The Bell review’s quiet nod to the role of Islamism in school antisemitism

The appearance of Sir David Bell’s review of antisemitism in schools was quietly revolutionary. Tucked away on page 30 was the finding by the demographer and a social statistician L. Daniel Staetsky – published just over nine years earlier – that Muslims were more likely to hold antisemitic views than members of the general British population. The citation followed a nod to my own finding, published much more recently, that the country’s recent meteoric rise in antisemitism has been mostly among the young.

The review did not mention that I, too, had found antisemitism to be higher – vastly higher – among Muslims, nor that research analyst Dr. Rakib Ehsan and colleagues had found the same. But as a rare, rare moment of official honesty on this issue, I’ll take it. Props to Sir David, he’s a brave guy. The review does not quite give an opinion on what is driving the rise in antisemitism, but it gives the very attentive reader just enough information to be able to join the dots.

Sir David and his researchers note the Community Security Trust finding of rising antisemitic incidents, especially since October 7, 2023, and helpfully provide a chart that shows the same: a gradual doubling from 2014 to 2021, followed by a rapid acceleration boosted by a spike in – yes – 2023. Combined with the above, it’s a hint – just a hint, a first official whisper – of acknowledgement of what everyone paying attention to this issue knows is to blame.

The answer, of course, is Islamism: the belief that a Muslim cannot be British, or English, or Scottish – or even Egyptian or Emirati – because Muslims everywhere only truly belong to the Umma, the international community of the faithful, and owe allegiance only to the Caliph. Who is the Caliph? Well, that can be sorted out later. For now, the priority is to overturn every existing society, and to do so in the name of Gaza. (The far left loves all this, of course, because it believes that, at the last minute, it will be able to divert the coming Islamic revolution towards Communism, through the sheer might of Dialectic.)

Having come about as close to blurting out the above as one may currently come and yet still be admitted in polite society, the review presents good evidence of its own concerning the scale of antisemitism in schools (while discreetly sidestepping any real discussion of the perpetrators), and then works its way around to some recommendations that come about as close to what needs to be done as one may currently come without being referred to Prevent.

These recommendations include improved Holocaust education – improved through emphasising the central role of antisemitism in driving the genocide of the Jews (which many teachers in their wisdom have apparently seen fit to leave out of the story) – and adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition of Antisemitism "as a starting point for understanding and discussions”. I have my reservations about the IHRA Definition.

It was developed in Europe, in order to standardise the recording of antisemitic crime across various European police forces, and as such it is strikingly Eurocentric, founded in a deep awareness of Christian and post-Christian forms of Jew-hate, but saying nothing about the virulent forms of antisemitism that are native to the Middle East. However, it does at least concede that antisemitism may be expressed through “the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived of as a Jewish collectivity” – and, as such, it represents a baby step out of the liberal comfort zone in which both educators and politicians most happily reside.

The revolutionary nature of this tiny concession to reality is apparent from the response. Owen Jones – a digital entrepreneur whose business model consists of identifying whatever the Very Online left wants to hear from one moment to the next, and then screaming it through a social media megaphone – was predictably splenetic, smearing the report as a "travesty” based on “BS numbers”, and asserting that antisemitism had been “weaponised to shut down discussion of Israel’s Western-facilitated genocide of the Palestinian people”.

Meanwhile, Jones’s less delicate counterpart, Shola Mos-Shogbamimu – recipient both of an OBE and of an honorary doctorate from Newcastle University – was visited by a fervour so righteous that it could be expressed only through the sort of language once limited to the neo-Nazi far right, all "Zionist invasion” and “Zionist Jewish supremacy”. Less clownishly, Daniel Kebede – General Secretary of the UK’s largest teaching union – joined in the chorus of left-wing outrage with a truly masterful sleight of hand, objecting that the IHRA Definition "risks blurring the line between antisemitism and legitimate criticism of the Israeli government and the genocide in Gaza” as if he did not know perfectly well that there is no genocide in Gaza and that, according to the definition, “criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic”. (One has to assume that he knows these things, because the alternative would be to assume him to have no idea what he’s talking about – which would hardly do.)

Still more brazenly, Kebede states that the NEU “welcomes a strengthened focus on antisemitism”, but only in the context of a demand for the government “to go a step further by strengthening the guidance on all forms of racism”. For the far left, “progress” on antisemitism always means subordinating it to forms of supposed racism more susceptible to instrumentalisation in the service of its political goals: naturally, the NEU promotes the thoroughly discredited definition of Islamophobia produced in 2019 by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims (and does so, moreover, in a document which identifies the location of the Al-Aqsa mosque as “Jerusalem, Palestine”).

Mild though the review’s recommendations may seem, they wouldn’t have inspired such responses from such people if they didn’t have at least the potential to initiate a discussion leading to positive change. Someday, perhaps, the national curriculum will require children to learn about why Islamism runs contrary to British values. Hold fast. Dr Daniel Allington is Reader in Social Analytics at King's College London