Anti-Semitism

Debate between Baroness Clark of Kilwinning and Denis MacShane

Thursday 20th January 2011 Westminster Hall

[Mr MacShane]

That is an intolerable remark, as I told the former Member himself. It is perfectly possible to criticise Israel and to defend the cause of the Palestinian people without making a 1930s-style allegation. We can see in Europe the rise of political anti-Semitism. We have many open anti-Semites in the European Parliament, supported by the two Nazi MEPs from Great Britain.

In Hungary this week, we have had the surreal spectacle of a court allowing a convicted Nazi war criminal, Sandor Kapiro, to sue for defamation Dr Efraim Zuroff, the head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Israel office. I know that Hungary is not the home of Kafka but this is Kafkaesque, as the Hungarian authorities are allowing a Nazi war criminal to persecute a Jew whose job is to expose and bring to justice the last remnants of the perpetrators of the holocaust.

Today the Prime Minister is hosting a number of right-wing parties from Baltic states at Downing street. I welcome the outreach to Baltic and Nordic states, but I hope that he is telling their leaders that the attempts by many of the conservative right-wing parties in the Nordic countries in particular and in the Baltic states to make an equivalence between the holocaust and the crimes of communism—the so-called “double genocide” campaign—is odious and offensive, and it is condemned by all democratic parties in Europe. Lord Janner of Braunstone has written eloquently about this issue.

Given my own family background, I certainly do not need any lessons on the evils of communism and Stalinism in eastern Europe. However, this downplaying and devaluation of the holocaust is a cold-blooded tactic by politicians, some of whose pre-war ancestors were openly anti-Semitic. The European right in many of the Baltic states is nationalistic and populist. Latvian right wingers celebrate the Waffen SS. Mr Michal Kaminski, the Polish nationalist politician, says that he will apologise for what happened to Jews on Polish soil when Jews apologise to Poland for what they did during world war two. Frankly, that is unacceptable language. There is very great concern in the Jewish community—tiny as it is—in those countries about this growing attempt to airbrush out of history the crimes against Jews between 1941 and 1945.

I quote Lord Janner:

“For Jews in Europe during the Holocaust there was little complication. The truth was and still remains that the Soviet and Allied forces were the heroes and that Hitler’s Nazis were the perpetrators and the war criminals. Any attempt to pervert this history is an attack on the memory of the hundreds of thousands of Jews from that region who were murdered including many of my own family, who were in Lithuania and Latvia.”

Lord Janner is right. Just as the Islamists seek to devalue the holocaust as part of their ideological assault on the right of Israel to exist, so too elements of the ultra-nationalist and populist right in Baltic, Nordic and eastern European countries seek to devalue the holocaust as a unique event to justify their own anti-Jewish ideology of the past and, in some cases, of the present.

The British ambassador in Lithuania, along with other ambassadors, signed a letter to the Lithuanian Government protesting about the “double genocide” phenomenon. I asked the Foreign Office to publish that letter but to my surprise it has not, praying in aid pre-WikiLeaks rules about secrecy and confidentiality. I think that it would do the Foreign Office no harm at all and in fact every credit to publish that letter. I know Foreign Office officials and other Government officials, and they want to work hard to promote the matter as solidly as possible.

I will stop shortly to allow others to speak. Very briefly, however, I want to highlight some sentences from the European Union’s formal definition of anti-Semitism. It is an important international document that tries to explain what anti-Semitism is and it was agreed after many debates and discussions a few years ago by all parts of the European Community. It says, among other things, that it is anti-Semitic to make

“mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective—such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.”

We still hear that today.

The EU definition continues, saying that anti-Semitic activities include:

“Denying the fact, scope, mechanisms (e.g. gas chambers) or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of National Socialist Germany and its supporters and accomplices during World War II (the Holocaust)…Accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust. Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations…Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination…by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour. Applying double standards by requiring of it a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation…Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”

I will sit down shortly, but I could bring to the House cartoons and articles in our main newspapers—our liberal newspapers, our left newspapers and our conservative newspapers—that draw precisely that moral equivalence between Israel and Nazism, which attempt to typecast all Jews as supporters of Israel and thus having a double loyalty.

The battle is intensifying; it is now about the demonisation and criminalisation of Israel. I salute my friend Ian McEwan for going to Israel to accept a literary prize. I want to see more academic, journalistic and political exchange with Israel, and indeed with its neighbouring states and the people of Palestine and their leaders. I had hoped that the marvellous work of the all-party group against anti-Semitism would somehow come to an end. Today I find that its work is more necessary than ever.

[Katy Clark (in the Chair)]

I remind colleagues that a considerable number of Members have asked to speak. Unless contributions to the debate are significantly shorter, I will not be able to call quite a number of colleagues.