Former Columnist and Historian of the Jewish Community, Professor Geoffrey Alderman, is Banned by Jewish Chronicle Editor Stephen Pollard

Alderman’s 'Crime' was telling the truth about the Zionists' Antisemitism Disinformation Campaign  

An email from the Jewish Chronicle’s Stephen Pollard to Professor Geoffrey Alderman, a columnist for 14 years, was blunt and to the point: “as editor I no longer wish to have you in the paper.” A decision confirmed by Pollard in a phone conversation.

There are many, almost too many ironies, in this affair. Alderman is nothing if not a man of many contradictions but he has one, abiding fault as far as Pollard and the Zionist claque are concerned. He is too honest. Being an academic he feels an obligation to tell the truth. An almost unpardonable sin in the Court of Stephen Pollard.

Alderman's latest academic research project is a study of the Jewish contribution to crime in the UK. In an interview with the Times Higher Education Supplement of July 13 2017 he said that ‘In the Oxford empirical tradition, I shall go wherever the evidence takes me.’

For Zionists, for whom defence of Israel right or wrong is all, this is entirely the wrong approach. The truth is secondary to the hasbarah (propaganda). That is why Zionists do so badly when they debate anti-Zionists.

The Zionist approach to such a study would be first to agree on the conclusions, namely that Jewish involvement in crime was minimal. Only then would they begin gathering evidence. You can see why Pollard had had enough of the good professor!

Alderman though is not your average progressive, still less a socialist.  He is religious and right-wing, as one would expect of someone who is Professor of Politics at the Britain’s only private university, Buckingham. But like Peter Oborne, the Tory journalist, he is a maverick and the Zionist tent has no room for mavericks.

What is surprising about Pollard’s decision is that it took him so long! Unlike previous editors, for example the late Geoffrey D Paul with whom I often crossed swords, Pollard has transformed the JC from a newspaper into a propaganda tract.  Dissenting opinions are rarely tolerated, which is why it is so boring. The idea of giving anti-Zionists space to debate issues or fairly covering the actual situation of the Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Territories would be enough to give its contributors a (kosher) heart attack.

Alderman was a successor to another maverick columnist, Chaim Bermant, who died 22 years ago. Although Bermant was anti-gay and hostile to the left, Bermant was the only person who consistently raised matters like the oppression of the Palestinians. He supported recognition of the PLO long before it was popular. He was also a fierce critic of the Orthodox. In an Obituary Letter to the Guardian I quoted his observation that the Orthodox fear peace because then there would be intermarriage (between Jew and non-Jew) ‘the worst of all sins in their eyes.’ Bermant also wrote that the ‘greatest threat to the character and integrity of the Jewish state comes from Jews not Arabs.’

 Long and loud was the clamour of the JC’s readership for Bermant’s head but to his credit, the JC’s Editor stood up for him and freedom of speech. That was why the JC was a lively publication even if it made you chew your hair at times. It also had interesting contributors such as its Literary Editor, T.R. Fyvel, who succeeded George Orwell as literary editor of Tribune.

Not so today at the JC where you have to make do with such luminaries as MI5’s man at The Guardian, Jonathan Freedland and ex-communist reactionary David Aaronovitch. Pollard, the ex-Editor of the Daily Express and friend of its pornographic proprietor, Richard Desmond (someone who might be a useful subject for Alderman’s research!) doesn’t do free speech which was why he was a founder of the Henry Jackson Society, a nest of Islamaphobes and what used to be called ‘police state Democrats’.

Alderman is no friend of the Palestinians. He has no understanding of their suffering or the racist nature of Zionism. He doesn’t understand the contradiction inherent in a Jewish state which is bound to trample on what were once considered Jewish values such as justice, opposition to oppression and socialism.

The expulsion of the refugees and the military occupation of the West Bank, to say nothing of the apartheid nature of Israel are not Alderman’s concerns. When an Italian member of the International Solidarity Movement Vittorio Arrigoni was murdered in 2011 by an Islamist in Gaza, Alderman infamously welcomed his murder:

Few events - not even the execution of Osama bin Laden - have caused me greater pleasure in recent weeks than news of the death of the Italian so-called "peace activist" Vittorio Arrigoni. [This was no 'peace activist' Jewish Chronicle 13.5.11].

I suspect the above piece was more bravado and bluster but nonetheless it was shocking.

