As Britain’s wartime prime minister, he led the fight to crush Nazism and its plans to exterminate the Jewish race. Yet, even as Hitler was stepping up the persecution and Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF) were fomenting unrest in Britain, Sir Winston Churchill believed that Jewish people were “partly responsible for the antagonism for which they suffer”.
Churchill penned the controversial views in 1937, only a year after Mosley’s blackshirts had clashed with Jews and other locals on Cable Street in east London and just months after Jews in Germany were banned from holding many professional occupations.
In comments that foreshadow the current debate on multiculturalism, Churchill argued that a tendency to form a “distinct and separate community” runs counter to the idea that settlers should be “100 per cent British” irrespective of their race and religion.
“The central fact which dominates the relations of Jew and non-Jew is that the Jew is different,” he added. “He has a different tradition and background. He refuses to be absorbed. In every country the Jews form a distinct and separate community – a little state within the state.”
Sunday Telegraph, 11 March 2007
Now, what does that remind you of? This perhaps?
The anti-fascist magazine Searchlight investigates the British National Party’s efforts to win respectability by covering “its racist anti-Muslim bashing with a quasi-intellectual veneer”. According to their report:
“The word ‘appeasement’ is rarely used except in the context of Neville Chamberlain’s deal with Hitler in 1938, but what about the present appeasement of Muslims in Britain? … We are told that Islam itself cannot be blamed for the terrorist attacks on New York, Madrid, and London, followed by widespread carnage in retaliation for the publication of a few innocuous drawings. That is like saying that the horrors of the Inquisition had nothing to do with Christianity….