Nearly every day I walk past the large new building in the heart of Jewish Golders Green being constructed for Jewish Care, a mainstream Anglo-Jewish charity. It always reminds me of the large Jewish Community Center the Conservative movement erected in the Mt. Airy section of Philadelphia in the early 1960s – that neighborhood then being one of the larger Jewish communities in the city. Within a few years the building was on the market because the area had rapidly changed from being nearly all Jewish to nearly all black. I always wonder if this new building is an omen of changes to come in England.
While the Jews of Golders Green are not likely to move someplace else in London, the question is, how much of a Jewish community will there be at all in the UK in a few years? It is a question more and more Jews are asking themselves. Anti-Semitism is growing precipitously and seems to be spreading out of its strongholds among Muslims and the liberal/progressive chattering classes and elites who run the country.
And then, of course, there is the economic situation. The term “British economy,” like “British society,” seems to be an oxymoron. The current financial crisis has destroyed the one significant industry the country had: finance and banking. Private industry and commerce may be shutting down and jobs hemorrhaging, but non-jobs in the public sector are proliferating, with rates of pay often higher than those found in the private sector. This is a liability that in the next generation will bankrupt the country – if the economy as we know it still exists. One in five people now works for the government, and in many regions of the country the government is the only or the major employer.
But the current state of the British economy is only one among many problems and trends that have changed England beyond recognition and that feed anti-Semitism. Indeed, the England of history – the England that generated the industrial revolution, the United States, the British Empire and Winston Churchill – slowly died between the Suez Crisis of 1956 and the turn of the 21st century; it now exists mostly in the form of tourist attractions.
Though the foreign visitor may still find patches of England in some of the villages and small towns, this is very much a minority phenomenon and is disappearing on its own where it is not being actively suppressed, since English culture is deemed racist by politically correct thinkers. London ceased being an English city some years ago and is now merely an overcrowded cultureless, flavorless, ugly conurbation of various types of foreigners.
England is the model that was used to create American democracy, but in England today democracy is slowly turning into totalitarianism. The citizens of this country are now the most spied-upon in the western world, and the level of intrusion is increasing. It was a foundation of ancient English common law that anything was permitted unless formally proscribed. Now the underlying principle seems to be that something is forbidden unless the government tells you it can be done.
Worst of all is the culture of “human rights.” The more this spreads, the fewer human rights the vast majority actually enjoy. But the “rights” of terrorists, criminals, and politically favored minorities have increased astronomically. The British people have been told the human rights of terrorists trump the human rights of ordinary people – including the right not to be killed by terrorists.
A cartoon in one right-wing newspaper put the situation brilliantly: Bin Laden and his henchmen are sitting around a fire in a cave, and the caption has Bin Laden saying, “I sometimes wonder why I’m hiding in this smelly cave when I could be claiming my human rights in the UK.”
There is a general air of insanity that has gripped what passes for the elite in the UK and that is being passed onto the ordinary person through repetition day in and day out in the media. After all, is this not how “truth” is created in the modern world? The Church of England is the officially established church, but the real established church is political correctness and leftist “progressivism.”