I said that Alderman was a man of contradiction, a ‘communal gadfly’ as the Jewish Chronicle article described him when he left the Board of Deputies to the sound of boos.

In an Interview with the Times Higher Education Supplement (13.7.17.) Alderman outlined his philosophy in the statement that ‘Folks don’t like the truth, do they? Even academic folks. Very sad.’ It would make a good epitaph for Stephen Pollard when the grim reaper comes a calling.

I said that Alderman was a man of contradictions and he is. Ironically he, of all people, in an article A man who deserves banning called, in November 2015, for the banning of another Jewish dissident, Gerald Kaufmann MP. In what was a prime example of the artificial hysteria generated by the fake anti-Semitism campaign, the Jewish Father of the House of Commons was targeted by groups such as the misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitism for having used the phrase ‘Jewish money’ in regard to the contributions of the Conservative Friends of Israel to Tory Party funds.

As I wrote in Geoffrey Alderman and Gerald Kaufman –Jewish Chronicle Columnist’s Exercise in Hypocrisy

surely this wasn't the same Geoffrey Alderman who wrote, in an article Obama’s false  Iran Alternative (14.8.15) of ‘the fact that Jewish money, albeit American-Jewish money – is being used to this end has led the president to adopt an unfortunate and worrying rhetoric.  Israel and its supporters are warmongers and American-Jewish money is being used to drag America into war.’ 

Alderman’s main sin in Pollard’s eyes has been to contradict the JC’s incessant propaganda barrage to the effect that Corbyn is the worst anti-Semite since Adolf Hitler. Having worked with Corbyn Alderman knew that this was not true and last May he wrote an article in The Spectator Is Jeremy Corbyn really anti-Semitic? in which he stated that:

The fact of the matter is that Corbyn has an impressive record of supporting Jewish communal initiatives. For instance he was recently supportive of Jewish efforts to facilitate the speedy issue of death certificates by the north London coroner. In 2015 he took part in a ceremony in his Islington constituency to commemorate the founding of the North London Synagogue. In 2010 he put his name to an Early Day Motion (tabled by Diane Abbott) calling on the UK government to facilitate the settlement of Yemeni Jews in Britain. Indeed I could fill this entire article with a list of philo-Semitic EDMs that Corbyn has signed since he was first elected as Labour MP for Islington North in 1983.

Alderman went on to describe how:

In 1987 the West London Synagogue approached Islington Council with a startling proposal: to sell its original cemetery to property developers, destroying the gravestones and digging-up and reburying the bodies lying under them. This cemetery (dating from 1840) was not merely of great historic and architectural interest – in the view of orthodox Jews, the deliberate destruction of a cemetery is sacrilegious. So when Islington Council granted the planning application, a Jewish-led and ultimately successful campaign was launched to have the decision reversed. I was part of that campaign. So was Jeremy Corbyn. Meanwhile, the then-leader of Islington Council (1982-92), whose decision to permit the destruction of the cemetery was eventually overturned, was none other than Margaret Hodge

As if this was not blasphemy enough, Alderman went on to declare that ‘in my view context is, again, paramount.’ Alderman wrote that:

‘I will agree that from time to time, as backbench MP and party leader, Corbyn has acted unwisely. But the grounds for labelling him an anti-Semite simply do not exist.’

In the eyes of Pollard and the Board of Deputies Alderman had committed a Chillul Hashem, the desecration of the name of God, which is about as great a sin as man is capable of viz. telling the truth.

Of course to most normal people it is obvious that Jeremy Corbyn is not anti-Semitic. As Alderman points out he is a philo-semite, the exact opposite. But Zionists are not normal. Their values are, above all, those of state worship and veneration of the land over the people who live on it. To that end lying is just a means to an end.

Alderman isn’t the first journalist to suffer punishment at the hands of the Zionist press for expressing a dissenting opinion. Stephen Oryszczuk the foreign editor of Jewish News dared to criticise his own paper’s attack on Corbyn. He told The Canary:

It’s repulsive. This is a dedicated anti-racist we’re trashing. I just don’t buy into it at all.

Neither did the Jewish News editor as Oryszczuk was immediately put on gardening leave and soon after parted company.

