On the eve of the British local elections earlier last month, a voter found on their doorstep a leaflet from the local Reform U.K. campaign bearing the slogan, “Vote Green, Get Islamism.” These words were emblazoned across a Janus-faced image of the Green Party leader Zack Polanski: one half showed him as he actually appears, while the other had been crudely altered to give him a long beard and “Middle Eastern-style” headgear, fusing two supposedly conflicting identities into a single image. This was only one of a series of coordinated attacks against Polanski in recent months, as the Green Party has emerged as a significant electoral threat to the Labour Party.
That Polanski’s Greens espouse “Islamism” is certainly a notion so ridiculous that it hardly warrants serious discussion, yet it was precisely this framing that many in British politics and the media have decided to adopt. Closely linked to it has been another line of attack: that, like Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, the Greens under Polanski have a terrible “antisemitism” problem. In fact, former Conservative cabinet minister Michael Gove went so far as to declare that, in this context, “Zack Polanski is worse than Jeremy Corbyn.” Naturally, Polanski has been subjected to the same smear campaigns that Corbyn faced in the run-up to the 2019 general election.
We may put the sheer absurdity of the allegations aside. That they revolve around the accusations of “Islamism” and “anti-Semitism” suggests, however, that at least according to the prevailing orthodoxy, these two ideologies are somehow intricately connected. Indeed, if we asked today, “Who is to blame for the rise in antisemitism?” in Britain, we could be led by the authorities to believe that it is the “Islamists.” The Telegraph’s Allison Pearson wrote quite clearly, for example, that “we all know who is to blame for the rise in antisemitism – and it is not Israel.” In her estimation, the rise in antisemitism was due to “the boil of Islamic extremism.” Pearson’s authority would never be questioned on such matters, of course, as it found expression in a “paper of record” whose new owners recently set out their editorial guidelines, among which was absolute devotion to the Israeli perspective in their coverage of Palestine.
Considering the ever-broadening scope of the operational definition of antisemitism across major British institutions, it is not entirely unimaginable anymore that being a Muslim itself would eventually be classified as “antisemitic.” In this way, the “far-right” concept of “Muslim invaders” would finally be fully developed, and this would be a remarkable echo of the past as the Frankish chronicler Fredegarius invoked in 658 a similar image of a “circumcised horde” who would, as the prophecy went, defeat Byzantine forces – referring to Muslims in Asia Minor at the time. Another similar image could be found in the Council of Toledo in 694, too, where King Egica warned against the Muslim advance in North Africa, amid widespread antisemitic accusations that “Hebrews, infuriated by repressive measures taken against them, were getting ready to assist the new barbarian hordes advancing from the East.”
It is certainly tempting to speculate on this theme further. If a critic of Pearson’s penned an article holding “Judaic extremism” responsible for the rise in Islamophobia, which has been rather extreme in recent years, what would be the reaction? Would the New York Times, another paper of record, ever be able to print that article, when it knows now that it can face considerable backlash for reporting with rare accuracy on some of the objective facts of the grotesque and systematic abuse of Palestinian detainees?
It is not difficult to see what purpose is served by claiming that “Islamism” leads to “antisemitism.” The latter refers to the demonization of Jewish people, among other things, and it is truly remarkable to witness someone like Pearson choosing to combat it by demonizing Muslim people instead, by conveniently referring to them as Islamic extremists who are apparently the primary cause of the rise in antisemitism in Britain. Given this picture, what if someone on the “other side” of the debate comes up and, instead of classifying simply being a Muslim as an act of antisemitism, says that accusations of antisemitism are actually inherently Islamophobic?
