Confessions of a non-elector

I’m not voting in the Election on Thursday.  This was a pragmatic and not a political decision. I didn’t expect a postal vote to arrive in time and we discovered that our good friends who acted as our proxies in the last two exercises in democracy would have had to trek to two polling stations, one for themselves and one for us – even though we lived one minute’s walk away from each other.

It may be more than seven years since I bade London goodbye but I do care about the country of my birth, education and working life.  My anguish about Brexit was not predicated simply because of the catastrophic effects on the income of ex-pats such as myself but because I believed then (and do now) that this was the biggest act of self-harm that any nation could do to itself. Nonetheless the people have spoken, like it or not, and as the late George Brown once remarkably commented “democrats have to democ from time to time. (George was , of course, tired and emotional.)

Even apart from the savage interruptions of the tragedies of Manchester and Borough Market, this has been an unbelievable campaign. The ease with which Teresa May has conjured virtual defeat out of what seemed an unstoppable victory march can only be compared to West Ham’s inability to protect a lead in the last ten minutes of a match.

Defensive errors by the Tories then but offensive mistakes too.  The implications of Labour’s give away on all sides – free education, loads more police, Government run railways and energy, etc, etc and all to be paid for by fleecing the wicked rich and knocking company profits. Union power unbridled. And Nationalisation will be the new keyword. (I recall Harold Wilson demurring on that front and saying “you’ll take Marks & Spencer and make it as efficient as the Co-op”.)

My big turnoff is Mr Corbyn and all he represents.  Personally a kind and caring man I am sure but a hater of Israel, a man who calls Hamas his friends and suggests that they should not be regarded as terrorists, a defender of the worst of the IRAs excesses, and more and more.  Thankfully it doesnt seem likely he can win – but perhaps this Election may end up making us all losers.

/

The day war broke out

The Six Day War began for me with my father coming into my bedroom telling me the glad tidings that hostilities had commenced. The community had been in a state of utter nervousness verging on semi-hysteria, with my personal complications of finishing my post-grad course at the Institute of Education, finding somewhere to live, contemplating  the new job I would be starting in September and above all getting married in July. In 1967, I certainly lived in “interesting times”. And then there was the small matter of the survival of the State of Israel which, as we were all to find out to our relief, was left in the capable hands of Moshe Dayan, Yitzhak Rabin et al.

I probably had a tutorial or something but I quickly found myself in the IUJF (predecessor to the Union of Jewish Students) office in Hillel House. I was the Immediate Past Chairman but with my successor (my old Carmel friend, Richard Engel) stuck up in Sheffield, the buck such as it was fell to me. Summoned to Rex House by our acting  shaliach, there was a lot of fevered activity but I can’t say that we really knew what to do in the circumstances. We had already helped organise a demonstration and sent many students off to volunteer.

I returned to Hillel where I was told that the country was being devastated. Richard Engel rang me and said that he had heard that the oil storage tanks in Haifa had been bombed. How I spent the afternoon is a blank after fifty years but in the evening I attended a protest meeting organised by the Zionist Federation, chiefly memorable for Barnett Janner being heckled for voting against Suez. I  sat next to my predecessor as IUJF Chairman, Leslie Wagner, at the time  a civil servant working in Whitehall, who told me that he had heard the bells of Westminster Abbey tolling at 3.00 pm. Thinking it was related to the war, he looked up Today’s Arrangements in The Times and saw that the Queen Mother was attending a service to mark National Rheumatism Week.

It was a long, lonely and worrying journey from South Kensington all the way to Gants Hill (described by Jonathan Miller in Beyond the Fringe as “the far reaches of the Central Line”) but when I reached home, my father told me of Michael Elkins’ dispatch that the entire Egyptian air force had been destroyed.  We lived to fight another day.

 

 

Thoughts on the changing of the guard

As I was walking to shul last Friday afternoon, a good American friend joined me complaining that he had been waiting all his lifetime for an Inauguration like this and now because of Shabbat he had to miss it. I said, mustering all my powers of good neighbourliness and tolerance, surely there had been Republican Presidents before. Ah no, was the reply, he knew the guy, had worked with him, he was truthful, he was different, he was a businessman. It wasn’t a very long walk so we parted friends.