Ironically Shraga Stern, wrote an article Among Charedim, Jeremy Corbyn's defeat is not being celebrated at all. Charedim are ultra-Orthodox Jews. Presumably Pollard was on vacation or out celebrating in the week after the general election to let this article slip through. Or maybe Pollard, knowing that the JC's circulation is continuing to decline sees Orthodox Jewry as a lucrative market.

Stern, a spokesman for Britain’s Ultra Orthodox Jews, had previously co-ordinated a joint letter from 34 Orthodox Rabbis dissociating themselves from the Board of Deputies attack on Corbyn. 

Yes I know that you didn't hear about this letter. That was because the BBC and the Press decided that it bore the wrong message. The subtitle of Shraga Stern's article was ‘The outgoing Labour leader has a distinguished record of support for our concerns’. Stern wrote that:

As the Campaign Against Antisemitism was forced to concede, a Deltapoll commissioned by the Jewish Leadership Council shortly before the election actually found that only 16 percent of 2017 Labour voters were wavering about voting for the Labour Party again because of the anti-Jewish prejudice that seems to have obsessed Mrs van der Zyl and the Deputies’ two ecclesiastical authorities, United Synagogue “chief rabbi” Ephraim Mirvis and Sephardi rabbinical authority Joseph Dweck.

In the Orthodox Jewish communities within which I live in Hackney, what was much more important was Labour’s promise to abolish Ofsted, which is currently engaged in what can only be described as a crusade against Torah-Orthodox schools.

Note how Stern puts Chief Rabbi in scare quotes.  Ephraim Mirvis is not recognised as a Jewish authority by the Ultra-Orthodox.  Or as Alderman wrote in the Guardian (13.7.12) ‘Once, the chief rabbi represented all British Jewry. No longer ‘

This was because of Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks response to a Home Office consultation on gay marriage in which he wrote that

"Our understanding [they declared] of marriage from time immemorial has been that of a union between a man and a woman. Any attempt to redefine this sacred institution would be to undermine the concept of marriage." The submission also made the point that "any attempt to exclude the possibility of a religious ceremony for such [gay] couples would be subject to challenge to the European court of human rights, on the grounds of discrimination" – a fear that is shared by other faiths.

This then is the background to the banning of Alderman, someone whose integrity and honesty  is in sharp contrast to that of Pollard, who is the human equivalent of a rattle snake on heat. On 2nd February Alderman issued a statement

Statement by Professor Geoffrey Alderman

Jewish academic Professor Geoffrey Alderman has been no-platformed by the UK’s oldest Jewish newspaper, the Jewish Chronicle.

Announcing this, Professor Alderman has made public the contents of an email sent to him by the Jewish Chronicle’s editor, Stephen Pollard.

In that email, Pollard told Alderman that “as editor I no longer wish to have you in the paper.”

This decision was confirmed by Pollard in a phone conversation with Alderman on 31 January 2020.

Following that conversation Alderman said:

“I am saddened immeasurably by Stephen Pollard’s decision, on which he refused absolutely to elaborate when we spoke on 31 January.  I began writing for the Jewish Chronicle in 1974 and from 2002 until 2016 I wrote the paper’s main weekly Comment column. Since then I have continued to contribute to the paper from time to time. Stephen’s decision to ban me entirely from writing for the paper has come without warning and without any rationale that he has seen fit to share with me. I simply don’t know why the decision has been taken, and can only speculate.”

Such is the level of Pollard’s dishonesty that he wouldn’t even give a reason for his decision.  However they are not hard to fathom. Amongst Alderman’s crimes we should include an article in The Independent headed ‘This Labour Party row will not be settled by relying on a flawed and faulty definition of antisemitism’.

Attacking the IHRA misdefinition of ‘anti-Semitism’, which has the status amongst Zionists of the tablets of stone that Moses carried with him on Mount Sinai, is another cardinal sin.

In his article Alderman wrote that the 11 examples of anti-Semitism in the IHRA

‘embed numerous internal contradictions. One example affects to condemn as antisemitic “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.” But the preamble that introduces all 11 examples explains that manifestations of antisemitism “might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. However, criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.”  

Well, a number of political regimes around the world have been criticised because they are alleged to be pursuing policies reminiscent of the Nazis. So how in principle can it be antisemitic to draw a comparison between “contemporary” Israeli policy and that of the Nazis? 

