Behind the Headlines Resurgence of the National Front

A resurgence of activity by Britain’s foremost racist organization, the National Front, is being watched closely by leaders of the Anglo-Jewish community. The front, which claims between 15,000-20,000 members, grabbed the national headlines last weekend when it tried to stage a march through a district in the Yorkshire town of Bradford inhabited by many colored immigrants. Rioting broke out when immigrants and anti-Fascist groups attempted to stop the march.

Although the Jewish community was not involved, the affair was strongly reminiscent of the battles in the Jewish quarters of London’s East End before World War II. Those memories were recalled a day after the Bradford march at the 33rd commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

Greville Janner, MP, a vice-president of the Jewish Board of Deputies, said the Jewish community should resist the modern Fascists in the way the fighters of Warsaw had stood up to the Nazis.

Although this may seem a melodramatic comparison, Dr. Jacob Gewirtz, the director of the Board of Deputies Defense Committee, believes that the Jewish community has been the main obstacle to the National Front’s acquiring the veneer of respectability to which it has long aspired.

He told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the National Front had even offered to participate in the demonstrations for Soviet Jewry. However the Board did not have the slightest hesitation in shunning any such offer. “We refuse to have anything to do with organizations which reincarnate Nazi race doctrines,” Gewirtz said. Recently, in any case, the Front has begun to revert to open anti-Semitism.

EXPOSED BY BOARD OF DEPUTIES

One of the main weapons against the National Front at the last general election was a quarter of a million leaflets distributed throughout the country, which exposed the Hitlerite past of the Front’s leaders. They were produced by the Board of Deputies.

The Front’s next political effort will take place at local council elections on May 6, for which the Board of Deputies has produced another 100,000 leaflets. The elections will test the success of the Front in stirring up prejudice at a time of unemployment and inflation. In some districts with many immigrants, the Front has been known to win 25 percent of the vote. This compares with the three percent vote which they average in Parliamentary elections.

But despite the Board of Deputies’ involvement in the anti-racist fight there is remarkably little contact with Britain’s colored communities which are the National Front’s main target. The Board has knocked at the doors of colored groups. But the West Indians seem to regard the Jews simply as part of the white community, while the Asian immigrants, many of them Moslems, may be inhibited by anti-Zionism.

The Jewish community’s anomalous position in also underlined by the fact that not one Jewish organization is listed in an ethnic minorities directory published by the government-sponsored Community Relations Commission.