Bombarded
by disinformation campaigns, many British Jews are being misled into
seeing Corbyn as a threat rather than as the best hope of inoculating
Britain against the resurgence of right-wing anti-Semitism menace
by
Jonathan Cook
End-of-year
polls are always popular as a way to gauge significant social and
political trends over the past year and predict where things are
heading in the next. But a recent poll of European Jews – the
largest such survey in the world – is being used to paint a deeply
misleading picture of British society and an apparent problem of a
new, left-wing form of anti-semitism.
Part
4 - The Hungary anomaly
Hungary
is a country in which Jews and other minorities undoubtedly face a
very pressing threat to their safety. Its ultra-nationalist Prime
Minister, Viktor Orban, used the general election last April to whip
up a frenzy of anti-Jewish sentiment.
He
placed the Hungarian-born Jewish billionaire George Soros at the
centre of his anti-immigration campaign, suggesting that the
philanthropist was secretly pulling the strings of the opposition
party to flood the country with “foreigners”. In the run-up to
the election, his government erected giant posters and billboards all
over the country showing a chuckling George Soros next to the words:
“Don’t let Soros have the last laugh.”
Raiding
the larder of virtually every historic anti-Semitic trope, Orban
declared in an election speech: “We are fighting an enemy that
is different from us. Not open, but hiding; not straightforward but
crafty; not honest but base; not national but international; does not
believe in working but speculates with money; does not have its own
homeland but feels it owns the world.”
All of
this should be seen in the context of Orban’s recent praise for
Miklos Horthy, a former Hungarian leader who was an ally of Hitler’s.
Orban has called him an “exceptional statesman”. So did Hungarian
Jews express to EU pollsters heightened fears for their community’s
safety? Strangely, they did not. In fact, the percentage who regarded
anti-semitism as a problem in Hungary was only slightly above the EU
average and far below the concerns expressed by French Jews.
Not only
that, but the proportion of Hungarian Jews fearful of anti-semitism
has actually dropped over the past six years. Some 77 per cent see
anti-semitism as a problem today, compared to 89 per cent in 2012,
when the poll was last conducted.
So, the
survey’s results are more than a little confounding. On the one
hand, at least according to the British media and the EU, British
Jews are in a heightened state of fear about the UK Labour party,
where the evidence suggests an already marginal problem of
anti-semitism is actually in decline.
And on
the other, Hungarian Jews’ fears of anti-semitism are waning, even
though the evidence suggests anti-semitism is on the rise and
government-sanctioned there.
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