Remarks to Anti-Semitism Policy Trust

Speech by Blair McDougall MP to The Antisemitism Policy Trust event at Labour Party Conference.

CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY

Thank you to David Rich for the intellectual lead he has given on tackling hatred against jews. And for making it utterly impossible to follow him. Thank you also to Joani Reid for being such a great Parliamentary colleague, a great neighbour in East Kilbride, and for taking on the role of Chairing the All Party Parliamentary Group on antisemitism.

As a Member of Parliament your inbox fills up with the most extraordinary and fascinating things. As I was thinking what to say to you today, I received an email asking if I would be interested in working on issues around the future of the arctic in Parliament – that resulted in me disappearing down a rabbit hole on the consequences of climate change on the frozen north. One thing that caught my imagination was the worry that there are ancient and deadly viruses trapped in the permafrost. As temperatures rise and the earth thaws, these long forgotten infectious diseases, that we no longer have any earned immunity against, may be released into the world once more.

You can see the metaphor taking shape here.

The exam question my friend Danny Stone set was whether we are living in a new age of antisemitism? Antisemitism might be the oldest hatred but I want to focus on the word: new.

To extend the metaphor of disease I want to suggest is that what is new is that we have had an outbreak (possibly an epidemic), that antisemitism is more infectious in our modern world, and that the infection is more difficult to treat than in the past.

Firstly let’s look at the outbreak. The evidence has piled up: the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights, the Centre for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry, the Community Security Trust, the OSCE, the Trust themselves and many others have reported significant increases in antisemitic incidents.

We know that jews face not only racism but also the denial of their experience of racism, so let me say to those who might doubt it – these pieces of research include increases in incidents of desecration of cemeteries, attacks on synagogues, and assaults on jewish people.

The increase is documented, it is real,  and worst of all it is working. 70% of European jews report that they are intentionally becoming less overtly Jewish in some way out of fear of racism. A deeply traumatised population is reacting in the way that racists hope they would: hiding Jewishness.

Secondly antisemitism is now more infectious. Last night I made the mistake of dipping into the ‘for you’ tab on twitter: Elon Musk’s innovation that seems designed to ensure that you encounter hours of racist clips. I found myself watching video after video about secret tunnels beneath synagogues that jews use for rituals using the bodies of non-jewish children.

In the past if you wanted to indulge in the blood libel you had to visit a shady far-right meeting above a pub somewhere and be handed a badly photocopied pamphlet. The internet made it easier – the blood libel was on demand. Modern social media has made things worse still: it is blood libel without demand. Antisemitic tropes are served up casually, regardless of whether there is anything in your own online behaviour that would suggest that you harbour nazi sympathies. Worse, now that blue ticks are available to all, the racists are given the same pre-eminence as the most professional news sources in the world.

So there’s an outbreak, it’s more infectious, but it’s also more resistant to treatment.

Those of us with a history of challenging antisemitism know that it has always been difficult to cure people of a hatred that is often disguised as something progressive or a hatred the existence of which is denied to exist at all. But I think there’s something else, something new going on.

In our age too many who are politically engaged forget that the purpose of politics is to resolve differences rather than to perpetuate them. People’s political views have become their personal identities. Political challenge feels like a personal insult. Algorithms encourage us to perform for those who share our views and to performatively fight with those we disagree with. The real, essential work of persuasion is utterly neglected.

There is too little room for correction of language, for complexity to be acknowledged, for consensus to be created.

And of course, the enemies of our rights and rules based societies, all the time in the background, are amplifying antisemitism, knowing that it undermines our liberal democracies.

In this environment we need new ways to challenge the oldest of hatreds. That is difficult for us – our instincts are to fight back immediately but sometimes that simply causes people to dig in deeper rather than acknowledge their error. Of course we cannot have a hierarchy of hatred, but we do need to categorise and recognise that so many, especially in the last year, have unwittingly consumed, digested and regurgitated antisemitic ideas.

I can’t claim to have the answer to this, but I think back to a public meeting I did recently when someone unthinkingly, and I’m sure unknowingly, repeated an antisemitic trope. I instinctively, reflexively, and, if I’m honest, performatively knocked him down. I felt good about it but afterwards I realised I had done nothing to change his mind. In fact, the manner in which I challenged him probably made him less likely to change his mind and his behaviour.

So in this new age of antisemitism, we need new cures that overcome the resistance to treatment.

I want to return to the theme of disease and end with a passage from a verse by the Hungarian poet Garai Gabor. Writing in the shadow of the Holocaust his poem describes the horrors and atrocities of the 20^th century which he says are “like snakes all interlocked, blood money and foreboding, frozen hard in the ice.”

He ends with the question that should haunt us all:

“What if this ice should once be thawed?”