There was a time when elections (in Britain certainly) weren’t thought to make a lot of difference. After the great Liberal landslide of 1905, Hillaire Belloc composed the following epitaph on the election result

“The accursed power which stands on privilege( and goes with women, champagne and bridge)
Broke – and democracy resumed her reign ( which goes with bridge and women and champagne.”

However with the coming of Trump undoubtedly there has been change and I have to confess a profound distaste for the man and everything he stands for.  I loathe his petty racism, his vulgarity, xenophobia, the coarseness of his speech and the ignorance of his opinions.  I query his judgement on major issues – minorities,  women.s rights, education and above all the environment. Climate change has been removed from the White House website – in a week when we have had reports of rapid melting of the North Pole icecap and endured the hottest year on record.

Here in the Holy Land to criticise the Donald is now regarded in the holiest circles as akin to blasphemy and only marginally more reprehensible than offering one’s off-spring to Moloch.  It may be wonderful that the USA will (regrettably) turn a blind eye to the remoter settlements and even move the Embassy to Jerusalem. But should, as I suspect, the majority of the world come to detest the USA in its new guise, we will be inviting even more opprobrium .  Perhaps this doesn’t matter if you want Israel to adopt the attitudes of a Millwall supporter  “No one likes us, we don’t care”.  Fortunately for the moment Netanyahu is showing a little political savvy and trying to restrain the madcap antics of Bennett and his ilk.

Thus I am not scouring You Tube to see the speech on Capitol Hill that Shabbat saved me from experiencing. I will hear enough quacks from the Donald in the months ahead. Oh well at least West Ham won another match….

Not with a bang but a rewind – thoughts on New Year’s Day 2017

I have to confess that the midnight hour which in this time zone ushered in 2017 passed me by. I was more or less awake, watching a documentary about Judi Dench, rewinding and forwarding as sleep and TV malfunction dictated. So a strange year passed without due ceremony.

Now we are not killjoys. A group of us had been out for a snack earlier in the evening and although we certainly enjoyed each other’s company. it was in most other respects a night worth forgetting. Firstly the restaurant lost our booking – which had been made in person, not over the phone. Once we were seated, we all felt distinctly cold so that we spent the evening in our coats. Admittedly the hot soup was excellent but the waiter seemed to have such little understanding of his own menu that several of us had the meal we didn’t order, much of it was cold and one of our friends had to send the incorrect dish back three times until finally getting what she wanted after the rest of us had finished. And then we had to go through the bill item by item. We did not stay for dessert or coffee……

So looking back, as one does at this season, let’s resemble a losing Premier League manager (or England cricket captain) and consider the positives. We’re all well, as are our family in various parts of the globe. Terrorism has remained a constant but there has been no war involving Israel. From the sublime to the sometime ridiculous, Essex have been promoted back to the First Division of the County Championship. West Ham should end the season in mid-table mediocrity, a far cry from hopes of the Champions League but a good deal better than relegation. After giving me two months of nerve-shattering Saturday nights, my Purim show (shpiel in the vernacular) was well received.  I left my network organisation BNI with much regret but the early mornings were beginning to tell – nonetheless I am still doing business.

Globally for me, there have been massive disappointments. I accept that we cannot go back to yesterday’s future and alter events but that doesn’t mean that I have to cheer Brexit and the Trumping of Hillary. The former I continue to regard as the greatest act of self-damage any nation could do for itself – after all, David Dimbleby had barely uttered the words “The decision is to leave” when the false hopes of the Leave campaign were being talked back.   I understand many of the motivations and realise that not everyone who voted Leave (including many family and good friends)  was an out and out racist. But the damage is massive and will be long-standing. I fully expect Europe to extract a pound or two of flesh in the negotiations that will come – and frankly who can blame them? Britain has let down the European ideal – and betrayed its youth in the process.

As for America, they have got the candidate that the KGB wanted, the KKK  wanted and most tellingly that the FBI wanted. He may bring respite to Bibi Netanyahu especially after Obama’s betrayal, which admittedly we did everything possible to encourage, but I fear for America itself. On the environment, on education,  on personal morality, the clock is due to be wound back several decades.

The common thread in both, so-called populism apart was that two weak campaigns lost. David Cameron (remember him?) failed to bring any idealism or vision to his cause and Hilary made the mistake of assuming that her gender ensured her election. The rest is history.

