Click for Contents

P.O. Box 1805,Jerusalem 91017 Tel. 972-2-531-5440, Fax: 972-2-537-9489 Advertising Fax: 972-2-531-5425, Email Editorial: [email protected] Subscriptions: [email protected] Web site: http://www.jrep.com

Jewish World: The Ignorant Jewish Face of the Far-Right
Daniella Peled London

Patricia Richardson, newly elected councillor for the British National Party, sees no contradiction in koshering her chicken and representing a party headed by racists and Holocaust-deniers

As a newly elected councillor for the far-right British National Party, Patricia Rich-ardson is angry about a lot of things, including foreigners, immigration and political correctness. She blames the "thought police" for censoring terms like "nigger brown," and warns that asylum seekers threaten to overrun British cities.

So far, so predictable. Except that the 59-year-old housewife switches seamlessly from complaining about "ethnic cultures" to reminiscing fondly about learning Hebrew in heder, shabbes dinners with the family, and her mother�s kosher kreplach. Richardson, n�e Feldman, has the dubious honor of being the first Jewish representative of a party rooted in white nationalism, racial violence and Holocaust denial.

It�s disconcerting to hear Yiddish -- the language her Transylvanian-born immigrant grandparents preferred to English -- trip so lightly off the tongue of someone who represents a party rife with religious prejudice and theories of Jewish world domination. But to Richardson, who won her seat in the June 10 local elections in the Epping Forest district of Northeast London, it�s not at all meshuga. "There is no anti-Semitism within the party," she insists, speaking to The Report by phone from her family home in Loughton, Essex. Richardson insists the BNP has moved on since it evolved out of the neo-Nazi National Front in the early 1980s, and now boasts a benign manifesto based simply on stronger law and order, freedom of speech, total withdrawal from the European Union, and an end to all immigration. Her membership makes perfect sense, she says, "because Jewish people who are British and have lived here for all their lives are in as much danger from all the PC, the overt Europeanizing, as anybody else."

That�s not a view shared by the majority of the community, who regard the changes within the BNP, its leadership littered with convicted race-hate criminals, as purely cosmetic. "It is still an extremist and racist party," says Neville Nagler, director general of the Board of Deputies, the representative body of U.K. Jewry. He describes the community as "disgusted" with Richardson.

Mike Whine, spokesman for the Community Security Trust, a body that monitors threats to the Jewish community, agrees. "The BNP have no newfound empathy for the community," he says. "They�ve merely found an easier target," namely asylum seekers and Asians. "They are still anti-Semitic, endorse Holocaust denial and promote violence against Jews."

Richardson grew up in a traditional, Shabbat-observant home in Stoke Newington, a north London suburb adjacent to the ultra-Orthodox enclave of Stamford Hill, attending heder and a Jewish youth club. Her interest in religion dissipated after she married out, but she ensured her two sons underwent circumcision -- she says "bris" -- and still insists on koshering all her chicken.

Although Richardson has never been to Israel, she has sympathy for the country. "The rest of the world says it�s doing naughty things, bombing people, but if you look at the basics of it, it�s defending itself, it�s under threat. A lot of Islam�s world agenda is to push Israelis into the sea; they want to totally remove them, whereas Israel just wants to be left alone." Apparently unaware of the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt, Richardson says she plans to visit, "when I can freely cross the border and go and visit the Pyramids and the Sphinx."

Her ignorance of world affairs is perhaps unsurprising, considering she and her retired college lecturer husband, Tom, gave up reading newspapers long ago, "because my husband used to get so wound up." Still, the reports of crime, Islamic extremism and EU expansion provided the impetus for them to join the BNP two years ago, following a local recruitment drive. They found a group that mirrored their own concerns. "People can�t talk about the party in normal terms, they start jumping up and down and getting really hysterical," she complains, blaming media prejudice for the BNP�s race-hate reputation.

That's a view probably shared by her party chairman Nick Griffin, for rather different reasons. In 1997, he co-authored "Who Are the Mindbenders," in which he "uncovered" a Jewish cabal controlling the media and promoting "an endless diet of pro-multiracial, pro-homosexual, anti-British trash." The following year, the Cambridge graduate received a two-year suspended sentence for inciting racial hatred in the Rune, a quarterly magazine, in which he derided the Shoah as the biggest swindle of the century.

The party�s No. 3, Tony Lecomber, has 12 criminal convictions, including one for stabbing a Jewish teacher. Former national organizer Richard Edmonds also has a record of violent assault, along with Holocaust denial.

The increasingly politically savvy Griffin now avoids making flippant jokes about the "Holo-hoax." Since he took over as leader in 1999 from BNP founder John Tyndall, a man who once described Adolf Hitler�s "Mein Kampf" as "my bible," Griffin has worked tirelessly to reinvent both himself and the party as a mainstream, respectable force, with some success. When Richardson is asked about her party leader�s record on anti-Semitism, an uncomfortable silence ensues, and she eventually denies all knowledge of it. She�s met Griffin, she says, and he has no problem with the fact that she�s Jewish.

