CST releases its half-yearly report on antisemitic incidents today, available on the CST website. This report shows an unprecedented rise in antisemitic incidents: 609 in total in the first six months of this year, more than in any previous entire year since CST began recording antisemitic incidents in 1984. The comment piece below, by Mark Gardner of CST, appears in today’s Jewish Chronicle alongside their news reporting of the incident figures.

A complex problem – we must stay focused

CST’s latest report shows that the most recent Israel-Hamas conflict continued the pattern whereby Middle East events trigger outbreaks of antisemitism against British Jews. Furthermore, the phenomenon appears to worsening each time it occurs.

CST defines an antisemitic incident as an act that includes antisemitic motivation, language or targeting. Perpetrators may deliberately find Jews to attack; or it may be circumstantial, such as in a road rage case.

In every instance, CST sensitively hears the victim’s story and gives whatever support and advice we can, including referrals to welfare agencies and police.

The physical threats (including terrorism) that CST confronts rest upon political challenges. Today there are many such challenges as modern antisemitism is complex, diverse and nuanced.

It comes from no single source or community, and can include antisemitic impacts and consequences, where no antisemitic motivation necessarily exists. For example, the anti-Israel boycott movement sincerely defines itself as anti-racist, but leaves many Jews feeling extremely vulnerable. This is not Jewish paranoia, as Jews who fail publicly to meet the required anti-Israel standard risk being treated as social outcasts and political enemies.

Moreover, it is entirely reasonable for British Jews to lament the rise of political extremism in this country; to note with grave concern the rise of the BNP, and to ask why large parts of the mainstream Left are selectively blind in their condemnation of antisemitism.

To help fight these challenges, CST encourages inter-faith and cross-political alliances wherever possible. We helped build the community’s anti-BNP campaign, and play a leading role in the task force that co-ordinates government, policing and judicial responses to antisemitism.

CST does not present Israel’s case, but anti-Israel anger obviously fuels antisemitism. Many observers also believe that the singling out of Israel reveals enduring antisemitism.  These questions are more fully explored in CST’s latest annual report on antisemitic discourse, which shows the persistence and resonance of old antisemitic themes in today’s treatment of Jewish-related issues; particularly in discussion about the ‘pro-Israel lobby’.

It is vital, however, to maintain a sense of proportion. Antisemitism does not define the British Jewish experience and Britain is a good place to be Jewish. Our community is, generally speaking, well integrated, highly educated and relatively prosperous. Most Jewish children are in Jewish schools; Jewish cultural activity is diverse, flourishing, and public. CST wants to safeguard this success story.

It is as foolish to imagine antisemitism everywhere, as it is to deny its existence. Better therefore, to contextualise the problem, to fight it appropriately, and to continue living our Jewish lives in the manner of our choosing.

CST has long been known for recording and analysing antisemitic hate crimes: the physical assaults, desecrations, racist abuse and hate mail that make up a quantifiable measure of antisemitism. But just as, in recent years, it has become increasingly apparent that antisemitism is not restricted to the activities of street thugs and bar room racists, so it has become necessary to chart that other sort of antisemitism: the ideas, images and language that occasionally pollutes public discourse. Last year, CST published its first Antisemitic Discourse Report, which attempted to identify, catalogue and analyse examples of this kind of antisemitism from 2007. Now CST has published its second such report, covering 2008.

Often, the antisemitic discourse covered in this report reveals unthinking stereotypes and prejudice, rather than something more considered. Lazy journalism can lead to what David Hirsh called “ready-made ways of thinking about Jews”. Some of the UK media coverage of the American presidential election, which is included in the report, falls into this category. Other examples in the report, such as Press TV’s promotion of Holocaust Denial, are more sinister; still others, such as Alan Hart claiming that Jews live in communities so that they can form voting blocs (rather than, for example, wanting to live within walking distance of their synagogue), are bizarre. Often, it is only by revisiting what antisemites used to say openly – such as in the 1960s British Nazi poster at the bottom of this post – that the antisemitic resonance of contemporary discourse can be fully understood.

