The former chairman of Comic Relief, who quit over the charity’s Gaza stance, said employers had a “blind spot” around antisemitism.
Eric Salama said the events of October 7, when Hamas fighters killed about 1,200 people and took an estimated 240 hostage, should act as a wake-up call in the same way that George Floyd’s murder triggered “emotionally honest” conversations about race.
The son of Jewish refugees from Egypt, Salama told The Times that Jewish people in Britain felt “threatened and vulnerable in a way I’ve not seen before” after a record number of antisemitic incidents were reported in recent weeks.
“Employers should be sensitive to that in the same way that many employers were with their black employees in the wake of George Floyd’s murder,” he said.
The former Kantar chief executive and government adviser said that while it was now the norm for organisations to do diversity, equity and inclusion training, he had “never seen DEI training that includes racism toward Jewish people”.
Salama quit Comic Relief in November after it signed a petition calling for a ceasefire in the Israel-Gaza war without consulting the board. He described it as “an approach to an issue which I thought was profoundly wrong and which I could not live with”.
Elaborating on his position, he explained: “There’s no mention of 250,000 Israeli people who are internal refugees in Israel because they can’t live in their homes and their homes have been shelled. There’s no mention of Hamas or the atrocities they committed.
“You read it and it’s very much about the damage that Israel is doing to Gaza … it’s a political statement.
“I think it is perfectly valid for individuals to hold that point of view but that’s not quite the same as signing up a charity to have a political point of view without a conversation with the board to agree that that’s what the charity wants to say.”
Salama added that his advice to clients had always been to only take a stance on topics when it felt “authentic and core to what you’re doing as a business”.
“I think the issue comes when you have organisations just say something to get on a bandwagon when it’s not really an area where they have any understanding or expertise,” he said.
The “ceasefire now” petition, which also called for the freeing of all civilian hostages, has been signed by nearly 800 charities from around the world. Comic Relief has appointed Tom Shropshire, a trustee, as interim chairman.
A spokesman for the charity said: “We would like to thank Eric for all he has done for Comic Relief over the past three years, including guiding Comic Relief through the Covid-19 pandemic, the ongoing cost of living crisis and shaping our current strategy.
“We are grateful to Eric for his continued support of Comic Relief by helping to recruit his successor and on various other projects. We wish him well for the future.”
Salama is currently the chairman of Verian, the government and public sector research and communications firm formerly known as Kantar Public, as well as a board adviser to the venture capital group LocalGlobe. He said he had decided to speak out about the petition because he hoped that recent events would “promote more conversations and more genuine empathy — and less social media grandstanding”.
In 2019, Salama was stabbed near the heart with an eight-inch kitchen knife during an attempted robbery while he was out getting coffee near Kew Gardens. Nearly five years on, he said the experience had made him much more alert when walking home alone at night.
“I developed a better appreciation of the worries that some women have in a dark car park or out at night on their own,” he said. “I hope that what we are going through strengthens people’s understanding of what Jewish people are currently going through.”
