This one’s for Takweel and also for Steph
This year, more than any other, let’s remember what Bonfire Night is all about: religious conflict, terrorism, punishment. Also remembrance and reconciliation, hard won.
Perhaps the least-appreciated virtue of the English (yes, I mean the English) is the way in which for most of the time, they really don’t give a toss. For most of the time, they really don’t give a toss about your sexuality, the colour of your skin, or your religion. We could, I suppose, chalk this up to an advanced liberal delicacy of conscience, but I suspect it’s mainly just laziness. ‘Yeah, mate, whatever does it for you’.
It’s why surveys show that Britain is just about the most relaxed European country when it comes to immigration. It’s why gay marriage, inter-racial marriage (hey, anyone remember that as an issue?), and religious tolerance are now just part of the weave and weft of British society. It’s why, when asked, Muslims reckon Britain is one of the easiest countries in the world to be Muslim. Because, mate, mostly we just couldn’t give a toss. Each to his own.
What we forget is that this tolerance/laziness is a bit unusual: you’ll not find it in Scotland, or in Ireland, north or south, or indeed in many places in Europe. (A friend of mine, an Ulsterman re-based in England, once asked his English employer - ‘Who do you employ here?’. The boss was stumped, not realizing that he was expected to identify ‘Catholic’ or ‘Protestant’. Not so long ago.)
We also should recognize what it took to achieve the blessed state of not giving a toss.
It can take a very long time. Years ago, when living in York, I invited a friend up to stay. They were a bit reluctant, a bit cagey, which puzzled me. It turned out my friend was Jewish and she had always given York a wide berth because York’s Jews were massacred in 1190, burned to death in Clifford’s Tower. (Background: successive bad harvests put two powerful local landowners in financial difficulties, owing money to York’s Jews. Having burned the Jews, they directed the mob to the Minster, since the debt-contracts were lodged under the alter. . . ) Perhaps she thought, York is not such a great place for Jews.
Time alone may not produce the desired result: more is required. The English approach which worked eventually has had two complementary strategies. The first was admirably set forth by Elizabeth 1st:
"I have no desire to make windows into men's souls."
It sounds simple, but at the time this was radically brave. England’s monarchy was (mildly) Protestant, whilst its population was still majority (mildly) Catholic. When she was crowned in 1558, England was under direct military threat from both the militant Catholic superpower of Spain and scarcely less-menacing Catholic superpower of France. Plots and subversion were financed from abroad, and abounded domestically, particularly after the arrival in Scotland of Mary Stuart in 1561. In 1570, the peril was made formal when the Pope excommunicated Elizabeth, giving formal religious sanction to subversion up to and including assassination. In 1588, famously, the Spanish emperor launched an Armada to make good that threat.
Still: ‘I have no desire to make windows into men’s souls’.
You can think what you like, but that uninterest was matched by an intense state patrol on what you said, and did. Think what you like, but step out of line in public, and the repercussions were likely to be painful, even lethal. This was true in Elizabeth’s time, as Mary Queen of Scots’ fate showed, an early death meted out also to numerous ‘treacherous’ Catholic priests who died either in prison or on the gallows.
The ‘think what you must, but keep your nose out of public business’ strategy didn’t succeed quickly or painlessly. Guy Fawkes, famous son of York, ran off to join the Spanish forces battling Dutch protestants in the Low Countries. Battle-hardened and now with a knowledge of explosives, he returned to England where in 1604 he joined a bunch of young well-connected but disaffected Hooray Henries bent on blowing up not just Parliament, but the entire Establishment in one fell swoop.
This is what we should remember on November 5th, an English terrorist who’d been blooded fighting for England’s sworn enemies, allied with privileged youthful revolutionaries bent on taking out the entire Establishment in a single epoch-making spectacular. Sound familiar? ‘I know of no reason / why the gunpowder treason / should ever be forgot.’