One continuing problem is the way that extremist and racist ideas find easy platforms on mainstream media websites, blogs and forums. There is no simple answer to this, but one needs to be found. The first step is to identify and map the problem, and we hope that CST’s report adds to this effort.

Second Life is now well known for its virtual world, in which users interact with each other’s Avatars, computerized graphical representations of themselves or their alter egos. Most do so without any problems, but it should not be a surprise that, like so much of the internet, this virtual world reflects some of reality’s worst features.

Two years ago, concerns were raised with regards to Jihadist activity within the forum.  It is perhaps not surprising that Second Life has attracted others whose activities are obstructed, monitored or shunned in normal society.  In June of last year, Jewish Second Life user Anais Atlantis logged onto Second Life to shop in a virtual judaica store, only to find that she was confronted with a copy of the The Turner Diaries, the bible of neo-Nazi terrorism, which had been implanted in the store by Second Life neo-Nazi users.

But its not just judaica shops that attract questionable items. One Second Life store sold Nazi paraphernalia and Nazi uniforms. The excuse given by the people who run the store – that they are simply history buffs – was undermined by  the fact that they have banned Second Life’s Jews from entering the store.

The store was actually set up by a group called the ‘Furzi Manuschaften’, or Furzis – furry Nazis – for short. The group says that it does not condone racism or fascism, but its image is an Avatar dressed in Nazi uniform, giving a Sieg Heil salute. The shop has been closed by Second Life, following complaints.

Others in Second Life have created characters wearing yellow stars, and one has even created a gas chamber.

Second Life has strong Community Standards that ban users from uploading content that is ethnically or racially hateful, or that includes “derogatory or demeaning language or images in reference to another Resident’s race, ethnicity, gender, religion, or sexual orientation“; more to the point, they appear willing to apply them, for instance in the closure of the Nazi memorabilia store. It is not clear whether the gas chamber pictured above has been removed, although the user who created it is still active. There are now growing demands for Second Life to ban the use of all Nazi symbols.

It is important to remember the obvious point that there is a strong element of fantasy to all this, and it does not automatically follow that a Second Life Furzi is also a real life neo-Nazi. To ban all Nazi symbols and images from a virtual reality game may seem censorious to the point of parody. Equally, though, virtual Nazism should not automatically be dismissed as just a game: the users are real people, albeit living out fantasy lives, and you can guarantee that neo-Nazis, like jihadists or other violent extremists, will explore any opportunity to use online platforms to organise, propagandise and recruit. Nazism was defeated, but left a permanent scar on the real world. Why give it a second life in the virtual world?

The mayor of the Romanian city of Constanta has caused outrage after he and his son performed at a fashion show wearing Nazi uniforms:

A Romanian city mayor outraged Jewish and pro-democracy groups after he goose-stepped with his son in World War Two German uniforms during a weekend fashion show.

Wearing Nazi uniform is illegal in Romania, which denied participating in the Holocaust until 2004 when it accepted the findings of international commission that Romanian authorities killed up to 380,000 Jews in territories under their control.

The Centre for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism sent a letter Monday to the country’s general prosecutor urging an investigation of Radu Mazare, 41, mayor of Black Sea city port Constanta, for breaking the law and instigating a child to follow his example.

Mazare said the uniform had no swastikas and was the uniform of a German infantry general and nothing to do with the SS.

“I was inspired from the Valkyrie movie … I wanted to dress like a Vehrmacht general because I’ve always liked this uniform, and admired the rigorous organisation of the German army,” newspaper Evenimentul Zilei quoted him as saying.

Under pro-Nazi Marshal Ian Antonescu, Romania became a German ally in 1940 but switched sides just before war ended.

Mazare later clarified his explanation: the uniform did have swastikas on it, but they were so small he missed them.

