plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

Jews need to read " the writing on the wall".......

“The more things change – the more they stay the same”

And this is certainly true for anti-Semitism in the UK. A Jewish charity, the Community Security Trust, monitors anti-Jewish incidents in the UK and reported a slight drop in 2011 compared with 2010.

The way in which the changes were announced, according to a report in the Jerusalem Post today, proves that percentages in statistics are meaningless if the total numbers are relatively low. For example, a drop of 9% in direct anti-Semitic threats is, in reality a difference of 3 – down from 32 to 29. Hardly statistically significant. Similarly a fall of 19% in “violent”anti- Semitism is a difference of 22 incidents, and so on.

The last paragraph of the report is, perhaps, a more realistic way of looking at the figures. There it is revealed that the last 6 years have produced the 6 highest totals of incidents since the monitoring began.

I am not sure that presenting the results on the “glass half full” basis benefits anyone. It seems to me that nothing has changed in the way the community, and especially its leadership, tends to minimise bad things that happen to Jews. All this in the best tradition of trying hard not to do or say too much to annoy the goyim. Of course the incidents are reported, but their effects are played down and straws are grasped to place the best possible interpretation on the figures.

I am convinced that anti-Israel feelings are inextricably entwined in the anti-Semitic actions, and the report supports this contention. Given the ever-increasing growth of the Muslim and Eastern European populations in the UK, there is no chance of these sentiments ever-changing.

It seems that UK Jewry does not wish to pay attention to the saying ” those who fail to learn from the lessons of history are doomed to re-live them.”

They can only live in the hope that George Santayana was wrong!