Jewish Chronicle survey finds that 85% of British Jews are stupid and gullible

Poll finds that 56% of Israelis Believe They are the Chosen People (Herren Volk) rising to 79% amongst Right-wingers

 Last week’s Jewish Chronicle front page More than 85 per cent of British Jews think Jeremy Corbyn is antisemitic was based on an opinion poll by Survation which the JC commissioned. The aim and purpose of the poll was to test whether the anti-semitism campaign which the Zionist press, the JC in particular had been waging, together with the mainstream media, against the Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn had been effective.

Given that there are now two definitions of antisemitism - the Oxford English Dictionary definition 'hostility to or prejudice against Jews' and the IHRA definition of hostility to Zionism and the racist Israeli state, it might have been more honest to make it clear what it meant by 'antisemitism'.

If one is to believe this poll then clearly the Zionist campaign has been successful in filling the minds of Jewish people in this country with garbage.  If the opinion poll is measuring anything it is measuring the susceptibility of Jewish people to being bombarded with propaganda.  In other words it is a measure of the gullibility and stupidity of British Jews. 

In the words of Abraham Lincoln, one can fool some of the people all of the time. On the surface it would appear that 85.9% of British Jews combine both stupidity and gullibility in equal measures, which is an exceptionally high figure for any group of people. The question is whether it is true?

Certainly the mainstream Jewish community in Britain is right-wing and has been so for close on half a century.  That is not surprising since 30 years ago William Rubinstein in his Right, Left and the Jews found that British Jews were twice as likely to be represented in social classes A&B as non-Jews. Jewish Chronicle columnist Geoffrey Alderman in his book The Jewish Community in British Politics reached similar conclusions. The richer and more privileged you are the more likely you are to be on the right of politics.

However I would urge a word of caution.  There is no evidence given of how the 710 Jews who were interviewed were chosen. What was the methodology of the survey? Were they self-defining?  How representative were those questioned? Were they based on synagogue attendance or self-identification? Many if not most Jews who are secular do not identify as such but are no less Jewish. What was the number of Haredi (ultra Orthodox) Jews? This survey should be taken with a large pinch of salt.

What is most interesting is the 9^th question in the survey. Jews are asked whether they would consider leaving the country if Corbyn becomes Prime Minister and 38.5% say yes and 51.1% say no.  It would be interesting to see, if Jeremy does become Prime Minister, how many of those saying ‘yes’ would actually go? My guess is very few if any.

This question was not asked of any other leader as presumably it was not thought likely that Gerald Batten of UKIP or Vince Cable of the Lib Dems was likely to become Prime Minister!

One amusing example of how anti-Semitism is being manufactured out of thin air is Stephen Pollard, Editor of the JC, tweeting on hearing that Jeremy Corbyn had blamed the bankers for the economic crash that this was a none too subtle attack on Jews. The implicit assumption being that 'bankers' are a euphemism for 'Jews' which is what one expects from racists and anti-semites.

This provoked a furious storm on Twitter before the hapless Pollard owned up not only to his own stupidity but the fact that it was he who was drawing the equation that Jew=Banker.

This survey is reminiscent of a similar survey that the Campaign Against Anti-semitism conducted in 2015. The CAA employed Yougov for their survey who contacted 2,230 people, more than three times the poll sample used by the Jewish Chronicle.  The conclusioin was that  ‘Well over half of British Jews (58%) believe Jews may have no long-term future in Europe.’ and that ‘1 in 4 British Jews has considered leaving the country in the past two years because of rising antisemitism.’

At the time the JC contested this nonsense. It commissioned its own poll which found that 88% of British Jews had no intention of leaving Britain.  Now the JC resorts to the same tactics as the far-Right CAA.

It would seem that whenever British Zionists want to stoke up people’s fears about anti-semitism they commission a poll which is specifically designed to elicit the answers they want viz. that Jews are scared out of their wits.  

Survey by Campaign Against Anti-semitism in 2015 which the Jewish Chronicle attacked - now they are doing the same thing

The same CAA poll that found most British Jews didn’t think they had a future in Europe any longer. It also found that ‘More than half of all British Jews feel that anti-semitism now echoes the 1930’s.’

Jews in Britain today ‘exhibit a disconnect from reality which borders on hysteria’– Ha’aretz 14.1.15.

This provoked the normally placid and sane Zionist Anshell Pfeffer in an article U.K. anti-Semitism Report Highlights Disturbing Trend - Among British Jews, to write of the finding that 56 percent of British Jews believed they were living through a repetition of the 1930's:

If the majority of British Jews and the authors of the CAA report actually believe that, then it’s hard to take anything they say about contemporary anti-Semitism in their home country seriously. If they honestly think that the situation in Britain today echoes the 1930s... then not only are they woefully ignorant of recent Jewish history but have little concept of what real anti-Semitism is beyond the type they see online.

Jews are represented in Britain in numbers that are many times their proportion of the population in both Houses of Parliament, on the Sunday Times Rich List, in media, academia, professions and just about every walk of public life. To compare today’s Britain, for all its faults, with the Jews’ situation in 1930s exhibits a disconnect from reality which borders on hysteria. 

However there were also other opinion polls of Jews that the Jewish Chronicle preferred to ignore. Last week the Haaretz-Dialog poll found that a majority of Israeli Jews, some 56%, also believed that they are the chosen people. It would seem to me that in a situation where the  Palestinians live under occupation, the fact that over half Israeli Jews believe in Palestinian racial inferiority, should serve as a reminder as to who it is who is really oppressed and it’s not British Jews. ‘79 Percent of Right-wingers Believe Jews Are the Chosen People. Are You for Real?’

Tony Greenstein