I have been hesitating over writing this column for some weeks. The topic is sensitive and involves people I either know or admire or both. With the volume of antisemitism growing to deafening proportions, I finally decided it’s too important not to write.
I should also admit to some unease that all three are women. That is accidental, I simply don’t personally know three men in equivalently influential positions.
The first of the three is Lady (her husband is a Lord) Nicola Mendelsohn. I am a friend of her parents and used to teach her in Manchester, UK where she grew up.
She chose advertising as her career and success soon gained her senior positions in some of the world’s most successful advertising firms that handle the accounts of clients like, Honda and Heineken. She has been repeatedly voted one of the most influential women in the UK by several organizations.
Nicola occupies several other prestigious roles like non-executive director of Diageo which owns 42% of all Scotch Whiskey. Unsurprisingly and typically, Nicola is involved in lots of charity work too.
But it’s her most significant role that makes her one of the three women in this piece. Nicola Mendelsohn is the Head of Global Business Group at Meta, leading the company’s relationships with top marketers and agencies, as well as global partnerships.
Meta is the 2021 rebranded name for Facebook. In the last few days, it has posted its best quarterly results in two years. If only that was the only metric for judging Meta, but it isn’t.
The scandals surrounding the company are legion. One of the most egregious (and there are so many) is its inaction over pedophiles. Several governments have accused it of offering sanctuary to child abusers. However, I am going to focus on another of its worst failures, antisemitism.
I have written here before about Facebook’s abysmal and ongoing inaction over antisemitic content on its site. Much worse; since October 7, has been its “Fact Checkers” interventions to quell and stifle posts supportive of Israel or condemning Hamas.
Here’s only one example from the Spectator Magazine’s, Rod Liddle entitled, “Facebook’s not so secret police.”
“A woman on Facebook was warned she would be blocked because she was spreading ‘false information’…the beheading of babies by Hamas…the Fact-Checkers that Facebook quoted were based in Pakistan – not a country renowned for its amicable relations with Israel.”
And so, Lady Mendelsohn, as I know you to be an outstanding person and certainly one loyal to your people; allow an old teacher to urge you to resign.
I am sure you will argue that things would be even worse if you were not there, but… to stand up proudly as a Jew and say loudly and fearlessly that you can no longer be associated with and oppose Meta’s tolerance of Jew hatred, would be the best thing you could do after October 7’s micro-Holocaust.
The second of my great Jewish ladies is Journalist Melanie Philips. Her autobiographical account of her life tells the story of a Jew of evolving Jewish awareness and commitment. It also shows her great courage.
She publicly took a stance against two pronounced enemies of the Jewish people she once used to be part of, the Guardian newspaper and the British Labour party. She resigned from both.
Interestingly, when in 2022 I resigned as a writer and broadcaster with the BBC, Melanie (whom I know and admire) was very upset. I left after an incident which showed the BBC had stopped camouflaging their antisemitism behind the pretense of anti-Zionism. I declared it to be irretrievably and institutionally antisemitic.
Melanie’s distress was about something I said in one of the numerous TV and radio interviews I gave at the time…
“I simply don’t see how I or any Jew who has any pride in that name can be associated with the BBC anymore.”
Melanie passionately disagreed and wrote, “I have no intention of resigning from the BBC… We need more platforms and more fighters, not fewer. Why oh why, Rabbi YY?”
I respected Melanie too much to respond. Many others did challenge her argument, asking why then, she hadn’t stayed within the Labour Party or the Guardian to fight?
The answer she gave in her autobiography was that she simply felt there was no point.
So now, post-October 7, allow me to ask Melanie the “Dr. Phil question; “How’s that working out for you?”
Has your “fight” and Israel advocacy over the last two years made things better at the BBC… or have they become exponentially worse despite your courageous lone soldiering?
Melanie was quite right when she wrote of my resignation that it would not change the BBC’s mind one jot. It did though deliver it a parting blow and brought it more unwelcome scrutiny over its antisemitism. So, to my second remarkable Jewish woman, allow me to ask, is it not now time to resign?
The last Jewish woman in my troika is Dr. Deborah Lipstadt and the only one I don’t know personally. She has been the U.S. special envoy to combat antisemitism since 2022.
My connection to her is through the event that probably defined her career more than any other; her trial in England for libel brought by David Irving whom she had accused of being a Holocaust denier.
I was contacted by her defense team after speaking on national BBC Radio about a Holocaust survivor I knew who had been in the gas chambers but was taken out at the last moment as the SS needed some tall men for a certain job.
English law puts the burden of proof on the person accused of libeling someone to prove that their statement is true.
As Irving argued that there was no evidence to support the gas chambers, the burden of proof lay with Lipstadt. My broadcast and friend testifying on her behalf, was a trump card they could use.
Recently, she joined with Michele Taylor, U.S. ambassador to the UN to write an article in the Guardian newspaper bemoaning the world’s hesitancy to condemn the Hamas rapes and violence against Israeli women and girls.
However, she is crucially part of the Biden administration that has appeased and empowered the source and inspiration of Hamas’ violence and so much suffering in the Middle East, Iran.
That administration’s support for Israel has wobbled and is keen to appease Michigan’s pro-Hamas Arab/Muslim community to get their votes. Then there is the matter of Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and the rest of the Squad. Oh! and the large number of the Democratic party that are Hamas-friendly. Their latest anti-Israel action is to try to stop Israel replacing Palestinians, (most of whom are pro-Hamas) with foreign workers citing “Human Trafficking” as the justification!
So, Ambassador, I admired the stand you took against someone who denied the Holocaust in 1996, but it is time to take that stand again against the support the October 7 mini-Holocaust is getting from members of your administration and its party. The Guardian column was nice… but it’s time to recapture the passion of the past. It is time to resign.