As for our little patch of earth, isn’t it about time Bibi stated what he is really for, rather than what he is against.  A cynic like me would say that we know – he is for himself, above all. And that is the core of our problems.

Nonetheless, this year is ours. Do your best. Strive to be happy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Of transatlantic incomprehension, mathematics and John Profumo – 1963 and now.

I left school in March 1963. It had been a terrible winter; the snow that first fell on Boxing Day lingered on and on for two months or more.  Football matches were cancelled almost indiscriminately and with the risk of the pools companies going  bankrupt, Sam Stamler QC, our Headmaster David’s brother, invented the Pools Panel which would meet on Saturday afternoons and decide on what the likely outcome of each cancelled match would be.

My hopes of a place at Cambridge had been extinguished by a moderate showing in the entrance exam which I had taken the previous December – three good marks and three poor ones just didn’t make the grade – and I made the decision early in the Spring term that I was leaving come what may. Then I received an interview at the very new University of Sussex, just outside Brighton (the Jewish world being what it is, the wife of one of my interviewers was the ex-wife of a friend of my father’s) and despite having a mental block when asked to list some modern poets having said I was fond of poetry, I must have impressed them because they offered me a place to read English. A provisional place.

It was provisional because I still had to pass Maths at O-level. I had suffered from an eccentric teacher called Mr George whose attributes included pronouncing words ending in “er” as “ey” so that if he called me Mister Gold it came out as Misty. I remember that he once wrote “Black Magic” on my Maths homework. He also once told us that “I don’t like you Jews much – we fought for you in the War and then you go to Palestine and beat up British soldiers”. (This didn’t prevent him from taking Jewish money for several years employment.)   He also lived next door to Agatha Christie in Wallingford.

Thus,  for the first time in ten years, I had a summer in my own home.  I entered myself on two O-level boards to acquire the elusive Maths pass and I had two lessons a week from two different teachers. One was the father of a fellow Carmel boy  who warned me against becoming a teacher and who said I warmed so well to his teaching that he reckoned he could have got me through A-level.   I watched a lot of cricket (that was the year of Frank Worrell’s West Indians, of Wes Hall and Charlie Griffiths), I went to concerts including the 50th anniversary of the first performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, conducted by Pierre Monteux, the same man who had done so among the boos and catcalls in Paris in 1913. A tumultuous evening ended with composer and conductor embracing each other on the stage. And, despite or perhaps because of all these distractions, I ended up passing the wretched exam twice, after five previous failures.

And while I was on my personal Odyssey, the British world was rocked by the Profumo affair. Orgies at Cliveden, Christine Keeler, Stephen Ward, Mandy Rice-Davies. All played to the background music of a new pop group from Liverpool called the Beatles.  A few weeks ago I read a fascinating book with the full background  story  –  An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the age of Profumo by Richard Davenport-Hines – which gave me belatedly considerable insight into the backdrop of the world into which I had been released after ten years of Jewish monasticism.

Reading it, I could only conclude that Mr Profumo’s sins were of a minor nature and that the whole affair was blown out of all proportion by the corrupt Metropolitan Police, used as a political tool by Harold Wilson and George Wigg, aided and abetted by Lord Denning.

I write these words the day after Donald Trump became President-elect of the United States. Undoubtedly, if any British politician had been accused of the misogyny and political thuggery that Mr Trump exhibited on the campaign trail, much less his record of abuse of women, he would have been forced out of public life. Now I understand that Mrs Clinton’s record in public life is not unblemished but the tendency to equate the two baffles me.

Maybe as a more or less true (if Jewish) Brit, I will never understand America. I cannot comprehend that a nation could move from its first Black President to a demagogue whose only press endorsements were from the Ku Klux Klan newspaper and one owned by a right-wing Jewish billionaire and fan of Bibi Netanyahu. A columnist in the Guardian wrote this morning , “However much people want to blame the Democrats, their voters or Clinton herself, the result of this election is due at least as much to anyone who pushed the narrative that Clinton and Trump were equally or even similarly “bad”.

Shame on them. The most qualified candidate in a generation was defeated by the least qualified of all time. That is what misogyny looks like, and, like all bigotries, it will end up dragging us all down.”

