Farage’s party is wooing far-right Jews

Today, the racist, anti-migrant party, Reform UK, is launching a “Reform Jewish Alliance” at the Central Synagogue in London's West End. They hope to recruit Jews, despite their leader, Nigel Farage:

• endorsing as “good and true” the “principles” of Enoch Powell, whose speeches unleashed racist violence in the 1960s and ’70s;

• amplifying the antisemitic Great Replacement Theory in accusing the Hungarian Jew, George Soros, of trying “to fundamentally reshape Europe’s racial makeup and to end the continent’s Christian culture.”

And Matt Goodwin, Reform UK’s Gorton and Denton by-election candidate, endorsing Donald Trump and saying:

• “our so-called ‘leaders’ have been importing millions of people from … inferior ‘honour cultures’ from the Third World”.

Jews are a migrant and refugee community. We know what it means to be the victims of racism, and that targeted groups must not be left to challenge it alone. Ninety years ago in Cable Street, London’s East End Jews blocked Mosley’s Blackshirts from marching through their shared streets – but they only achieved this with the support of their Irish neighbours and other antifascists. Multiculturalism unites. Fascist hate divides.

As Donald Trump lets his murderous ICE agents loose on communities across the United States, encouraging his Reform UK allies to follow suit, we give solidarity to this week’s Jews Against ICE Protest in Washington DC called by T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights and Bend the Arc: Jewish Action, supported by 50 Jewish organisations and 100 rabbis. Like them, we stand alongside those, particularly Muslims, who are at the sharpest end of this ideology today, and we call on Jewish people to reject Reform UK’s far-right politics and their so-called Jewish Alliance.

In contrast, London’s Central Synagogue, which is hosting Reform UK’s bid to recruit Jews to its Islamophobic crusade, has worked to foment fear of other minorities. It has demonised the peaceful marches for Gaza, with their vibrant Jewish Bloc, claiming spuriously that the protests threatened synagogue congregations.

The destruction Israel is wreaking in Palestine, together with rising tension and insecurity in Britain, are polarising the Jewish community. More people are supporting humanitarianism, defending refugees, and campaigning with other minorities. However, a small but growing fraction of Jews express violent Islamophobia and make alliances with antisemites as long as they support Israel and attack progressive politics here.

Farage will recruit some far-right Jews, just as Mussolini and Mosley did in the 1930s. But we now know where those fascist movements led. Today, Reform UK’s constant vilification of refugees, migrants and minorities, with the collusion of the media and other political parties, is giving confidence to racists and fascists, including antisemites, and normalising their malignant hatred. Once again, we are hearing of people afraid to leave their homes, of children racing home from school for fear of being attacked and of people walking miles because they don’t dare travel by bus.

Jews came to this country seeking sanctuary from violence and discrimination. Britain’s response was its first peacetime anti-immigration law, the 1905 Aliens Act, which blocked the entrance of Jews fleeing Tsarist persecution in the Russian Empire. It enabled the UK to refuse asylum to all but a few refugees from the Nazis before the war and to slam the door on most of the stateless, violated remnant of the Holocaust after the war.

These were the people Nigel Farage was referring to when, according to multiple reports, he spent his schooldays bullying Jewish students, saying, “Gas them” and “Hitler was right”. He now dismisses that abuse as “banter”.

This is the leader of the organisation the Central Synagogue is hosting.

Read a response to Farage’s teenage bullying, Banter – the refuge of the abuser.