It was a long painful journey to ‘couldn’t give a toss.’ The strategy of private tolerance allied with state vigilance broke down catastrophically during the Civil War (partly thanks to the Scots, who had never been party to it in the first place); then again in 1715 and in 1745 (Scots again). But it was well-enough established that by 1766, the process of English Catholic emancipation was underway, and essentially near-complete by 1829.
Consider, though, its extraordinary success. During the 1970s, at the height of the Northern Ireland Troubles, when republican bombing campaigns opened up in England, the murder and mayhem was seen not so much as a ‘Catholic’ problem, but rather an ‘Irish’ problem. So far as I know, Irish republican terrorism provoked no significant anti-Catholic feeling, or anti-Catholic action, in England. The religious element may have seemed overpoweringly important in Ulster - in the mainland, not so much.
It’s end-September 2023, and I’m at the car-hire in Leeds-Bradford airport being shown my unexpected upgrade by Takweel. He’s young, well presented, and I’m a bungling idiot who long ago forgot his UK PIN. It’s raining, and I’m juggling for a card which might work. I’m also tired because I landed in the middle of the night and have had only a couple of hours sleep. But Takweel’s pretty new on the job, and he’s absolutely going to make it work one way or another, despite me. And eventually it does.
‘If you could give me a recommendation, it would help’.
‘Sure, what’s your name’.
‘Takweel - it’s a bit unusual’
So we get talking, and I find a way of asking where his family originally came from without offending him. I’m genuinely interested. He says: ‘Kashmir’. I say: ‘Wow, tough neighbourhood.’ And he agrees.
I liked Takweel. He was a nice guy and good at his job, and had a well-cultivated Yorkshire accent. I want Takweel to have a great future in Yorkshire. I want Takweel to build himself the sort of life his family could never hope for in a Kashmir fought over by India and Pakistan.
But here’s the thing. It’s quite possible that a few weeks later Takweel also found himself in Leeds at demonstrations which only the purblind couldn’t recognize as a bleak flowering of Jew-hatred.
And as far as I’m concerned, Jew-hatred is about the lowest expression of humanity of which it is capable. I loathe and fear it. And for me, at least, I’m perfectly OK with Isaiah Berlin’s tongue-in-cheek definition that an antisemite is someone who hates Jews more than strictly necessary. Bearing that in mind, when I see or read of some public figure protesting about Israel with an energy and frequency absent from their critiques of other nations with boundary issues (Turkey/Cyprus; Russia/Ukraine; India/China; China/Tibet; Kashmir itself - there’s no shortage) then I think I recognize what’s going on.
It is particularly despicable when, like some ghastly pustule reaching its escape pressure, this poison sprays out from those with the biggest public platform. From those who have every reason to know better. My experience ‘on the doorstep’ on housing estates in North Yorkshire is that my contempt for antisemites is shared far more widely among the general public than among its public ‘representatives’.
So I think our best hope to tackle this new infestation of antisemitism should embrace the English way:
Make no windows into men’s souls, but be absolutely prompt and resolute with those mouthing off about it in public or, worse, encouraging active antisemitism.
Leading chants about jihad? Preaching the murder of Jews in the madrassa? Sharing celebratory TikToks about Hamas’ pogrom? Publicly supporting Hamas and their ‘right’ to pogrom? Intimidating Jews in public? I’d go for instant and draconian repressive action, up to and including where possible deportation; including exclusion from public sector employment, public housing, public benefits.
The message has to be very publicly clear: think whatever you like, but if your public words or actions are likely to encourage antisemitic violence here, or anywhere, you’re in big trouble very quickly.
I don’t pretend for a moment that this strategy is easy, or will eradicate Islamic antisemitism quickly or painlessly. What I do believe, however, is:
that my Jewish friends need public support which they are not getting right now, and;
that Muslims like Takweel also need support for him and his family to make the best life they can for themselves in Britain.
And that means caring enough to give him the room, and the the protection, to eventually - like other Englishmen - not give a toss.