That the obnoxious Nigel Farage adores Trump speaks volumes. We all go into the dark. I just hope that one day my good American friends will realise just what they have released upon us. As Yeats memorably wrote  And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

 

 

Two Cheers for Suburbia

 

Gaily into Ruislip Gardens

Runs the red electric train,

With a thousand ta’s and pardons

Daintily alights Elaine

 

John Betjeman

 

We didn’t live in or anywhere near Ruislip Gardens. The station which nestled just under my parents’ semi-detached was Gants Hill, whose inner hall was modelled on the Moscow Underground, if less luxurious. Ruislip was westerly, in the heart of Metroland and we were in suburban Essex at the other end of a long Tube journey. However, when in my latter student days I commuted and saw Ruislip Gardens on the destination sign of the train, I muttered Betjeman’s words to myself, in somewhat of an invocation.

Ilford, where my parents settled after their marriage in 1934, was not an exciting place. In my childhood it was best known as the home of Ilford photographic products – everyone knew the slogan “Ilford Films for Faces and Places”.   In the 1920s there had been a sensational murder trial where Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywater had been found guilty of murdering Edith’s husband Percy. That apart, Ilford was very much, at least in my childhood and adolescence, the dreaming suburb.

It was safe suburbia. In the winter a short ride on the bus to the ABC Barkingside where the organ would play as the usherettes entered with the ice-cream. In the summer, as I wandered the empty streets people would hang coloured linen drapes on their front doors to prevent the paint cracking up in the sun.

We lived at no 65 Ethelbert Gardens which was on the corner of what used to be described as an arterial road, Eastern Avenue which led in one direction out into Essex and in the other to the East End, the City and eventually Oxford Circus and Marble Arch (although not under the same name).  The roar of the traffic, even in those days, was loud and persistent and when combined with the rumble of the Central Line which passed right underneath our house, was quite intimidating for non-Ilfordians. When Ruth paid her first visit, she didn’t know quite what to make of it.

My best, and really only,  friend in those days, Trevor who lived round the corner in Ethelbert Gardens always spent a month each summer with his family on the Isle of Wight so summer was a lonely time for me apart from the family holidays. My main recreation was throwing a tennis ball against the garage wall at the end of our garden and then batting it back. My scoring was prodigious, alas never to be repeated on more conventional cricket fields.

Trevor’s family worshipped at the Congregational Church which was at the corner of our L-shaped street. We had no problem in accepting our different religions although I suppose that I found it easier to understand his than he mine. At one time I remember that he asked me to tell him what we said before meals (as I recall he used to say “thank you for the world so sweet/thank you for the food we eat/thank you for the birds that sing/thank you God for everything”). I then made Hamotzi.

My father was appalled at this, he thought it was carrying my “Jewish thing” a bit too far. My mother thought I was right. Trevor wasn’t a bit bothered. He also always enjoyed coming to see us lighting the Chanukah candles.

One regular summer outing was to Epping Forest near Queen Elizabeth’s Hunting Lodge in Chingford. We’d take out a boat and row on the lake and then go fishing for tiddlers (tiny fish). We could go all the way there and back on a bus from Gants Hill, my memory tells me it was the 144 or 145 but Google informs me that it is now the 179! As boys do we had ferocious arguments without any lasting rancour such as what was the best car to drive and disparaging my father’s Hillman and questioning the then early existence of Israel – I remember telling him that the real purpose was to rebuild the Temple!

Come Fireworks Night on November 5th, Trevor’s family always had a party to which I was invited, in the years when I was not away at boarding school. I would postpone our fireworks to the following night and the highlight was watching for the 148 and 66 buses coming along Eastern Avenue and aiming our rockets at the top deck. It was an early brush with hooliganism.

We have remained friends, mostly at an inevitable distance, all our lives. Trevor and his parents came to our engagement; he came to our wedding and Ruth and I, plus Mum and Dad, went to Trevor and Pauline’s nuptials on a very wet and cold winter’s day in Frinton.

Sadly the one time we had planned a visit to them Ruth’s Uncle Solly was on his deathbed in a Southport nursing home and we had to go to say goodbye. I was pleased to have had a long phone chat with Trevor a few days before we left England and we communicate irregularly by Facebook. Maybe he will have other happy memories worthy of sharing.

