounds and is intended to close a small but important gap in the law. Concerns that it could impede genuine but vigorous debate between or within religions resulted in the threshold for prosecutions being set high, and for a prosecution to succeed it will be necessary to prove that offensive words or actions must be threatening, abusive or insulting and must either be intended to, or are likely to incite hatred. The Jewish community has long been protected by the existing racial incitement provisions in the law.

 

Court Cases

Several right-wing activists and antisemitic individuals were convicted in 2007. In January, Anthony White, a convicted far right activist, was found guilty of distributing extremist literature and sentenced to 21 months imprisonment in Bradford Crown Court. Police seized large quantities of flyers and stickers, as well as DVDs and CDs and material from the hard disk of White’s computer.

In February, Daniel Coleman and Richard Fallows were found guilty of damaging 35 Jewish gravestones at the Derby cemetery in March 2005, but on the judge’s direction the jury acquitted them of racially aggravated damage. Complaints about the outcome formed part of the investigation carried out by the Crown Prosecution Service into its own role in ignoring crime motivated by antisemitism (see below).

Also in February, Andrew Young and Martyn Closs were convicted of spraying swastikas and antisemitic graffiti on the war memorial in Troon Scotland at the beginning of the year.

Edward Crowe was sentenced to fourteen days in prison at Cheltenham magistrates court in August for contempt after he called Judge Shlomo Kreiman a “dirty Jew.” Crowe was in court facing charges of assault, threatening behavior, criminal damage, stealing a car and possessing offensive weapons. After passing sentence, judge Kreiman who has a rabbinic ordination and wears a skull cap, treated Crowe to a lecture on Jewish history.

In September, Christopher John Lyons was sentenced to 12 months in a youth offenders institution suspended for two years after he had attacked an ultra-Orthodox student in Prestwich Manchester with an iron bar causing serious head injuries in June 2006. During the attack, Lyon and two other assailants told their victim that he was going to die. The unduly lenient sentence was appealed by the police and condemned by the CST. The solicitor general subsequently referred the case to the Court of Appeal, but the sentence was upheld despite an admission by the court that the sentence was light, on the grounds that Lyons also had to serve a 12 month supervision order and carry out 200 hours of unpaid social work. In a letter to local MP Ivan Lewis, the attorney general noted that the sentence fell within sentencing guidelines and could not have been more severe given all the circumstances. The lesser sentences passed on Lyon’s two unnamed accomplices were not appealed.

Five men were jailed for life for terrorism offenses in May following the long running Operation Crevice, stated to have been the largest counter-terrorism operation ever undertaken in the UK. The plotters had planned to bomb the Bluewater shopping center in Kent, a large night club in central London and key nodes in Britain’s piped gas network. A list of synagogues was found in the home of the group leader Omar Khyam, and it was suggested in court that they had begun to consider attacks against these, too.

Also in May, Mohammed Rizwan and Baber Mansoor were sentenced to 12 months imprisonment each at Stoke-on-Trent crown court for causing racially aggravated harassment. They had carried out a month long campaign of telephone harassment against the elderly president of Staffordshire’s Jewish community and the administrator of Peterborough synagogue. Bomb threats made to a local pub, in which they lauded al-Qa`ida, were traced to their mobile phones and led to their apprehension.

In June, Samar Alami and Jawad Botmeh had their appeals against sentence dismissed by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. They had been found guilty of the car bomb attacks on the Israeli embassy and Balfour House (the office of the United Jewish and Israel Appeal), in 1994 in which fourteen people were injured. They had been members of a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine splinter group and had sought to sabotage the Middle East peace process that began in Madrid that year.

In August, Waeil Hammed was convicted by St Albans crown court of using racially abusive words, racially aggravated assault and common assault against a member of the local Watford Jewish community who had objected to antisemitic remarks he had made out loud in a local café.

Leigh Barshef, a customer services worker, was awarded four thousand pounds by a Birmingham industrial tribunal after a successful claim that he had been hounded out of his job by his antisemitic employer, a local telecommunications company.

In a case before the European Court of Human Rights in March, ASLEF, a major British trade union failed in its attempt to expel a member who was also a member of the BNP on the grounds that far right views were inconsistent with trade union membership. The court upheld the view that expulsion would be in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights

 

Official and Public Activities

A cross-government working group made up of officials from the Home Office, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Departments of Communities and Local Government, Universities Innovation and Skills, Children Schools and Families, and Culture Media and Sport, as well as the police and representatives of the BOD, CST and JLC met during the year to consider the government’s planned response to the report of the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism. The government response was due to be published in early 2008. In addition, meetings were held during the year between representatives of the BOD, CST and JLC and the home secretary, foreign secretary, secretary of state for communities and local government, minister of state for Europe and the parliamentary under secretary of state for communities and local government to discuss antisemitism and government plans to combat it.

The government’s initial response to the report was published in March as a command paper, elevating it to official status. It was followed by a parliamentary debate led by John Mann MP, chairman of the All Party Parliamentary Group against Antisemitism. In September, the government gave a grant to the group to fund its efforts to persuade some foreign parliaments to establish parliamentary inquiries into antisemitism in their countries. Earlier in the year, the government also initiated an inquiry into the failure to properly record and prosecute antisemitic crimes, and meetings were held between representatives of the CST, BOD, JLC and the police and the Crown Prosecution Service.

In June, Baroness Deech, the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education, initiated a debate in the House of Lords into antisemitism in universities. In her speech she recalled that a parliamentary inquiry had recommended that universities should record all examples of antisemitic incidents, and that there should be support for combating the proposed boycott of Israeli academics. She noted in particular that campus antisemitism was increasingly manifested in attempts to delegitimize Jewish student societies. In response, Lord Adonis, junior minister for education and skills, deplored the proposed academic boycott, noted recent high level visits to Israel by education ministers and university principals and pledged legal action against anti-Jewish discrimination and other support.

The BOD expressed dismay that the government had allowed Ibrahim al-Musawi, editor of the Hizballah television station Al Manar, into the UK after having been given an assurance by officials that he would be excluded. Al-Manar serves Hizballah and all its activity as well as promoting antisemitism, and Hizballah’s external wing is banned by the European Union. Al-Manar transmissions via Euro-Sat were blocked after complaints by the French government, but were still available via Arab-Sat.

Following an announcement by ministers in October that the government plans to provide additional capital support for schools, including for security, the CST began negotiations on behalf of the 37 state funded Jewish schools. In December, a representative of the education department stated that local authorities could meet requests for additional funding for schools, where this is the local priority.

In July, Junior Minister for Communities and Local Government Ian Wright MP, announced that police forces would have the capability to record antisemitic incidents nationally by April 2009. Currently, only the larger police forces have the technical means to do so.