Alderman compounded his ‘crimes’ by making a submission to the Equality & Human Rights Commission slating the IHRA definition. Indeed one of the wondrous things about the IHRA is that no academics or legal scholars defend it and yet it continues to dominate the narrative.  Another example of Marx’s dictum that the ruling ideas in society are the ideas of the ruling class.

Geoffrey Alderman, who is Professor Emeritus at the University of Buckingham, has written 16 books, several of which are on the history of the Jews in the UK. These include The Jewish Community in British Politics, Modern British Jewry, British Jewry Since Emancipation and London Jewry and London Politics 1889-1986. In 2011 was awarded the Chaim Bermant Prize for Journalism. His website is www.geoffreyalderman.com. He is also a monthly columnist for the Jewish Telegraph.

However you will be pleased to know that although Geoffrey Alderman is now banned from writing for the Jewish Chronicle, Pollard’s pages will still be open for the Daily Mail’s racist columnist Melanie Phillips whose latest piece is ‘Don’t fall for bogus claims of ‘Islamophobia’’

I should add one other thing.  I first came across  Alderman’s name in 1978 when the Board of Deputies was launching ‘kamikaze attacks’ (Maurice Ludman, Editor Searchlight No. 41) against the Anti-Nazi League because of its anti-Zionist founders. The ANL bothered the Board far more than the National Front.  Alderman along with others like Miriam Karlin criticised their approach. See also Jewish Voice for Labour’s Jewish academic no-platformed by Jewish Chronicle

Tony Greenstein

The Sad and Steady Decline of the World’s Oldest Jewish Newspaper

In his efforts to destroy Jeremy Corbyn Stephen Pollard has Destroyed the Reputation & Circulation of the Jewish Chronicle

Even by the feral standards of Britain’s tabloid press, the Jewish Chronicle is in a class of its own.  Under former Daily Express editor, Stephen Pollard, the favoured son of Britain’s largest pornography publisher and EDL/UKIP supporter, Richard Desmond, the JC has staggered from the gutter to the sewer. Even the Sun and the Mail make occasional attempts at separating news from commentary. The JC sees no purpose in even pretending to be neutral (or even accurate).

The Jewish Chronicle has, over the summer, behaved like a demented cat on hot tiles. Its one and only abiding theme is that Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semite. It has failed of course to provide even a smidgeon of proof to back up this libel. What it lacks in evidence it more than makes up for in shrieking, screaming headlines.

Pollard's screeching has not done the JC's circulation any good

It is little wonder that its circulation has declined since Pollard took over in 2008 from over 32,000 to 20,000 today. It also appears to be in considerable financial difficulty which might explain why Pollard has become the journalistic version of a rabid dog.

The Jewish Chronicle's absurd Goebbel's like propaganda

Things were not always like this.  Even though the paper has long supported the Zionist cause it has, in the past sought to achieve a modicum of balance.  Historically it was the paper of the Jewish Establishment and dull as ditchwater. Its main problem used to be how to keep its readers awake long enough to read it. (see British Jewry’s Family Newspaper:A Century of the “Jewish Chronicle”)

When the Zionist movement was first founded by Theodor Herzl at the end of the 19^th century, the Jewish Chronicle reflected the position of the Jewish Establishment which was hostile to this attempt to suggest that after having won the battle for Emancipation, British Jews didn’t belong in Britain. It described Zionism ‘as ill-considered, retrogressive, impracticable, even dangerous.”

The JC demonstrates its visceral racism in this headline. The continuous death of Palestinians murdered by the Israeli military is not considered 'violence'.  The death of a settler by contrast 'raises fears of fresh violence' in a Gaza which saw 160 people mown down by sniper fire

It was only the mass influx of Jews, fleeing the Russian pogroms, which caused a section of the Jewish Establishment to have second thoughts about Zionism. Palestine’s attractions lay in keeping the East European Jewish hordes from British shores and what they saw as the accompanying anti-Semitism. Chief Rabbi Hermann Adler summed up their attitude when he refused to condemn the 1905 Aliens Act, introduced by the Zionists' hero Arthur J Balfour. 'We must frankly agree' he wrote to Herbert Bentwich, 'that we do not desire to admit criminals and that there is force in the argument against the admission of those [Jews] mentally or physically afflicted.' [Geoffrey Alderman, Modern British Jewry]

The key battle in the struggle within the Jewish Establishment over Zionism came when Claude Montefiore and David Alexander of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Conjoint Committee sent a letter to The Times on 24^th May 1917 opposing Zionism and the movement to create a Jewish state. It caused a split in the Board and a vote to disown the letter.