The party chairman no doubt recognizes that a Jewish councillor is a prize asset for a party intent on distancing itself from its anti-Semitic record, a tactic his European allies also appear to be exploring.

In March, Sonia Arrouas, a 42-year-old Jewish woman, was elected as a councillor in France�s southern Provence-Alpes-Cote-d�Azur district for the Front National, whose leader Jean-Marie Le Pen was hosted by the BNP on his recent visit to the U.K. In Belgium, the far-right Vlaams Blok has actively courted the Jewish vote, calling for greater efforts to combat anti-Semitic attacks by Muslim youths, and consistently supporting Ariel Sharon�s government. And in Austria, the former Freedom party leader, Jorg Haider -- who made much of recruiting a Jewish journalist, Peter Sichrovsky, as his deputy -- and is now a provincial governor, hosted a group of locally born Israelis last summer, ahead of a mooted return to politics.

BNP representatives miss no opportunity to use Richardson as an example of their new respectability. How can the party be anti-Semitic, asks their national press officer, Phil Edwards, when they have a Jewish councillor? In any case, he adds, "We are the only party opposed to the spread of Islam in this country. Muslims are the Jews� biggest enemy, so I would have thought you would support that."

Such crude divide-and-rule, scare-mongering tactics have been central to the BNP�s campaign strategy. Its latest election leaflet, printed in the red, white and blue of the British flag, drives home its point with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, featuring a photograph of grinning Middle Eastern-looking men burning a Union Jack, contrasted with a charming shot of a BNP candidate with his young family and the caption, "My dad�s not a racist." The blurb claims refugees are making Britain "explode" -- this despite the fact the U.K. ranks only 10th in the European Union in terms of asylum applications -- and warns they will even destroy the verdant English countryside; it says the government plans to build five gigantic cities over the next 30 years to house over 5 million immigrants, an allegation a government spokesman dismisses as "completely ludicrous."

But playing on public fears of illegal immigration and Muslim extremism has had some tangible results. Nearly 900,000 people voted for the BNP in the June council, European and London mayoral elections, even though the party certainly lost potential votes to the U.K. Independence Party. More respectable than the BNP but also fiercely anti-Europe, UKIP�s star candidate was former talk show host Robert Kilroy-Silk, famously sacked by the BBC in January after describing Muslims as "suicide bombers, limb amputators, women repressors." UKIP won 12 seats in the European Parliament, with Kilroy-Silk himself becoming, ironically, an MEP, and scored a full 16 percent of the vote. (Labor�s 23 percent share was its worst result in living memory, widely attributed to a "Baghdad backlash" as a result of the highly unpopular Iraq war, while the Conservatives fell 10 points to 27 percent of the vote, amid fears UKIP may seriously damage their prospects at the next general election.) The BNP, nonetheless, succeeded in winning seats for 21 local councillors, among them both Richardson and her husband, up from 17 in 2003, and five in 2002.

Whether Jewish voters played any small part in the BNP�s rise is highly debatable, although the BNP is keen to emphasize the supposed support it has found within the Jewish community. Barry Bennett, BNP organizer in Bournemouth, a coastal town with a large Jewish population, says he has a Jewish father, and knows of other members with Jewish ancestry, although the individual he eventually produces admits to have only had a Jewish step-grandfather. Bennett claims that both his father and a fully Jewish half-sister voted for him in the last election. Richardson also says at least one member of her family agrees with her politics, and adds that she has received messages of support from Jews, including the elderly widow of a rabbi, whom she coyly declines to name.

Jewish leaders do not envisage a Jewish drift toward far-right parties. "The community will continue to challenge their racist agenda," says Nagler, "together with all those people who believe in equality, respect and understanding."

Veteran anti-fascist campaigner Gerry Gable, editor of Searchlight magazine, a publication dedicated to tracking and exposing the far-right in Britain, and himself Jewish, is similarly unequivocal. "The whole Jewish community is going to treat Richardson as a raving lunatic or as a traitor." But, he adds, "one good thing that�s come out of it is that it�s created an awful upheaval in the organization." Many BNP activists have reacted with fury at the election of a Jew, with former leader Tyndall deriding Richardson�s candidacy as a gimmick that has caused "further alarm, dismay and disillusionment in the ranks of the BNP�s most dedicated supporters and activists."

It seems that Richardson�s election says little about the political orientation of the U.K. Jewish community and much more about the party�s internal struggle for respectability. Gable believes the BNP has already squandered any possibility of achieving anything near the electoral success of rightist European parties. "Griffin had this idea he was going to be the British Jorg Haider but he�s not pretty enough or clever enough," he adds, rejecting the idea the BNP will ever be powerful enough to win a seat in Parliament or even control a local council.

In the meantime, still slightly surprised by the controversy surrounding her election, Richardson is looking forward to beginning her work as a local councillor and vice chair of the council�s complaints panel. First up on her agenda, she says, with a conventionality that belies her party�s more controversial concerns, is making sure local pensioners don�t miss out on any of their pension entitlements.

July 26, 2004

  

Jewish World