This is a guest post by Winston Pickett, via the Jewish Chronicle:

In assessing the consequences of antisemitic discourse, are some characterisations worse than others? Are some epithets more offensive due to the depth of the insult, the affront to memory or the power to malign the Jewish collective? If so, how should they be treated?

These questions go to the heart of the European Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism’s report, Understanding and Addressing the ‘Nazi Card’: Intervening Against Antisemitic Discourse. In seeking to answer the questions, authors Paul Iganski and Abe Sweiry have fashioned an indispensable tool for cutting through the conceptual fog that hovers over what could be called “the discourse surrounding antisemitic discourse”.

When the 2006 Report of All-Party Inquiry into Antisemitism flagged the use of words that vilify, demonise and demean Jews and Israel as a form of “antisemitic discourse” it provided a useful service for analysts, policy makers and politicians who sensed that something dangerous and Judaeophobic was taking place when Israel was compared to Nazis and the Nazi state. When the CST launched its own report last year that sought to red flag and quantify such antisemitic eruptions on an annual basis, a sense of QED seemed to be around the corner.

Yet critics and free speech purists cried “censorship” and claimed it was a way to silence “legitimate criticism” of Israel. They alleged it was fair criticism and that harsh words were sometimes needed to curb Israel’s excesses.

Meanwhile historians saw something more sinister at work: playing the Nazi card gives Holocaust deniers a cognitive pass, making what Anthony Julius calls fellow-travellers out of its users.

Even worse, it tacitly advances an insidious dialectic implying Jewish complicity, auto-genocide and the ineluctable conclusion that things would be better if a Jewish state did not exist at all.

In short, in the words of Iganski and Sweiry, “a cul-de-sac of claims and counter-claims” — and a dead-end street with moral relativism the default victor in a standoff debate.

The ingeniousness of the authors’ analysis is that they seem to have cut through this quagmire. By labelling the Nazi card a “speech act”, the authors affirm the reality that such words and discourse are not simply dangerous. They inflict a singular pain— one that is without parallel in history or emotional charge for the Jewish psyche. Further, it fits the same classification of “hurt” defined by law enforcement authorities and tagged as a hate crime component.

This is why it is vital to look at the report’s recommendations when it calls on police and lawmakers to look more carefully at playing the Nazi card as a component of incitement or racial aggravation — as a sign that antisemitism is more than the concern of a post-Holocaust traumatised minority.

Critically the report asks official bodies to accord playing the Nazi card with the same seriousness and sensitivity as the worst of racist epithets. How? By embedding interventions into codes of practice of umbrella authorities such as the University Colleges Union and Press Complaints Commission — precisely those bodies that ideally seek to guarantee a certain level of civility in the maintenance of civil society.

Will it work? Even if their argument manages to pierce the “it’s only hyperbole” rationalisation and begins to gain traction then Understanding and Addressing the Nazi Card will have performed a valuable service by sending a clear signal to Jews and all ethnic minorities that hatred curtailed for one group helps curtail it for all.

Saturday marks the 15th anniversary of the terrorist bombing of the AMIA Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which killed 85 people.

There are outstanding Interpol Red Notices against five senior Iranian officials for their alleged roles in the bombing.

The European Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism – EISCA – has published a new report today, on Understanding and Addressing the ‘Nazi card‘. Any student of antisemitism is familiar with the way that  swastika daubings or Hitler salutes – the discourse of Nazism – are used to abuse Jews. More recent observers will also have noticed how such language is increasingly thrown back at Jews, via anti-Israel discourse. This report looks at both uses of Nazi discourse and the hurt that they cause.

Reproduced below in full is the foreword to the report, written by EISCA Chairman Denis MacShane MP.

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For over 60 years, antisemitism – the hatred and abuse of Jews – has been guided by the legacy of the Holocaust. The Nazi salute and swastika daubing have become staples of racist thugs everywhere. There is nothing complicated about this; it is the most immediate form of anti-Jewish insults, and is easily applied by anyone who wants to hurt Jewish sensibilities.