The Jewish Chronicle takes Zionism to its logical antisemitic conclusion - Jewish MPs should separate themselves off

Margaret Hodge and Zionist Anti-semitism

Fast forward a century to Margaret Hodge’s outburst in the House of Commons when she called Jeremy Corbyn ‘a fucking anti-Semite and racist’ on account of his lack of sympathy for Zionism. This caused a rush of blood to Pollard’s head. Pollard called for Jewish MPs to leave the Labour Party. Jewish Labour MPs must quit the party and form a new bloc of independents.

It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Pollard that calling for Jewish MPs to leave the party they are a member of on the basis of their religious affiliation is itself anti-Semitic! We have to go back nearly a century to Poland where, as a result of the Minority Treaties a block of Jewish MPs sat as Jews in their own right.

Those who advocate the separation of Jews from  mainstream parliamentary parties are usually anti-Semites. The practice of Jews sitting apart on ghetto benches in universities in pre-war Poland was a consequence of the vicious antisemitism amongst Polish students. Yet this is what the Editor of the Jewish Chronicle was advocating when he urged Jewish MPs to separate themselves off from non-Jews. All in the name of fighting anti-Semitism!

Hodge’s behaviour had been triggered by the refusal of Corbyn and Labour’s NEC to adopt wholesale the IHRA‘Definition’ of Anti-Semitism. Pollard complained that ‘instead of adopting the definition... has excised the parts which relate to Israel and how criticism of Israel can be antisemitic.’  When we criticise the Zionists' false anti-Semitism campaign as really being about Israel we are condemned as ‘anti-Semitic’!

Pollard, in his enthusiasm for the dramatic, spoke of how ‘one extraordinary, unplanned event has indeed changed the dynamics. Dame Margaret Hodge’s confrontation of Jeremy Corbyn in a corridor of the House of Commons, calling him an “antisemite and a racist”, seems to have burst a dam.’

A week later the Jewish Chronicle, together with two other Jewish newspapers, in a collective act of madness, published a joint front page which spoke of ‘the existential threat to Jewish life in this country that would be posed by a Jeremy Corbyn-led government.’

The Jewish Chronicle all but accused Jeremy Corbyn of seeking to build concentration camps and why?  Because he refused to endorse a 'definition' of anti-semitism which has been universally panned  by legal and academic critics. 

The Director of the Pears Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism Professor David Feldman, who was also Vice-Chair of the Chakrabarti Inquiry, described the IHRA as‘bewilderingly imprecise.’

Sir Stephen Sedley, a former Judge in the Court of Appeal who is also Jewish wrote that the IHRA ‘fails the first test of any definition: it is indefinite.’

Hugh Tomlinson QC in an Opinion declared that the IHRA had a potential chilling effect on public bodies which, in the absence of definitional clarity, may seek to sanction or prohibit any conduct which has been labelled by third parties as antisemitic without applying any clear criterion of assessment.

Geoffrey Robertson QC, a renowned human rights lawyer described the IHRA as 'not fit for purpose'.

Are all of these people vicious anti-semites whose pronouncements pose an 'existential threat' to the Jewish community today? The hysteria of Britain's Zionist press defies rational explanation.  Racism does strange things to people.  Yet these are the forces driving the Labour Party into declaring that opposition to Zionism is anti-Semitism.

The Jewish Forward

In one fell swoop the Zionist press in this country demonstrated not only how little difference there is between them but how they are little more than  propaganda sheets.  Contrast this with America's main Jewish paper The Forward which has a broad range of articles and themes on political issues, including from Jews who are not Zionists and even, God forbid, Palestinians!

It's a question that the JC avoids - why are so many anti-Semites such ardent fans of Israel?

Whereas the Jewish Chronicle has refrained from criticising the anti-Semites and racists that make up the Trump Administration, the Forward  has had a series of eviscerating headlines such as Naomi Zeveloff’s How Steve Bannon and Breitbart News Can Be Pro-Israel and Anti-Semitic at the Same Time. The Forward’s liberal editors and writers have been forced to confront the fact that the Trump regime is both anti-Semitic and ardently pro-Zionist at one and the same time.  The Forward has articles questioning the relationship between American Jews and Israel, a topic that the JC wouldn't even go near for fear of attracting a lightning bolt.