Farther Off From Heaven

I remember, I remember,
The fir trees dark and high;
I used to think their slender tops
Were close against the sky:
It was a childish ignorance,
But now ’tis little joy
To know I’m farther off from heaven
Than when I was a boy. 

Thomas Hood

 

When I was born, my contemporaries in Europe were being slaughtered daily in concentration camps and the atomic bomb was not far off readiness.  Seventy plus years on, Iran threatens Israel with annihilation and we are being prepared for a man-made catastrophe in anything from fifty to a thousand years. Progress should be made of sterner stuff.

For years and years I have promised myself I would write and have feigned ever conceivable excuse that I have no time and promptly done something ephemeral, wasteful and purposeless.  Having written a blog on the Internet, much of which may well end up in these pages, including autobiographical pieces which were appreciated by those who read them, I felt I must at least make a start.

I owe it to myself to try at this stage to make sense of my life and my thoughts. Hillel famously counselled “If not now, when?” and two thousand years later, his adage holds true. And paraphrasing another rabbinical statement, I am well aware that this is one task that if I do not complete, no one else can or probably ever will.

As I write in my sunlit salon overlooking the Mediterranean, I wonder just where I should begin. My father, of whom much more later, always said that autobiographies should commence with the second chapter because most people’s childhoods were so uninteresting to anyone but themselves. This book is written for the benefit of my children and four grandchildren and hopefully one day their children as well, I will for once ignore his advice, remembering another dictum from the Old Sheep of the Lake District that “the child is father of the man”.

I was born, or brought into the world, at what is now the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel.  One of the many quotations that my family are heartily fed up with is my comparison with Macduff in the Scottish play that I was from my mother’s womb untimely ripped. In other words, like my two eldest grandchildren Ben and Ella I was a Caesarean delivery; unlike them I arrived on a Friday night in the middle of a V1 (buzz bomb) raid and my mother told my father, who was a doctor, to go out into the streets and help people, rather than staying in with her. It was a situation that in one sense or other was to be repeated many times in the next forty or so years.

My parents had been married for nine years when I was born. My father Sidney was the youngest son of Myer and Ethel Gold and was brought up in East Ham. About my grandmother, I know very little, other than photographs and my father’s reminiscences as she died from a drowning accident shortly before the outbreak of WWII.

There seems no doubt that she had to play second fiddle to my grandfather Myer Gold who was a larger than life character but none too pleasant with it. He was a large man with a florid complexion. Arriving from Warsaw at the beginning of the last century, he was of the generation who, although schooled traditionally in Jewish subjects saw yiddishkeit as the barrier that prevented Jews finding their way in the world. Whether he actually did this himself  or not, he would certainly have sympathised with Isaac Deutscher the Trotskyite writer who described how he ate ham sandwiches smeared with butter on his grandfather’s grave on the afternoon of Yom Kippur.

However unlike many non-observant Jews today, Myer was not an am ha’aretz nor was he indifferent to the practical needs of poor Jewish people in those pre-welfare state days. Apparently he could quote from the Tenach verbatim and he was deeply immersed in the benefit society movement. As I understand it, these were societies where people would pay a small amount each week and be covered against illness and presumably with a widow’s payout at death. He established the Myer Gold Benefit and Divisional Society and among my souvenirs is the gavel that was presented to him on the Society’s 25^th Anniversary.  The charm of this very beautiful item is enhanced by the howler on the inscription which states that it was presented on its 25^th university.

My grandfather Myer seems to have made being awkward into a way of life although I have to smile at his audacity. The family name was Goldman, the name shared by our many cousins in the States and that was the name on of my father’s many school prizes. However, Myer decided to go into business against his former employer and consequently the name was changed.  When someone else opened round the corner to him in the East Ham High Road, he was reputed to have paid a trumpeter to play the Dead March in Saul outside his rival’s shop.

He was a card-carrying Communist who liked to drive a flash car, stay in a good hotel, smoke the longest cigars, drink the best liquor and not confine his social life to the family circle. He rowed incessantly with his family to the extent whereby errant members of the tribe (and we are talking about grown up married people) were declared to be persona non grata, a kind of secular cherem which could apparently last for months if not years. He threatened not to attend my parents’ wedding if his current lady friend was not invited.

