Campaign Against Antisemitism’s analysis is that Mr Greef’s actions amount to breaches of the International Definition of Antisemitism and qualify as antisemitic discourse according to our methodology.
In his comments on 25th January 2013, Councillor David Ward stated that the victims of the Holocaust are required to learn the lessons of their persecution by the Nazis, thereby making his support for the victims of genocide conditional upon their adopting his own views (in order for him to consider them worthy of his respect), which constitutes a clear rhetorical manifestation of antisemitism. In addition, he was holding British Jews collectively responsible for the perceived actions of Israel, which, by implication, he was comparing to the actions of the Nazis. By endorsing Cllr Ward’s statements [1], Mr Greef was also “holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel” and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”
By sharing a post in which it was alleged that Israel had ‘bought’ former Prime Minister David Cameron through the Conservative Friends of Israel, giving substance to the suspicions he expressed in his tweet of 13th October 2014 [2], he was voicing a common antisemitic trope about world leaders being directly controlled by Israel, aided by local political organisations close to the Jewish community. In doing so, he was “making mendacious, dehumanising, demonising, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective — such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions,” where “the State of Israel [is] conceived as a Jewish collectivity.”