The JC simply does not mention the phenomenon of real antisemitism in the Trump Administration despite the presence of people like Sebastian Gorka, a fully-fledged fascist and member of the neo-Nazi Vitézi Rend who was Deputy Assistant to Trump.

Whereas The Forward is not afraid of taking up debates about matters of concern to the American Jewish community regardless of Zionist sensitivities, the Jewish Chronicle ploughs the ever more shrill and hysterical furrow of a bogus and fabricated ‘anti-Semitism’.

You are unlikely to read an article such as American Jewry Is Israel’s New Opposition Party in the JC. Editor Jane Eisner writes about how 'the two largest, most important Jewish population centers on the planet are drifting dangerously apart.'  Eisner is a liberal Zionist.

Kaminski 

Michal Kaminski of Poland's Law & Justice Party, who openly wore the Chrobry Sword, the symbol of the anti-Semitic National Radical Camp (ONR) is defended as a 'friend' of the Jews by Pollard!

Pollard has never hesitated to defend anti-Semites who support Israel. His concern is the ‘Jewish State’ not the Jews. Pollard went out on a limb to defend the Tories' membership of the European Conservative and Reform group alongside anti-Semitic parties and members. Pollard defended one fascist in particular, the Chair of the ECR, Michal Kaminski, who had defended villagers in Jedwabne who had herded up to 1,600 Jews into a barn which was then set alight in 1941.

This did not stop Pollard in the Guardian of 9.10.09. writing that Kaminski was ‘one of the greatest friends to the Jews in a town where antisemitism and a visceral loathing of Israel are rife.’ Kaminski, even if he didn’t like Jews very much loved the State of Israel. Poland's Kaminski is not an antisemite: he's a friend to Jews

A good example of the dishonest and distorted coverage of anything related to Corbyn is the story in this week’s Jewish Chronicle ‘Corbynites in plot to unseat pro-Jewish MPs.’ Most readers would assume that this meant a campaign to target Jewish MPs because they are Jewish. The first paragraph of this article talks about ‘A co-ordinated and targeted hard-left plot to threaten and destabilise Jewish MPs and their supporters in the Labour Party.’

In fact Joan Ryan, the MP who was no-confidenced by her own Labour Party Enfield North last week is not Jewish or for that matter pro-Jewish (whatever that means).  Ryan is the Chair of Labour Friends of Israel and is well known for her greed and dishonesty having claimed the most expenses of any MP in 2006-7 and having been runner up in 2005-6, to say nothing of having tried to frame Labour delegate Jean Fitzpatrick as an antisemite at the 2016 Labour Party Conference. [See The Lobby - Episode 3 'An Antisemitic Trope]

The letter from 29 Jewish Rabbis supporting Jeremy Corbyn

The affair of the letter which was signed by 29 Orthodox Jewish Rabbis last week, dissociating themselves and their communities from the Chief Rabbi’s letter attacking Corbyn, is another example of the Jewish Chronicle’s dishonesty. When the letter first surfaced the Jewish Chronicle of 10th September claimed that the letter had been ‘condemned as fake’. Two days later it owned up to the fact that it was in fact genuine although it still tried to discredit it. Organisations distance themselves from ‘letter from Charedi rabbis’ defending Corbyn ran the headline. Because of course a letter from Jewish rabbis opposing its own campaign of vilification doesn’t quite square with the image of Corbyn that the Jewish Chronicle has portrayed.

In other words the JC now accepted that the letter was genuine.  However at no point did the JC follow normal journalistic practice which notes at the bottom of any article just what if any changes have taken place since the article first appeared.

 Skwawkbox, which has covered this issue in depth, noted that ‘The JC appears to use software to prevent any archiving of its pages.’ Not only had the headline changed but the content of the article had also changed.  Now it was being alleged, not that the letter was a fake but that the rabbis who signed it had been ‘misled’ as to its contents.

A spokesman for the Union of Orthodox Hebrew Communities in response to these allegations by the Jewish Chronicle commented that ‘This is a sad state of affairs and a commentary on the lengths to which some people will go. Of course the letter is genuine.’ And of course the Zionist organisations behind the anti-Semitism campaign have a vested interest in pretending that they represent the whole Jewish community. To them being Jewish is synonymous with being a Zionist.

