I was a thoughtless anti-Semite like Naz Shah and far too many British Muslims Seeing Naz Shah’s Facebook post recommending that Israeli Jews are relocated to the US gave me a start, not because […]

Seeing Naz Shah’s Facebook post recommending that Israeli Jews are relocated to the US gave me a start, not because it’s surprising – many British Muslims would hit Like on a post like that, comment on it or share it. No, I felt startled because I can remember when I might have shared a post like that myself.

I grew up being told by relatives and family friends that Jews in Israel are occupiers, simple as that. When I started reading political material myself as a teenager, I went first to conspiracy theories about how they could so easily have been settled somewhere else. I remember talking to other Muslim teenagers about it, boasting about the outrageous stuff that we had read.

We could tell it was outrageous, not politics at all but something much darker, and yet we talked about it in the same way as we might talk about smoking or girls. It was a way of showing off, probing what others knew or were willing to reveal; harmless as far as it went, but we did keep talking about it.

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It’s not common for British Muslims to have Jewish friends

What changed? I read Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, not on the Holocaust or the Israeli state, just their novels. They were Jewish and they could write like that, like I dreamed of writing. None of the other guys I had been talking to about Zionism read any novels at all. Then I went to a university in a big city, for the first time had friends who were Jews. That still isn’t common among British Muslims.

“He was Jewish. He was also kind. He asked me into his office and explained to me what I’d done.”

Even more importantly, I screwed up. I wrote and published in the student magazine an anti-semitic slur. I suggested, in a supposedly satirical article, that one of our lecturers, who came from a wealthy family, in secret owned the law school building.

You’ve guessed it. He was Jewish. He was also kind. He asked me into his office and explained to me what I’d done. I admitted the truth: that I hadn’t noticed he was Jewish, that I didn’t know about the history of such slurs. That’s the terrifying part: I didn’t know.

So I fixed that. I talked to him a lot more. I read a lot more. And, when I saw the news about Shah, I thought there but for grace of that man. Yet this is precisely why anti-Semitism among British Muslims is so difficult to eradicate. Shah, like anyone else, knows what she is supposed to think.

Her statement after the news broke shows that well enough, the typical regret and the will to do better. But changing someone’s point of view more profoundly takes contact, not greater wariness or a staged dialogue.

Terrible attitudes have persisted for long enough

There are two challenges to making such contact take place. The first is that many British Muslims aren’t seeking it. None of the boys I used to talk to have developed Jewish friends. Very few of them even have Jewish colleagues, because most of them are self-employed in small businesses. This segregation by choice is diminishing but it’s the type of social change that takes years.

“Seeing my article made his daughter cry. Why should he have to respond to her hurt by providing contact to me?”

Then the second challenge is that Jews should be fed up of being told that contact is the way to eliminate anti-semitism. Terrible attitudes have persisted for long enough. Why should Jews keep having to work at this?

My law lecturer could have asked for me to be censured or suspended, the treatment that Shah has eventually received from the Labour Party. In hindsight, I wouldn’t blame him if he had done that. Seeing my article made his daughter cry. Why should he have to respond to her hurt by providing contact to me?

It’s like asking me to explain that Islam is a respectful religion to some skinhead who hurls abuse at my mother. I might prefer to hit him.

Spouting radical nonsense

Yet of course I won’t hit him, and that’s because over the last twenty-five years, since I first spouted radical nonsense about the Middle East, I’ve grown up into a liberal. A much higher proportion of Jews than Muslims, I’d wager, are liberals too, which is why many still do have the patience to keep at inter-faith dialogue and all the rest.

This is our best hope: that day to day liberalism – living closeby, working together, showing civility when we talk about the hard stuff – can stick.

Shah, or so it seems from reporting of the fuller apology she wanted to give, now recognises that her posts were anti-Semitic and that she and perhaps others in the Labour party need to engage in the type of contact and discussion that I’m talking about.

If that’s true, then I hope it happens. It’s the only way that anti-Semitic attitudes will begin to change.

Emran Mian is director of the Social Market Foundation, a think tank

