One of the most hypocritical and nasty tirades against Jeremy Corbyn in the right-wing

Jewish section of the war against Labour, that started in 2015, was made by the former Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, who in August 2018 compared Jeremy Corbyn to Enoch Powell. I say “hypocritical” because, just a few months earlier, Rabbi Sacks listed Douglas Murray’s book, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam as one of his four favourite books of 2017; a book that included an apologia for and re-interpretation of Enoch Powell’s horrifying “Rivers of Blood” speech, a speech that incited violence towards immigrants.

In Rabbi Sacks’s rave review of Murray’s book, he wrote: “Murray weaves a tale of uncontrolled immigration, failed multiculturalism, systemic self-doubt, cultural suicide and disingenuous political leadership.” He called it: “Accurate, insightful and devastating.” In more liberal circles, the Eton and Oxford-educated Murray has been roundly condemned as a dangerous Islamophobe. The writer Pankaj Mishra described this book in The New York Times as, “a handy digest of far-right clichés”. Not surprisingly, Murray’s book has been enthusiastically promoted on Facebook by none other than Hungary’s antisemitic, Populist Right premier, Victor Orban

Rushing to defend Rabbi Sacks after his attack on Corbyn were the Board of Deputies and the Jewish Chronicle, whose editor, the execrable Stephen Pollard, is one more gushing fan of Douglas Murray.

But times move on. Yesterday, the Board of Deputies announced it was holding a meeting on 17th March at Portcullis House, asking: “How should the Jewish community respond to the Far Right?”, with speakers including prominent MPs and commentators and a representative of the Community Security Trust which monitors the rise in antisemitism.

Good. And not before time. In its publicity the Board rightly highlights the Far-Right terror attack at Hanau last week (in which most victims were Muslims and also included a Roma immigrant to Germany from Poland).

Even without the outrage in Hanau, it may have also come to the Board of Deputies’ notice that the Johnson government they were so keen to get in power instead of the alternative – a Corbyn-led Labour government – has, in the short time since the General Election, taken measures to deny unaccompanied child refugees the right to be reunited with family members in Britain;  deported people to Jamaica, who came to Britain as children, but have spent some time in prison; produced a blueprint for a more racist and unjust immigration system; and welcomed as a government adviser Andrew Sabisky – a eugenicist – who was forced to resign, but only under pressure from anti-racist protesters.

Meanwhile a backbench Tory MP, Dehenna Davidson, is in trouble for being pictured

recently with members of the far-right ‘Democratic Football Lads’ Alliance’ (DFLA), and the Tory MP for Shrewsbury, Daniel Kawczynski, spoke at a conference earlier this month alongside the anti-migrant, anti-refugee Italian politician, Matteo Salvini, antisemitic Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán, and Marion Marechal le Pen of the far-right National Rally party (formerly the French National Front).

Given the belated, but welcome, switch of focus by the Board of Deputies to the threat from the Right, I wonder, then, how they will respond to the invitation by “Jewish Book Week” to Douglas Murray to speak on 3rd March about his 2019 book: The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity, where he will be introduced by the (Jewish) right wing Islamophobe, Melanie Phillips? This is the same Melanie Phillips who was roundly condemned by figures across and beyond the Jewish community for her column in the Jewish Chronicle last December urging  people not to “fall for bogus claims of ‘Islamophobia'”. The Editor of the ailing Jewish Chronicle (its sales are plummeting, and it has just had to make a big out-of-court settlement to an elderly Labour Party activist in Liverpool for telling lies about her) was strongly criticised for publishing this piece by Philips.

Jewish Book Week’s website helpfully lists its “supporters”. Among them you will find the Community Security Trust and the Board of Deputies. Let’s see what they say and do about the presence of Murray and Philips at this festival, in this increasingly febrile atmosphere of right-wing racism.