Elephants in rooms
Your report (JC, June 8) on the on-going dispute between the Charedi community and Ofsted over the latter’s attempts to enforce the teaching of its concept of British values is notable by its avoidance of the ‘elephant in the room’.
Clearly, the UK educational establishment is trying to avoid being accused of Islamophobia and is targeting Charedi schools to show that it is not concerned solely with Islamist extremism.
While there are certainly some aspects of Charedi education which could be improved, these do not include teaching the ‘gospel truth’ of evolution or introducing children to ‘alternative lifestyles’.
In this context, the comments of Lord Justice Singh and Mrs Justice Whipple, in their Judicial Review of the policies of the North London Coroner, Mary Hassell are particularly relevant:
“What on its face looks like a general policy which applies to everyone equally may in fact have an unequal impact on a minority. In other words, to treat everyone in the same way is not necessarily to treat them equally.
“Uniformity is not the same thing as equality ... the hallmarks of a democratic society are pluralism, tolerance and broad-mindedness”.
These are the true British values with which the Charedi community agrees.
Martin D. Stern
Salford M7
Learn no lessons
Miriam Shaviv thinks that as supporters of Israel, we can learn from the “political consciousness” of Jews on the far left (JC, June 8.) But what do they have to teach us? How to be treated as useful idiots by the Corbynistas and Islamists ranged against us? How, as recently, to mourn the death of Hamas fighters whose avowed aim was to kill as many Jews as they could reach?
The Jewish far-left may indeed be fluent in the hackneyed, cliché-ridden vocabulary of our enemies: intersectionality, Israeli “apartheid” and all the rest of it. Will that help them to make a single BDS supporter stop and really think about the issues?
The whole purpose of such terminology is not to promote debate but to shut it down. If the left is really more “politically sophisticated” — well, I’d rather be an unrefined realist than a sophisticated dupe.
Dave Whippman
Blackpool FY1
Cheap abuse
Rabbi Schochet has coined a new word, “kapo-ism”. (Words carry real power, JC June 8). He says describing someone’s behaviour as kapo-ism is not the same as calling them a kapo.
Use of this term, together with others such as ‘like a concentration camp guard’ and the ubiquitous, indiscriminate use of ’Nazi’ should be taboo, unless being used to describe the real thing.
Every time someone otherwise uses any of these terms, they dilute the force of the word and the unique loathsomeness of it.
A kapo was a person who emerged from a living hell. Making a new ‘ism’ out of the word is cheap and harmful.
We surely have enough vocabulary at our disposal without resorting to the Shoah.
Frances Canning
Stanmore HA7
When Ken Livingstone told a Jewish reporter he was like “a concentration camp guard”, he caused outrage. If he had said, “Your practices are those of a concentration camp guard “ or “concentration camp guard-ism”, would that have been ok?
Comparing Jews who act in a manner one disapproves of to kapos is quite simply obscene.
Inventing “kapo-ism” to avoid criticism in comparing the behaviour of Jews to those of kapos, when such comparison is exactly what was intended, shows a disingenuous lack of integrity.
Apologising to those who might experience “unintended offence” by the “kapo-ism” accusation is the height of hypocrisy - since offence was precisely the intention.
I am not calling Rabbi Schochet an obscene, “integrity-less” hypocrite. I am saying his article displays an obscene hypocritical lack of integrity.
That’s different.
Leslie Bergman
London NW8
I was appalled by Rabbi Schochet’s use of the concept of “Kapoism” as an insulting epithet in his dispute with those who said kaddish for Palestinians killed at the Israeli/Gaza border. He is not the first Rabbi to improperly do so, but he and all the others should be utterly ashamed of themselves.
Only those who lived through the terrifyingly debased, murderous hell in which the inmates of the concentration camps found themselves have any right to pass judgement on those who were forced to do such appalling things to their fellow prisoners. Sitting comfortably in his Mill Hill abode is certainly not the place from which Rabbi Schochet is ever likely to be able to sit in judgement on those who lived in the most inhumane conditions ever contrived by man.
In future, he would do well to think before he speaks, an essential quality in any rabbi.
Michael Lazarus
Northaw EN6
He was no Jew
In your back page article World Cup Jews (JC, June 8), you say that Edgar Davids wore “protective glasses that his Jewish mother no doubt nagged him to wear”. When one doesn’t take a subject seriously, or indulges in lazy stereotypes, mistakes are perhaps inevitable.
The first player you highlight, Alfréd Schaffer, was not, in fact Jewish. He coached freely in Nazi Germany in the 1930s and then in Italy and Hungary during the war years. The Hungary team he took to the final of the 1938 World Cup did contain one Jew, Ferenc Sas (Sohn), but this was a far cry from previous years. When Béla Guttmann, the subject of my biography, made his debut for an excellent Hungary team in 1921, there were six Jews in the starting XI.
Hungary were again beaten in the 1954 final, this time with no Jews in the team.
If the Hungarian authorities and much of the Hungarian population hadn’t participated so willingly in the subjugation and subsequent murder of 600,000 Jews, then who knows? That country might now have two World Cups to its name. You might have mentioned the prolific goalscorer Rudolf Wetzer, captain of the Romania team at the 1930 World Cup. He was later accused by the post-war Communist regime of being a follower of “revisionism and bourgeois ideology” (i.e. of being a Jew), and emigrated to Israel.
Alfréd’s namesake, Emanuel Schaffer, was very much a Jew and also a Holocaust survivor. Only perhaps another Jew can imagine the pride he must have felt as coach of the Israel national team during the 1970 World Cup tournament, the most prestigious stage in sport, less than three decades after his parents and three sisters had been shot into a pit.
David Bolchover
London N14
Surely no surprise
In the same week that we had confirmation from a federal court that the Argentine prosecutor investigating allegations that former President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner covered up Iran’s role in the 1994 AMIA Jewish centre bombing was murdered, we also had Argentina declining to play a football match in West Jerusalem due to BDS threats to burn Messi shirts.
Truly you could not make this up.
Andrew Berkinshaw-Smith
Walton on Thames KT12
Sauce for the goose
I find it deeply amusing how, in the same breath, members of the Jewish community rightly condemn the BDS movement and proclaim how divisive and even destructive its activities are, while also calling for a boycott of the new Coop supermarket due to open in Hampstead.
Avi Moshe
Higher Blackley M25
