The Labour government, the party of imperialism and racism, has accepted 27 recommendations of a report into antisemitism in British schools, which suggests that antisemitism is a major problem within the education system. In reality, these recommendations focus on suppressing solidarity with Palestinians, and re-educating children to essentially make them pro-zionist without question.
Let’s take a closer look.
The main argument for this moral panic is that “three in five jewish pupils” have experienced antisemitism in schools. However, that figure comes from a survey of 5,000 pupils, of whom only 92 were in fact jews.
The 92 jewish pupils in question were asked if they’d personally experienced antisemitism at school. Only 70 of those 92 responded to the question. Twenty-nine said yes – ie, less than a third of those asked. Further to this, only 12 percent of the children who responded said that they felt antisemitism was a problem at their school, and only 2 percent said it was a “big problem”.
In other words, you can count the number of pupils surveyed who felt that “antisemitism was a problem at their school” on your fingers. Yet the government in its wisdom has decided that this means antisemitism must be put into its own special category of racism and treated more seriously than all the others.
Interestingly, the report did not consider asking muslim pupils about their experiences of racism in school or educational settings. Why might that be?
One figure that has been heavily pushed in headlines by the Telegraph and other outlets is that jews are “nine times more likely” to experience racism than muslims. The Home Office insists that the most reliable data comes from the Crime Survey for England and Wales – whose reporting has in fact concluded that muslims are “twice as likely” to be victims of hate crimes as jews.
So how to explain the discrepancy between the headlines and the statistics beneath?
Well, let’s consider Sir David Bell, who was asked to conduct this report by former Education secretary Bridget Phillipson, now succeeded by Lucy Powell. Sir David sits on the national council of the Academic Study Group (ASG) on Israel and the Middle East; a ‘charity’ whose main objective is to oppose the Boycott, Divestment & Sanction (BDS) movement.
Despite such obvious bias and allegiances making him a questionable candidate for the role, Sir David’s conclusions have received almost no scrutiny by mainstream media or by any official bodies or bourgeois think-tanks. Instead, we are being handed down an ‘accepted’ conclusion that antisemitism belongs at the top tier of the racism hierarchy in Britain and has created a red alert situation in our schools.
Conflating anti-zionism with antisemitism
The report itself is meant to be about antisemitism in British schools, yet it mentions Gaza and Israel repeatedly. And it explicitly indicates Palestinian flags and badges as symbols that make environments more hostile to jewish pupils.
Just because these flags and badges make zionists shudder, does that directly mean that they are antisemitic? Most people, particularly students, are aware that a genocide is taking place and that it is right to oppose and shun it for the sake of humanity.
The Bell report, on the other hand, clearly seeks to impose neutrality on genocide. (And we recall here the powerful observation of Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire, when he wrote in 1985: “Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.”)
The Bell report recommends that schools should hold “impartial” debates, “particularly those relating to the Israel-Palestine conflict and contemporary antisemitism”. It also suggests that schools should be adopting and utilising the IHRA’s working definition of antisemitism (which conflates anti-zionism with antisemitism).
The Department for Education has slapped all over its social media accounts that it wants to “encourage debate” in educational settings – presumably in relation to Israel and Gaza and not in relation to antisemitism – and so it (the DfE) will be “backing teachers and school leaders with training, guidance and practical resources; giving them the confidence to lead these discussions well”.
In other words, the party of imperialism, with its complicit racist hands stained in Palestinian blood, wants to make sure schools are pushing the ‘correct’ view when it comes to discussions about genocide, and that this is subordinate with Labour party (ie, imperialist) doctrine.
And the icing on the cake? Open the report, go to page 30 and read the opening paragraph under the title “British attitudes”. It reads thus:
“British attitudes relating to jewish people and Israel show two broad trends. Anti-jewish attitudes are typically less prevalent and have remained more stable, whereas anti-Israel sentiments are more prevalent and have been increasing.” (Our emphasis)
So if anti-jewish (or antisemitic, you could say) sentiment is less prevalent and on the drop, then what on earth is this report actually on about?
Clearly, the problem for the British ruling class is precisely that anti-Israel sentiment is rising – and anti-imperialist sentiment along with it. But Israel is the most important bastion of imperialist domination over the territory and resources of the middle east; the central node in its network of compradors and proxies without which its ability to loot the vast energy reserves of the region would collapse.
Hence the need for an ever more frantic campaign to protect the zionist settler colony. And, since the truly genocidal colours of the Israel project have now been revealed to the whole world in horrific technicolor, the only way to try to hold down the rising discontent of western workers is by trying to enforce silence on the topic.
Hence the relentless promotion of the IHRA ‘working definition of antisemitism’, the creation of false statistics and false-flag ‘attacks’, along with the endless repetition of the narrative that “antisemitism is on the rise” and “jews in Britain are under threat”.
