The UK's Community Security Trust is fueling, antisemitism with claims of Covid 'conspiracy'

JEWISH institutions which claim to be combating antisemitism by labeling known Covid truths as ‘anti-Semitic conspiracies’ are eroding public trust and creating an environment of confusion and suspicion. The result is a rise in antisemitism.

In July, the Community Security Trust (CST), a British charity which works to protect British Jews from antisemitism, released a report titled Covid, Conspiracies and Jew Hate: Antisemitism in the Covid 19 conspiracy movement. The CST lists its mission, in part, as being to ‘speak responsibly at all times, without exaggeration or political favour, on antisemitism and associated issues’. Yet the report is anything but responsible. 

The report identifies some clear and concerning cases of antisemitism in relation to Covid, for example, a leaflet headed ‘Every single aspect of the Covid agenda is Jewish’, which the CST reports was handed out in the West Midlands. It cites a case in which a man was refused entry to a supermarket in North London for declining to wear a mask. The man became aggressive and shouted: ‘The Jews are behind this.’ 

The report also lists as ‘antisemitism’ some examples of legitimate comparisons between so-called public health policies enacted in the name of Covid, and policies which led to the death of six million Jews in the Holocaust. 

The CST devotes a section to ‘Misuse of Holocaust Imagery by Covid Conspiracy Activists’ which shows protesters in London wearing yellow stars. This motif was picked up by Covid protesters in 2020/21 to protest against the segregation and ostracisation of those who chose not to take the Covid 19 vaccines. The message was clear: we know where this sort of division and discrimination leads, especially when accompanied by a propaganda campaign designed to paint the out-group as ‘disease spreaders’. 

The imagery is legitimate. 

Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, Susan Bachrach PhD notes: ‘In Nazi Germany, national or public health — Volksgesundheit — took complete precedence over individual health care. Physicians and medically trained academics, many of whom were proponents of “racial hygiene”, or eugenics, legitimised and helped to implement Nazi policies aiming to “cleanse” German society of people viewed as biologic threats to the nation’s health. Racial-hygiene measures began with the mass sterilisation of the “genetically diseased” and ended with the near-annihilation of European Jewry.’

To ‘save’ themselves from this ‘biological threat’, the Nazis introduced the Nuremberg Race Laws over a period of some years, beginning in 1935 with the Reich Citizenship Law, and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour. These laws stated that Jews could not be German citizens, and that they could not intermarry with non-Jews. In 1941, a new law decreed that Jews must wear a yellow star at all times. The intent was clear: to mark Jews out as an underclass to humiliate and dehumanise them. 

This dehumanising was an act of discrimination that the world told itself would never again be enacted against Jews. Yet some eight decades later, and in Tel Aviv of all places, at the height of Covid madness deckchairs appeared on the public beach marked ‘Reserved for Vaccinated People Only’. An outcry immediately went up, prompting the municipality to remove the deckchairs and apologise for the ‘mistake’, but they carried on with a series of ‘vaccinated-only’ concerts that same month, to ‘encourage’ people to take the vaccine. Meanwhile across Israel the unvaccinated were barred from bars, restaurants, gyms, concert halls, shopping malls and cinemas. Teenagers were told they would not be allowed to take end-of-year exams without getting jabbed, and thousands of jobs were lost  because of vaccine mandates. 

The comparison is so obvious that protesters in Israel wore home-made yellow stars and carried banners comparing the vaccine passport to the Nuremberg Laws.

It prompted myself and two others to write the Isaiah 62 Declaration, which states: ‘It must be recognised that the Nazi regime initially excluded Jews from German society by claiming that such measures were necessary on grounds of a “public health emergency” in order to prevent the spread of infectious disease. Anti-Covid policies which excluded the unvaccinated from society, and denied many more their basic right to make a living, to travel, even to hospital treatment and to food, were asserted on the very same grounds.’ The declaration has now been signed by more than 800, including rabbis, Holocaust survivors, human rights campaigners, an Israel Prize laureate and many more. 

However, the problems with the CST report don’t stop there. 

To map out the ‘Covid 19 Conspiracy Movement’, which is apparently so beset with antisemitism, the CST offers its own definition of this so-called conspiracy theory. It cites three main threads – quote:  

• Covid-19 is a fake pandemic and elites are using it as a pretext to control the world population and force them to accept unnecessary laws and lockdowns (known as the ‘plandemic’ or ‘scamdemic’). 

• Covid vaccines are experimental, unsafe and are killing people – perhaps are designed to do so – and vaccine programmes should be stopped. 

• Face masks do not offer any protection in the fight against Covid and are detrimental to health.

There is ample evidence that all three of these statements are at least partly true. Let’s be clear here: when people can see with their own eyes that statements such as ‘Covid vaccines are experimental’ are true but labelled ‘conspiracy’, it erodes their trust in the CST as a valid source. That opens the door to people wondering whether anything the CST says can be trusted. 

On the one hand, the CST is expecting people to swallow a lie; then on the other, it’s asking them to believe that directly anti-Semitic conspiracy theories are not true. We cannot be surprised if some people erroneously conclude that at least some of the anti-Semitic theories must have some truth to them after all. 

In this way, the CST is driving the very thing it seeks to combat. By conflating genuine concerns with conspiracy, the CST is driving antisemitism, not preventing it. As I’ve argued previously here, when antisemitism spikes, civil discord for all is not far behind. Antisemitism is not just a Jewish problem. 

The CST’s failure is all the more galling as in fact there has been a clear surge in antisemitism over the last two years. As trust in institutions erodes, people will naturally look for a scapegoat to blame; time and again that scapegoat has been the Jewish people, and is again today. 

That’s why it’s more important than ever that our institutions come clean and admit that there are valid questions around the government’s response to Covid, the vaccine efficacy and safety, and whether masks hinder or help the spread of viruses. Then its concerns over clear antisemitism will carry much more weight with the public.

This article first appeared on The Conservative Woman. They post a number of articles daily on the growing threats to free speech, freedom of conscience and to our Western Judeo-Christian heritage. Visit their website to find out more.