April 23, 2008 - By BNP News

The Board of Deputies of British Jews – working with the London Jewish Forum and Community Security Trust – has launched a misguided campaign, with the slogan, “Your Voice or Theirs”. Board of Deputies president Henry Grunwald told the Jerusalem Post: “The higher the turnout across the country, the harder it [will be] for the BNP to succeed.” Every vote for a mainstream political party is… a vote against extremism,” Grunwald added.

Is Grunwald right? Should the Jewish community vote as a bloc to deny the BNP representation? Are they a monolithic community or one which contains different opinions within it? Pat Richardson is a councillor and a member of the British National Party (BNP). She told the Guardian recently: “I’m in the BNP because no one else speaks out against the Islamification of our  country,” Support for Israel

We support the right of Israel to exist and defend itself against the relentless terrorist attacks of Islamic fanatics. This seems to be what led Ruth Smeed, of the Board of Deputies, to tell the press that: “The BNP website is now one of the most Zionist on the web – it goes further than any of the mainstream parties in its support of Israel.”

Natural allies

The BNP has made its position clear many times. We are not ‘Zionists’, our overall concern is to look after the interests of our own country, and not to bother ourselves with or interfere in the affairs of other nations. But we have repeatedly denounced the neo-Nazi cranks who infest the fringes of British politics, and we reject anti-Semitism as part of a dangerous and outdated cycle of last-century hostility between Jews and Gentiles – a hostility that can only benefit our mutual enemy, Islamic imperialism.

Loyal British Jews are our natural allies in the fight against the Islamic fundamentalists who want to destroy the Western civilisation so many of whose core values we hold in common. That is just one reason why many Jews will be voting for the BNP. Let’s remember also, however, that this is only one reason. Jews will be voting British National Party for other reasons too: because they are concerned about crime, because they are worried about the economic decline of our country, because they are concerned about the disintegration of community spirit and decent values. In other words for the same reasons as so many other British voters, including many Sikhs and Christian West Indians. As Martin Wingfield commented in our paper Freedom recently:-  “today there are an increasing number of Jews campaigning for the BNP and feeling very comfortable with their political choice.”

When the Chief Rabbi a few years ago wrote a book entitled “Will Our Grandchildren Be Jewish?” he articulated precisely the same concern that we have for the future of our people in the same overcrowded multi-cult nightmare that threatens traditional Jewish and British identities alike.  Just because a Jew wants to preserve and celebrate his ancestral culture and identity doesn’t make him a ‘hater’ of Gentiles, and nor does our wanting to preserve and celebrate our ancestral culture and identity make us ‘haters’ of Jews, or any other ethnic group for that matter.

Anyone but the BNP?

Jews are also rejecting the call to vote against the BNP for other reasons. They are being asked to vote for Establishment parties. Few believe they have any solutions. Many know that the tide is slowly turning against them. ”It is important that olim [immigrants to Israel] vote, because any vote is one to keep the BNP out. It doesn’t matter who you vote for, so long as it isn’t for the BNP, and that will help keep the BNP out of the London assembly,” said Jenni Woolf, National campaigns fieldworker for the Union of Jewish Students (UJS).

It doesn’t matter who you vote for? Really?  Jews are asked by some of their self-appointed ‘leaders’ to identify themselves with a political class that is increasingly despised and distrusted purely to deny the British National Party – and our growing number of voters -  representation. This seems cynical, immoral and unwise to many.

A Jewish Green or Socialist? Bad Luck!

In addition to advocating a pro-Establishment vote the Board of Deputies campaign is bad news for Jewish Greens, Jewish Socialists and Jewish Independents. The campaign is based on boosting voter turnout to lower the percentage the BNP is likely to achieve. Presuming this worked (and we don’t think it will) it would also have the effect of denying Greens, Socialists and Independents representation. Does anyone really want a London where political diversity is shut out? Would the election of two or three BNP members to the GLA, a Green and a Socialist be such a bad thing? Wouldn’t a BNP voice act as a check or balance on some of the crazier ideas?

The ‘Red Ken’ problem

In London there is a particular problem – ‘Red Ken’. One Jewish BNP supporter puts it like this:-

Q.    Who Compared a Jewish journalist to a Nazi guard?

* Portrayed young British Jews as potential soldiers in the Israeli army, thus raising the accusation of “dual loyalty” (it is well-known that only Israeli citizens can serve in their country’s army)?

* Edited a newspaper which ran a cartoon showing then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin dressed in an SS Uniform and captioned with the words “The Final Solution” in Nazi-style Gothic script?

*  Embraced Sheikh Yusuf al Qaradawi, a leading ideologue of Islamist terror and an avowed anti-Semite?

A.    Not the BNP but Ken Livingstone.

Many in the Jewish community are aware that anti-Semitism is widespread on the Labour ‘left’. Often it is cloaked by a terminology which is anti-American or anti-Zionist but the motive is clear. Why then do the Board of Deputies and CST single out the British National Party for attack on the basis of arguments and positions we left behind in the last century, while saying nothing about the current radical Islamist agenda of ‘Red’ Ken’s core Muslim constituency? Are they as out-of-touch with their community and its interests as our own political ‘leadership’?

We wouldn’t be surprised, which is why we urge all concerned to ignore the self-serving and backward-looking bias of those (neo-Nazi cranks and professional Zionists alike) who would foster suspicions between the British National Party and the grass-roots Jewish community in order to maintain their own power-bases, rather than facing up to the realities of the Era of Global Jihad: We hang together, or we hang separately.