The psychological damage he inflicted on his family seems immense. My father, my Uncle Sam and I certainly inherited his horrible temper, an inheritance in which I take no pride whatsoever and which has certainly served me ill over the years. Although I discovered when teaching that simulated anger, that emotion which can be switched on and off like a light, has a useful place, real anger is a sign of personal defeat. I find myself getting worked up even in imaginary conversations and arguments, be they political or down to sporting allegiances.  Sometimes I am surprised that I keep any friends….

In a sense, this memoir begins and ends in Israel. I have always had a memory, and who is going to contradict me, of my mother Doris coming into my room, then referred to as the “nursery”, and telling me, as if I understood, that Israel was born. That would have been May 14^th 1948 when I was just over three and a half years old.

Today I am a card-carrying Israeli, albeit very much an Englishman abroad, drinking Tetley’s tea and eating Quaker Oats porridge, avidly following the fortunes of Essex and England at cricket and West Ham United at football. Having been in America for English football’s sole moment of triumph, I have never had any comparable worry about the national team as with very few exceptional games they have invariably disappointed me – and of course many others.

Until I came with five school friends in 1962 Israel meant very little to me. I was “converted” within hours of landing in Haifa and my life and my attitudes began to change from that point. Nonetheless with the benefit of hindsight I dearly wish the time lapse between first visit and Aliyah had been far less than 48 years.

The blogger returns – or does he?

Oh dear oh dear, it has been a long time. Just a few days short of eleven months. I even had to Google to remind myself how to log into my own site.

Somehow the blog was never prioritised, other people’s requirements (for which admittedly I was/am being paid) invariably pushed themselves to the front of the queue (that’s line hopping for my American readers!).

Water, some of it quite dirty, has certainly swirled under the proverbial bridge since last I blogged. The electors of my “other” country proudly ignored the expert advice they were given and in a display of patriotism, pettiness and prejudice voted to sacrifice themselves on the altar of separation in the hope that some mythical golden age might return.

Moans of expats such as myself at a 20% reduction in our income have of course been petulantly tossed aside.  Consequently, when the British cost of living shoots up, spurred on by the extra cost of all those imported goods and raw materials, my pocket handkerchief will remain stubbornly bereft of tears.

And now we have an election in our former colony. If someone wrote this whole awful Trumpeting saga as an airport page-turning novel, running to 650 pages, you just would rate it as this side of unbelievable.  As the identity of the occupant of the White House matters somewhat to us all, I do feel that comment is justified.

I have been fascinated by American politics ever since when travelling through Switzerland in 1956, I picked up a copy of Time magazine which was all about the Democratic convention where Adlai Stevenson was again nominated to stand against Eisenhower and John Kennedy failed in his bid to be the Vice-Presidential candidate.  JFK attracted me as a different kind of politician to the generally two-dimensional types back in the House of Commons.

Fast forward to 1960 and I am sitting in Kopul Rosen’s study at Carmel, with some of my contemporaries and he is getting us to debate whether we should be concerned with the prospect of a Catholic President. After the discussion had heaved to and fro, Kopul told us that had he been an American not only would he have voted for Kennedy, he would have campaigned for him. I could hardly sleep waiting for news of the election (in those days it was the BBC Home Service at 6.00 am) and I had nightmares the night of his assassination.

My Democratic spirit was boosted still further in 1966 when I met my dear cousins Jane and Ben Goldman. Jane was a real grassroots campaigner, fighting not just the Republicans  but also the then corrupt Democratic machine of Senator Harry Bryd.

And so we are within two weeks of hopefully saving the world from Donald Trump. I have to walk on proverbial eggshells because my several good US friends out here in the Holy Land are dyed in the wool hard line Republicans with a visceral hatred for Obama and perhaps even more for Hillary Clinton. I can understand policy disagreements which are fair in any circumstances.  But when Trump has been disowned by numerous Congressmen, Senators, Governors, past Presidents, past Presidential candidates and the Harvard Republican Society, the faithfulness of my religious brethren to such a man as Trump baffles me in the extreme.

The important news is however that I hope to blog regularly now but as part of a master project – my autobiography. I want to make sure that posterity or shall I say my grandchildren know about Ilford and Liverpool, Kenton and Carmel, BNI, Rotary, the Clique and the quizzing, Upton Park and Chelmsford and all that goes in between and more.  As I write, I shall endeavour to post.  Comments will be welcome, to help me with the final print, and web, version.

