The UK’s former chief rabbi, Lord Sacks, has spoken of feeling ashamed while watching “too many good people doing nothing” to tackle the rise of antisemitism in Britain and elsewhere in Europe.
Leaders had a particular responsibility to take a stand, Sacks said as he delivered Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4 on Friday. As well as violent attacks on Jewish members of the public in continental Europe, he referred to Tuesday’s parliamentary debate on antisemitism, in which a succession of MPs urged Jeremy Corbyn to act against offenders within the Labour party.
“I have been doing Thought for the Day for 30 years, but I never thought that in 2018 I would still have to speak about antisemitism,” said Sacks.
“I was part of that generation born after the Holocaust who believed the nations of the world when they said ‘never again’, but this week there was an unprecedented debate about antisemitism in parliament. Several MPs spoke emotionally about the abuse they had received because they were Jews or, more scarily, because they had fought antisemitism.”
Sacks referred to recent figures released by the Community Security Trust, which showed antisemitic incidents in Britain had risen to their highest level since the charity began keeping records in 1984, and averaged nearly four a day in 2017.
“This is not the Britain I know and love,” said Sacks, who also cited the case of an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor who was murdered in France last month.
This was just the most harrowing of a series of attacks in Europe in recent years, he said, adding: “There is today almost no European country where Jews feel safe – and this within living memory of the Holocaust, in which one and a half million children were murdered simply because their grandparents were Jews.
“It has happened because of the rise of political extremism on the right and left, and because of populist politics that plays on people’s fears, seeking scapegoats to blame for social ills. For a thousand years, Jews have been targeted because they were a minority and because they were different, but difference is what makes us human. A society that has no room for difference has no room for humanity.”
He finished by warning: “Where there is hate, freedom dies, which is why each of us, especially we leaders, have to take a stand against the corrosive power of hate.
“All it takes for evil to flourish is for good people to do nothing. Today I see too many good people doing nothing, and I am ashamed.”
