A Moral To The Picture

 A now-deceased British Conservative MP of my acquaintance, who was in equal measure a proud Jew and a proud Englishman, used to look aghast at the insistence, during the 1970s and subsequently, of the organised Jewish community to ingratiate itself with multicultural communities.

He believed that such attempts were not in the interests of Anglo-Jewry, since such attempts risked pitting the Jewish community against the British mainstream by committing the Jewish community to advocate for the particularist agendas of such minorities instead of identifying itself (as hitherto) with British society as a whole.

Convinced that the welfare and destiny of Anglo-Jewry was inextricably linked to the welfare and destiny of the British majority population, he was a supreme political realist who foresaw the evils that would stem from mass Islamic immigration, though of course he was condemned by the Left, and by most of his fellow members of the Board of Deputies, for saying so.

He was also condemned by other deputies for forthrightly opining that the Board's attempts to cosy up to other religious/ethnic minorities was misguided, a waste of time and effort.  At worst it would entail appeasement and smacked of an unwise retreat from Anglo-Jewry's traditional integrationist outlook; at best it would not make members of those other minorities love Jews or Jewish causes the more, he predicted: those minorities had concerns of their own to occupy them.

Knowing that for certain Jewish individuals and Jewish congregations and Jewish day schools in Australia today the concept of "social justice" seems to revolve almost exclusively around the issue of "asylum seekers" (a term the Left, including the ABC, uses for anyone who claims to be a refugee, economic migrant or not; advocating for them; performing acts of service for them; collecting food and clothing and money for them, including Muslims by the way), I thought of that British MP's warnings when I saw this photo of a group of demonstrators at yesterday's Israel-demonising rally in Sydney: