Seventy seven years ago on this very day the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet troops. The liberation of this and other camps by Allied forces was confirmation of the stories that had been trickling out of Nazi-occupied Europe, stories carried by Allied agents and others, that the Nazis were murdering millions of Europe’s Jews. The revelation that citizens of Germany, one of the most cultured and educated peoples of Europe could become so bestial shocked the world and had a massive impact on society including British society.

One of those impacts was to lessen the support for organised anti-Semitism in the UK. The remnants of the British Union of Fascists for example, never regained the sort of support that they had before the war, during the post-war period. Some of this withdrawal of public support was obviously down to disgust at the Mosleyites actively choosing to side with Britain’s enemy but I believe that another cause of that drop in support was the revelation that what the Mosleyites were campaigning for could easily lead to the sort of horrors that were perpetrated during the Shoah. The revelations about the crimes of the Nazis quite rightly shocked people and caused many, both Jews and non-Jews to say ‘Never Again’.

Britain became a place where it was better to be Jewish than it would be in places like France or Spain or other European countries and even in some US states. Jew hatred ceased to be as socially acceptable as it once was in the UK and although some still thought of Jews as being ‘odd’ or ‘strange’ there was no appetite for the sort of murderous Jew hatred that had existed in British politics before the war.

This admirable situation where Jews were seen as fellow Britons but merely with different food and beliefs lasted well. In fact it lasted right up until the importation of millions of people who came from Islamic cultures that have Jew hatred shot through them like the name of a seaside town on a stick of rock.

Thankfully there are many Muslims who have abandoned the cultural and religiously inspired Jew hatred that they may have been fed in their pasts, but we should not ignore the fact that Jew hatred is more common in Islamic communities than it is in the general population. The writer and academic Dr Rakib Eshan has written an excellent piece for Spiked about how society needs to acknowledge that there is a current of Jew hatred that exists in Britain’s Islamic community. He has also pointed out that the recent hostage taking outrage in the USA by a Muslim from Blackburn in the UK is evidence that Jew hatred attitudes are commonly circulating in some Islamic communities.

Dr Eshan said that Britain’s Muslim communities have an anti-Semitism problem and it is one that needs to be discussed openly. However, according to Dr Eshan this is not what is happening.

Dr Eshan said:

So, lest there be any doubt, anti-Jewish Islamist terrorist activity is a well-established threat. But the British public could be forgiven for never hearing much about it, such is the silence of Britain’s political and cultural elites over the issue. They are too fearful of causing offence or of being accused of bigotry or Islamophobia to risk addressing the discriminatory behaviours and attitudes that persist among ethnic and religious minorities. But address them we must. For there is a wealth of data that tells us that anti-Jewish views and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories are far more prevalent among British Muslim communities than they are among the general population.

Dr Eshan then went onto describe how attitudes conducive to Jew hatred were much more prevalent in Islamic communities than in the wider population. For example he said that Holocaust denial was a belief held by 8% of British Muslims when compared to just 2% of the general population. The figures that Dr Eshan gave regarding Jew hatred in Islamic communities showed that although such hatred was not commonplace, the fact that it was higher in Islamic communities than outside them was something to be concerned about.

What caught my eye about Dr Eshan’s piece is what he said about segregated Islamic communities and how they are more likely to produce people who believe Jew related conspiracy theories or hold anti-Jewish views. This to me looks like a damning indictment of the policy of state sponsored and state approved multiculturalism. The policy of multiculturalism has encouraged communities to create ghettos and to siloise themselves away from the wider community which means that those who live in segregated Muslim communities do not have that much contact with others with different beliefs and different lives. This lack of contact with members of other groups means that conspiracy theories about other groups or hostility to those groups is allowed to fester and is not challenged in individuals, by having those individuals meet with others who are Jewish, Christian, Hindu, atheist or agnostic.

Maybe the problem with Islamic Jew hatred would not be as bad as it is at the moment had successive governments taken a different path to that of multiculturalism and instead followed a policy of assimilationism? Ghettoisation is never in my view a positive thing in a modern country like that of the UK. In its worst forms it could end up with situations where a person can be born in a ghetto and have almost no contact with those outside the ghetto, this lack of contact or involvement with others impoverishes the individual and increases division. This need to be aware of and involve yourself with what is outside the community is a lesson that has been learned by some of the more insular Jewish communities in the UK. Some of them now take much more of a part in local politics in some areas as they’ve realised that if you don’t take part in the political process then you don’t have the right to complain that your views have been ignored. This engagement policy also exposes any insular community to new ideas and different people and breaks down barriers.

Dr Eshan said that there was a primary indicator of whether a Muslim would harbour anti-Jewish attitudes and that indicator was whether or not they were integrated into British society or not. This finding makes sense to me. After all those who are integrated will be meeting all sorts of people outside of their own group and this helps to stop the person othering those who are different to them.

Dr Eshan said:

My own study, Muslim Anti-Semitism in Contemporary Great Britain, which was based on December 2019 polling data, showed that Muslims who were less well integrated into British society than others were more likely to believe that British Jews put loyalty to Israel over loyalty to the UK. They were also more likely to think that there is too much Jewish control in the spheres of politics, banking, media and entertainment.

Dr Eshan added:

The impact of social integration is discernible in British Muslim perceptions of other faith groups and countries. As my research showed, British Muslims who have a network of close friends of the same faith tend to have have a less favourable view of other non-Muslim groups. Whereas British Muslims who are more integrated through their friendship and kinship networks have a comparatively favourable view of Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists and atheists. It is also worth noting that better integrated British Muslims have – on average – a more favourable view of the US, Israel and India than more socially segregated Muslims. They also tend to hold a less favourable view of Iran, Saudi Arabia and Palestine than more socially segregated Muslims.

I find that I cannot disagree with much of what Dr Eshan says. The political classes who have created a policy of multiculturalism that helps to build and strengthen ghettos, have done the country no favours by doing so. As someone who is acutely aware of the danger of living in an echo chamber, which is why I quote from the Guardian just as much as I would from the Mail, I can readily see how a religious and cultural echo chamber in the form of an Islamic ghetto can end up promoting and sustaining Islamic extremism.

Dr Eshan has ably diagnosed what the problem is with regarding Islamic Jew hatred in Britain and I believe that a policy of multiculturalism that allowed Muslims to live separately without any reference to the wider population has been a disaster. The question now is what is to be done to reduce the impact of these Islamic ghettos like those in Blackburn that seem to produce more than their fair share of Islamic extremist headcases? Personally I believe that the first step would for the political class to admit that multiculturalism has been a failure and to embark on a policy of guided assimilation to get people mixing and break down the ghetto walls.

Britain managed in the fifties and sixties to reduce Jew hatred to something on the fringe of society. I have to say that was a great achievement. But sadly we imported many of the same anti Jewish attitudes that Britain had previously got rid of when we imported large numbers of the followers of Islam. The great tragedy is that successive governments refused to do anything that would increase integration and instead followed a multiculturalist path that almost guaranteed that separatism and therefore extremism would result.

On Holocaust Memorial Day we should give some thought to how, under the misguided belief that multiculturalism was the way forward, we’ve allowed and indeed encouraged the sort of separatism in some Islamic communities, where the sort of anti-Jewish conspiracy theories so prevalent in the 1930’s can flourish. Maybe we should see the growth of Islamic Jew-hatred in separatist Islamic communities as one of the big failures of multiculturalism and make the necessary changes to our society to bring about better integration and also reduce the problems caused by Islamic Jew-hatred.