A little more subtly, as neo-Nazi movements spread across Europe, there emerged from the shadows in the 1980s and 1990s a more sophisticated way to play this Nazi card against the Jews; not to remind them of the Holocaust, but rather to deny that it ever happened.

Now, from elsewhere in the political spectrum comes a new variation: a strand of discourse that uses the memory of the Holocaust as a means of vilification. Nazi Germany, we are told, has been reborn in Israel. The Holocaust is happening again – only this time it is being perpetrated by Jews, in Gaza.

Given this phenomenon, this report confronts one of the most pressing questions in the analysis of 21st century antisemitism: why is such stress placed on making an association between the eliminationist ideology of Nazism and Jews who either support Israel, refuse to denounce it or fail to reject Zionism?

There is an entire dictionary of alternative condemnatory nouns, adjectives and metaphors that can be used to critique Israel and its policies since 1967, including its occupation of land won by conquest or presiding over people who do not wish to live under Israeli control.

Critics of Israel are entitled to express their views as trenchantly as they wish. But when particular words are used they bring particular responsibilities. The notion that any comparison with Nazism and the Holocaust can be honestly made constitutes a systematic attempt to denigrate Jews, and to straightjacket them into the category of citizens without legitimacy or the right to respect. The Nazi comparison scratches deep wounds that are not yet healed – something that should be blindly obvious to anyone.

Those who claim rights for people who have been displaced do not make their case well by calling their opponents Nazis. The voice of Palestinians is heard worldwide. They have the attention of the media, supporters in Parliament and in the press, and the opportunity to take their cause to the Israeli judiciary, often winning against government policy. To say they live in the same conditions as Jews in the Warsaw ghetto for whom the only way out was a gas chamber is to distort all meaning in language. It is a travesty of history and inflicts great hurt.

Nazism was an exterminationist, eliminationist ideology. To draw a comparison between Jews and Hitler’s policy of systematic mass murder is a grotesque anti-Jewish – and hence antisemitic – speech act.

In his novel, David’s Revenge, the German writer Hans Werner Kettenbach portrays a schoolteacher who leads his class of students through German and European history. A scandal ensues when a boy paints a swastika on the set of a school play as a protest. “They had been my pupils long enough to know what a swastika means: it is the emblem of terror and inhumanity”, writes the German novelist via his character. That is why German law forbids the use of the swastika in the public space.

In Britain, we would not easily allow the promulgation of pre-1939 imagery of the hook-nosed, child-devouring Jew. Most of us would also disparage the classic stereotype of the Jew as perpetual outsider, locked into a global network secretly conspiring to control the world. Despite Britain’s trademark liberalism and tolerance of free expression, since 1945 a line has been drawn in depicting Jews in the kind of pre-WWII language and imagery that helped shape antisemitism.

Yet it is now considered acceptable by some newspapers, cartoonists and commentators – to brand Jews as Nazis and to allow the swastika to be used as an image that stirs up hate against Israel and the Jews, no matter where they may reside. This is modern antisemitism.

It is important and necessary to assert the legitimacy of criticising Israel with all the vocabulary available in the modern political lexicon. But to play the Nazi card is to play an antisemitic card. The hurt it causes Jews is no less when it is played against Israel today than when it was used in its previous incarnations. And this time it is not simply Nazis or neo-Nazi thugs who are playing it.

Britain is unlikely to follow the lead of European countries that were directly vicitimised by Hitler’s policies by banning Nazi symbols outright. But just because a law cannot be written does not mean that the antisemitism of using Nazi comparisons to attack Jews, their affiliations and their history should be tolerated. Antisemitism is a form of racism and there are laws to combat racist expression.

In particular, there needs to be vigilance on university campuses. The problem of Jewish students who are branded directly or by association as Nazis for supporting Israel’s right to protect its citizens from terrorist attacks needs to be exposed – and action taken – to counter this new form of antisemitism.

The government and all the main parties are aware of this problem of the Nazi card. Finding a right way to tackle it requires careful thought and analysis, grounded in strict factuality. This report is an important contribution to that process.