Trump that anyone?  Chag sameach

Abnormal service resumed

Three months ago I last blogged and the goings on in the dear old Palace of Westminster lead me to take up my parable again.  Re-reading it I see I was musing on the implications of J Corbyn’s election as Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition – although I can’t believe that our dear Queen can have been that much enchanted.

Of course since then we have had Paris and the Russian plane over Sinai and much else besides and I humbly suggest that my sentiments of mid-September ring only too true in December. Europe is a lost cause, a busted flush. Not in my lifetime but certainly in that of our grandchildren, most countries in Europe will have a Muslim majority – or at very least a minority so strong that its demands may become irresistible.  This is not good news for Western civilization and quite emphatically it is not good for the Jews.  I am more than happy that for all its faults, problems, conflicts and crises, my grandchildren were born here and live here.

Returning to Corbyn et al, I know where they are coming from. Read the declaration signed by John McDonnell, Shadow Chancellor, which he is pictured holding and smiling broadly but says he never read. (Anyone interested read http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/11/19/john-mcdonnell-mi5-letter-signature-denied-_n_8601684.html). But people I respect are telling me that the vote was appalling and war never solves any problems.

What in the name of reason and sense is the alternative to taking up the fight against Fascism ? And what a relief to listen to Hilary Benn who had the courage to treat ISIS for what they are. On the presumption that the people protesting don’t want to acquiesce in a radical Islamic lifestyle, how do they envisage we are gong to deal with the problem?  A friendly chat over beer and sandwiches out in the desert hardly seems appropriate or realistic in the circumstances.

Terrorism is terrorism whatever the label and whoever the perpetrator (and I don’t discount our own unsavoury crowd who I hope are now being brought to justice).   It is not an excuse for lapses in democracy and decency but it must be opposed, in deeds as well as words.  The methods may be crude at times but needs must.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If not now, when?

There is an old story about a man caught in floodwaters and marooned in his house on the roof. As the floodwaters were rising, first, a man in a dinghy came by and said, “get in”, and the man on the roof replied, “No Thanks, I’m praying and waiting on the Lord.”  Next, a lifeguard came by, and again, the man refused the help, saying he was waiting on the Lord.  Finally, even a helicopter was refused with the same excuse, he was waiting on the Lord.  After dying in the floodwaters, and getting to heaven, the man asks God, “Why didn’t you save me?”  God replies, “I sent you the dinghy, the lifeguard and helicopter, what did you expect?”

Jeremy Corbyn, at least theoretically, could be Prime Minister of Great Britain in less than five years’ time. Now I am well aware of the perceived wisdom that his chances of victory are akin to the survival rate of snowballs in Hell, that he is likely to alienate many Labour supporters and is unlikely to attract a single Tory. And there are boundary changes in the pipeline which will increase the likelihood of a Conservative victory in 2020. But if a week is a long time in politics, and this has been a pretty remarkable one as weeks go, four plus years is even longer. Who knows what forces will come into play – Europe, the Great Migration, China’s economic collapse – which could be game changers.

The point is that even if JC does a Michael Foot and loses spectacularly he will still have changed the political dialogue in the UK and not for the better. The lunatics have quite firmly taken over the asylum and I don’t see this as being a happy time for the Jewish community and certainly not for Israel and those who care for her. (JC’s recipe for peace is the Palestinian right of return. Moreover he doesn’t understand why the UK is trading with Israel in the first place.)

Here’s a secret. The guy on the roof had a mezuzah on his front door and indeed on all his doors. His house might metaphorically have been in Edgware or Hendon or Whitefield. He cares about his children and his grand children and wants them to grow up with a positive Jewish future. How many warnings does he need?   The July bombings. The hordes outside Downing Street screaming “death to the Jews”. The Manchester boy beaten nearly to death as he waited for a bus.

Of those whose adherence is minimal, I have few expectations. But those who care – can you put hand on heart and say that the Jewish future is rosy in England’s green and pleasant land? There is a great, if confused, country here. If my grandchildren thrive, why shouldn’t yours?. Just listen out for the helicopter.

Katima v’hatima tova – may you be inscribed and sealed for good in the year ahead.  If I have offended anyone in these blogs, I ask your forgiveness.