There are press reports today about official statistics showing that 'black and Asian people [are] disproportionately targeted within the use of stop-and-search operations' by the police. The extent of the disproportion as between blacks and whites is eight to one. A Times leader says that the disproportionality is 'so stark and stubborn' as to keep the charge of institutional racism within the police a live one.
There is good reason for this concern, given realistic assumptions about the frequency of crimes committed by whites and blacks respectively.
Must we not then conclude also that the UN Human Rights Council is institutionally racist because of its singleminded focus on the Jewish state? And that political campaigns - of boycott and such - which target Israel and only Israel are racist in effect? Well, people could argue that such narrowness of focus is not on account of Israel's being a Jewish state, but on account of its human rights offences. Couldn't they? Except that if human rights offences are the reason for this focus, then there's a disproportionality here easily as great as in the police stop-and-search statistics today reported, with human rights violators of an entirely non-Jewish complexion thick on the ground globally.
It's a tough one, isn't it? Are these stop-and-search statistics not, after all, a cause for concern? Or are singularly negative attitudes towards Israel evidence of political anti-Semitism?