Shraga Stern, the Haredi Jewish activist who helped organise the letter from twenty-nine Orthodox rabbis sent a letter to the JC in response to their attempts to portray the letter as either a fake or unrepresentative. Not surprisingly the Jewish Chronicle has not published it.  It is reprinted below.

It now appears that Haredi Jews, who are sick of the attacks in their name on Jeremy Corbyn by the Board of Deputies are now planning their own protests outside the Board's annual fundraising dinner in November.

Clearly the Board of Deputies have been stung by this demonstration by Haredi Jews that the Board does not speak for them.  The JC has acted as their faithful mouthpiece. In the Jewish Chronicle this week the Board condemned what they called the “divide and rule” tactics of a “small group of malcontents”. The Board’s anger boiled over adding that “The Charedi community has had no better ally than the Board of Deputies” and that they “should be protesting against antisemitism, not against attempts to fight it.”

This is doubly ironic as the Board has never organized against genuine anti-Semitism.  From the campaign against Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascism in the 1930’s to the Anti-Nazi League in the 1970’ the Board’s position has always been to appeal to Jews not to confront the fascists and anti-Semites.  Only when it comes to critics of Israel does the BOD gird its loins!

The Haredi community, because it is visibly different in how it dresses stands out as distinctly Jewish. Uniquely among Jews it experiences racist and anti-Semitic attacks. This was the one section of the Jewish community that was comprehensively ignored by the Report of Parliament’s Home Affairs Select Committee on Anti-Semitism which was issued in October 2016.

As the letter below from Shraga Stern makes clear, the Board of Deputies represents a minority of Jews in Britain.  The Board's claims have been supported by the BBC and the British media precisely because it is in their interests to support Israel.

Unpublished Letter from Shraga Stern to the Jewish Chronicle

We believe that the anti-Semitism smear and witch hunt against Jeremy Corbyn is a Zionist agenda and has all the footprints leading to that direction. It is being promoted by the Board of Deputies and by the self-made unelected JLC, who are a well-known pro-Israel bodies-  and it’s completely cruel and unjustified.

The Board of Deputies and JLC do not represent Charedi Jews, who do not have voting rights at BoD elections and number today over fifty thousand in the UK, of which 30,000 live in Stamford Hill. According to a 2007 study by Dr Markov Wise at the University of Manchester, almost three out of every four Jewish births in the UK – home to the largest strictly Orthodox community in Europe – are in the Charedi community.

The strange thing here is that they are 263,000 Jews living in UK according to the 2011 census. Half of them do not belong to a synagogue according to BoD population statistics, so this half would not have voting rights in the BoD elections.

Add this up with 50,000 Charedi Jews it equals 181,000 out of 263,000 who will not fall under the BoD and the BoD do not represent them. So how on earth can the BoD have the chutzpah to say they represent the Jews in UK? BoD is a pro-Israel body and only represent a very particular part of Jews who are pro-Israel.

Charedi Jews and most mainstream Jews in the UK are only interested in Anglo Jewry matters and do not get involved in Israel politics. However saying this we do recognise that real anti-Semitism is an issue all over the country and in all political parties. We are convinced that Jeremy Corbyn is doing his best to tackle real anti-Semitism in his party while still giving his people of his party freedom of speech to criticize Israel.

However, we are nowhere near to fleeing this country because of this. As a Charedi Jew I can say that Charedi Jews are the most vulnerable to anti-Semitic attacks as they dress differently and one can see that they are Jewish, therefore this support letter from leading Charedi rabbis from Stamford Hill including Chief Rabbi Padwa from the Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations (UOHC) says it all.

Jeremy is a long friend and neighbour of the Charedi community here and everyone who knows him personally says that he loves Jews and is against real anti-Semitism, and this is what he has done all his life.

Times have changed and we will not stop here. We will not be hijacked by the BoD and JLC. We will go further then this to make it clear to all the government bodies and to the press, not to fall into the trap of the BoD and JLC who are extremist Zionist bodies and do not represent mainstream Jews.

Discussions are now taking place that I’m personally aware of and talks are in place on considering setting up a new body of Board of Deputies of mainstream British Jews that will focus only on anglo-jewish matters and will represent the entire Jewish population no matter if they are associated to a BoD synagogue or not and act for the many Jews not the few.