In the aftermath of the antisemitic attack in Golders Green in North London on April 29th when two Jewish men were stabbed, the BBC has of course devoted much airtime to the issue of antisemitism in Britain, and its causes and potential remedies.
The May 2nd edition of the Newscast Podcast devoted almost its entire program to the subject. However rather than truly digging into the root causes of this epidemic of hate against British Jews, Laura Kuenssberg and Paddy O’Connell leant into an unacceptable trope we have called out here before, namely, that some Jews might be responsible for harm committed against them.
After listing the recent crimes committed against the Jewish community including the arson attacks, the attack on Heaton Park Synagogue, the Bondi Beach massacre, and naming the awful fact that this is now expected and unsurprising to Britain’s Jews, Paddy O’Connell told listeners exactly what he felt was at “the heart” the problem:
O’Connell: “what lies at the heart of it is an argument over when people take their hatred for the actions of the Israeli state to a read across to behave against Jews. That’s the kind of starting point for the problems, because people who feel desperately angry at the actions of Benjamin Netanyahu are many and multiple and some of them live in Israel, some of them are Jewish people, so the big error, the big crime, is the read across to attack Jewish people in Britain assuming you know what they think, assuming you know their political views because they’re Jewish”
To repeat that, the “big crime” being discussed here is not stabbing Jews in the street per se, but to do so without doing one’s due diligence and discovering whether or not that specific Jew likes Benjamin Netanyahu.
Rather than pushing back on her colleague’s assertion, Kuenssberg doubles down:
Kuenssberg: “And it’s the oldest form of racism in the world it’s sometimes known as that, antisemitism, that has been given a grim new life by the realities of conflict in the Middle East”
Once again, antisemitism is being caused, not by antisemites believing a specific set of conspiracy theories about the Jewish people, including tropes about money, power, the murder of children, and sexual perversion, but by “grim realities” in the Middle East.
This framing, that some Jews, whether that’s Zionist Jews, Israeli Jews, right wing Israeli Jews, Jews in the IDF or Benjamin Netanyahu himself, are responsible for the violence committed against the community is based on a logic that would never be applied to any other minority.
The idea that a BBC journalist might ever suggest, for example, that Islamophobic attacks in Britain may simply be misplaced anger at the actions of the Islamic Regime in Iran, or ISIS, or even Hamas and Hezbollah is so abhorrent that it’s difficult to even express as a thought experiment. Everyone knows, rightly, that a position like that would be untenable, shocking, and cause immediate and unprecedented backlash.
And yet here, on the UK’s national broadcaster, with one of the BBC’s most recognisable journalists, the idea that Jews are responsible for antisemitism and that some bad Jews might be fully deserving of it, finds a respectable home.
As the podcast goes on, the “Good Jew” trope pops up again. Perhaps in an attempt to again point out the “big crime” of targeting the wrong Jews, Paddy O’Connell presents a short interview he did with Jewish teenagers, always at great pains to point out that these are British children who happen to be Jewish:
O’Connell: “What we really want you to hear is the determined optimism of these young British people and we often talk don’t we about what does the younger newscaster think, so we’ve just laid out the worst of what’s happening, but I hope you’ll hear here these are young British people who are confident about how it could work here and they’re proud of their country, they happen to be Jewish and they’ve got things to say so here’s a little bit of what happened when I spoke to teenagers at Finchley progressive synagogue”
O’Connell goes on to ask each child how they feel as “young Londoners” and to tell him their “optimism” about their futures in Britain. What this framing does is drive home that these Jewish children are British and happy to be so and therefore are not legitimate targets.
In a segment perhaps meant to garner sympathy and create shared identity, what O’Connell actually does is apply a litmus test and lean dangerously close to a further antisemitic trope, that of dual loyalty. Are you a British child who just happens to be Jewish? Do you love London? Are you hopeful for your future here? See, the segment says, these are the good Jews. They don’t deserve it.
Unfortunately, whenever the idea that there are good Jews who don’t deserve harm rears its head, in its shadow sits the idea that there are bad Jews who do.
