Bill Carmichael: Why anti-Semitism is the greater threat

MORE than a week after the jihadi massacre in Paris and thankfully the widely predicted “Islamophobic backlash” hasn’t materialised.

No real surprise there. Despite acres of newsprint devoted to the evils of “Islamophobia”, there was no real evidence of a widespread anti-Muslim backlash after the 9/11 attacks in the US, the Madrid train bombings in 2004, the London bombings of 2005, the murder of Lee Rigby in 2013 or the attacks in Ottowa and Sydney last month.

Despite the real provocations from the jihadis, ordinary people proved perfectly capable of distinguishing between their peaceable Muslim friends and neighbours and the murderous fanatics killing innocent people in the name of Allah.

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Islamophobia is little more than an establishment concocted myth designed to divert attention away from the real horrors. Why worry about the four people gunned down in cold blood in a kosher supermarket when you can fret over someone who may have been slightly rude to a woman in a headscarf riding on public transport?

In fact the public have remained remarkably tolerant of Islam despite the bloody, unprovoked attacks unleashed on civilians on virtually a weekly basis.

Muslims do not face any widespread hostility and are not routinely discriminated against. They are free to worship, work and bring up their families safely in Western democracies.

Indeed that explains why millions of Muslims are desperate to escape despotic Islamic regimes in the Middle East and set up home in the free and tolerant West. Would that be the case if Muslims were living in fear in our societies? Of course not.

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I’ll take claims of “Islamophobia” seriously when I see armed police protecting Muslim schools in the way they have been forced to protect Jewish schools across France.

And here is the point: there is in fact a growing racist campaign directed against a minority in the West – but the target is Jews, not Muslims.

Jews and their synagogues and schools are increasingly the subject of attacks, not just in France but in the UK and elsewhere in Europe.

In sharp contrast to the imaginary “Islamophobic” incidents, the threat is very real. For example, in 2012 an Islamist gunman murdered three children and a teacher at a Jewish school in Toulouse and the Jewish supermarket in Paris last week was deliberately targeted.

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As a result, tens of thousands of Parisian Jews are leaving the city for somewhere safer.

A shameful aspect of this is the collusion of the Left in Britain and other Western countries with Islamist bigots. Under the guise of supporting the Palestinians, the Left have joined forced with extreme Muslims to demonise the tiny democracy of Israel.

They like to dignify this with the label “anti-Zionism”, but it is nothing more than pure Jew hatred.

And in Yorkshire we don’t have to travel far to find hard evidence of this Left wing bigotry. Bradford West MP George Galloway wants to establish a Nazi-style “Judenfrei” zone in the city by banning all Israelis from visiting.

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And equally outspoken Bradford East MP David Ward blames all the world’s problems on what he calls “the Jews” (he keeps forgetting to use the more politically acceptable terms such as “Zionists” and “Israelis”).

The real problem in the West is not the non-existent victims of “Islamophobia”, but the very real threat of violent jihadism and anti-Semitism. And the British Left should be deeply ashamed of its collaboration with the Islamo-fascists.

Backfiring policy

It seems that Labour’s energy price freeze idea has had an impact – by keeping prices artificially high.

In normal market circumstances we could have expected to see fuel bills drop in response to the decline in world oil prices, saving the average customer about £100 a year. But most of the big energy companies are refusing to pass the savings on to customers because they fear they will be locked into low prices until 2017 if Labour wins the May general election.

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Labour leader Ed Miliband has vowed to freeze prices if he is elected Prime Minister, which of course is a perfect incentive for the energy companies to raise prices still further around about the end of April. So thanks Ed; you’ve already cost us £100 a year, and you are not even in power yet!

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