Jack Engelhard
Jack Engelhard’s classic international bestselling novel Indecent Proposal, which later became a worldwide hit movie, has been republished to meet readers’ demands. His other major works include Compulsive: A Novel, his award-winning post-Holocaust Montreal memoir Escape from Mount Moriah, plus Slot Attendant: A Novel About A Novelist. His website: www.jackengelhard.comSomewhere in his latest book, British novelist Martin Amis writes about America that it is more like a world than a country. I take it then, that diverse as we are, we act like one big family so tight that we don’t much care what they are doing, say, in Britain. Let them play cricket. We’ll stick to baseball …and please keep your anti-Semitism to yourselves.
By way of saying Jeremy Corbyn, Leader of Britain’s Labour Party, or as some would say, leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition.
Around here we don’t call them Labor or Labour. We call them Democrats. Pew says 27 percent support Israel. (It’s 80 percent among Republicans.)
Or…as others have it – Jeremy Corbyn, the face of British anti-Semitism.
But what do we know. We’ve got our own problems, our own political squabbles and our own anti-Semites.
Around here we don’t call them Labor or Labour. We call them Democrats. Pew says 27 percent support Israel. (It’s 80 percent among Republicans.)
That’s a lousy number, and it is not how it used to be. The shift began somewhere in the 1970s when the Palestinian Arabs postured themselves as freedom fighters. As when they tossed Leon Klinghoffer overboard in his wheelchair and slaughtered unarmed Israeli Olympians in Munich.
At about that time, Liberals here in the USA and there in the UK, turned their backs to their Labor brothers in Israel and began to sympathize with the “Palestinian cause.”
The Ma’alot slaughter (1974 – 25 Israelis murdered, 22 of them children) and the Passover Massacre (2002 – 30 Israelis murdered) made the Palestinian Arabs even more lovable.
It is probably more complicated than that, but in any case, Leftists everywhere could not resist the charms of Arafat and later Abbas. Even the savages of Hamas, who rioted again this weekend and a group we elaborately covered in the thriller “The Bathsheba Deadline,” are likewise (secretly) a favorite of the Left, even snagging lovely turncoats like Natalie Portman.
Around here, the last British prime minister we really remember is Margaret Thatcher and then of course there was Winston Churchill – but Theresa May we don’t know much about. We only know what we read in the papers and the name that keeps coming up is her challenger, Jeremy Corbyn. He does not seem to do much besides associate himself with anti-Semites.
The papers say it so often that it may be time to believe. Something’s going on and it’s more than Corbyn. His Party is awash with anti-Semites. So is his country.
That’s what the papers say and…and some of them are themselves anti-Semites…as are the airwaves from the BBC.
Reminder that it’s nobody here saying this. It’s coming from over there and we have been trying to give it no attention -- until we heard from MP Luciana Berger.
It wasn’t our business until Berger cried out, in the House of Commons, against the abuse she faces personally for being Jewish, symptomatic of a new wave of anti-Semitism reaching all across the UK and blemishing her own Labor Party. Her address was a Howl of alarm and it touched all good people who found it online, where it got thousands of views, some defiantly supportive and others stubbornly anti-Semitic.
We scratch our heads and wonder how this could be happening in a nation so enlightened and advanced. This isn’t Poland. When did the Jews, who number no more than 270,000 across the UK, become such a bother to a nation of 65 million? Rubbing it in, Corbyn links arms in fellowship with Hezbollah and Hamas, groups whose anti-Semitism is not merely political but deadly.
Yet with elections due in 2020, Corbyn may become prime minister after all. His Party has strong numbers despite or perhaps because it’s been so hospitable to anti-Semites.
British author Howard Jacobson has written eloquently on what it means being British and Jewish (despite winning the Man Booker Prize, 2010).
Should we worry? Yes. We should worry about a trend.
Even Alan Dershowitz, who chooses his words carefully, is alarmed that someone like Cynthia Nixon could become the next governor of New York.
Emphatically, attention must be paid to what’s doing in the UK. This we know – anti-Semitism knows no borders.
New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.
He is the author of the international book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal” and most recently the two journalism thrillers “The Bathsheba Deadline” and “News Anchor Sweetheart, Hollywood Edition.” Engelhard is the recipient of the Ben Hecht Award for Literary Excellence. Website: www.jackengelhard.com