Britain slides into an antisemitic sewer
Shocked platitudes don't cut it. Jew-baiting in Britain is out of control
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On Sunday, London’s Jews were subjected to four hours of drive-by intimidation directed at the entire community.
A convoy of cars flying the Palestinian flag drove through one Jewish area of north London after another, with occupants screaming through a megaphone: “F*** the Jews, rape their daughters” and “Go back to Poland”.
According to the Campaign against Antisemitism, the convoy then reached Downing Street to join a demonstration against Israel which featured numerous antisemitic signs including several equating Israel to Nazis. Some demonstrators wore Hamas-style headbands, and one was filmed yelling that Jews should “Go back to all the sh***y countries you came from”.
British politicians and other public figures were shocked at the Jew-baiting convoy. Shocked!
The Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, tweeted:
There is no place for antisemitism in our society.
Robert Jenrick, the Communities Secretary, said:
We must not tolerate this vile, criminal hate in our country.
Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, said a video of the convoy was "utterly disgusting”:
Antisemitism, misogyny and hate have no place on our streets or in our society. There must be consequences.
Oh, but there is such a place, Prime Minister; alas, Secretary of State Jenrick, Britain does tolerate it; antisemitism, Sir Keir, occupies all too large a place; and there never are consequences.
The total disconnect of the political class with this escalating proto-pogrom public climate, which they have been either choosing to ignore or to which they have even been contributing, is egregious.
The day before the drive-by onslaught against London’s Jews, there was a mass Israel hate-fest in London over the war in Gaza. Thousands of demonstrators marched once again to the Israel embassy. In the Mail, whose offices are near that embassy, Richard Littlejohn writes today:
At the nearby Barkers building, which houses the offices of this newspaper, one protester scaled six floors of scaffolding, tore down the Union flag and hoisted the Palestinian flag. Protesters waved Hamas scarves and brandished deeply offensive banners comparing Israel to Nazi Germany, with a swastika imposed on a Star of David. Outside Downing Street, a pro-Israel counter-demonstrator was kicked to the ground. Nine police officers were injured.
Even now, however, few in public life can bring themselves to acknowledge the symbiotic connection between hatred of Israel and hatred of the Jews — and that the latter creates the former, and not the other way round.
I have written about the recent incendiary falsehoods, lies and libels against Israel here, here, here, here, and here.
Yet there’s still an absolute refusal in many quarters to acknowledge that the hysteria against Israel can only be explained — in its demonic irrationality and determination to libel the Israelis as child-killers, while excusing those who really are murdering and procuring the deaths of children and other innocents — as a profoundly unhinged obsession with demonising the Jewish people.
To repeat: there is no other conflict, issue, people or country in the world which has ever been subjected to such a campaign of systematic, obsessional and paranoid falsehoods and inversion of historical, legal and demonstrably factual reality. This is a unique pathology, directed uniquely at both the Jewish people and the Jewish state because it is the same unique disorder with the same unique characteristics. And it has one name. Antisemitism.
Of course, this is insistently denied. Those who point out the undeniable evidence are accused, odiously, of using the spectre of antisemitism to camouflage the crimes of Israel. The “progressives” insist they are merely supporting “Palestinian rights”.
Well, leave aside for a moment the lies told about Israel, the history of the Jews in the land and all the other gross distortions of the truth. Look instead at what these self-professed “anti-racists” and “anti-Nazis” are actually supporting. For the Palestinian cause itself is nothing other than politicised Jew-hatred and incitement to murder Jews and steal their country.
According to an Anti-Defamation League poll in 2014, the Arabs of the “West Bank” and Gaza are the most antisemitic people in the entire world. Ninety-three percent of those polled said they believed that at least six of the 11 negative stereotypes the pollsters suggested about Jews were “probably true”.
Given the decades of Palestinian indoctrination in paranoid, deranged libels about the Jewish people — not just Israel, but Jews qua Jews— who can be surprised? In January, Palestinian Media Watch reported:
PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement recently produced a propaganda video purportedly about Jewish history in Europe which it publicised on Fatah’s official Facebook page. It teaches that Jews see themselves as superior – “We [Jews] are a nation that is above the [other] nations... only we are people, and all the others are our animals” – and others as inferior: “Non-Jews... according to their worldview are snakes.” The Jews, Fatah explained, “led the project to enslave humanity” and allied with Nazis to burn Jews “to accumulate wealth.” The Jews themselves established “ghettos in order to separate from other people out of arrogance and disgust for non-Jews.” It was in the ghettos, the documentary further lies, that the Jews schemed against the non-Jews, leading to European Antisemitism: “[Jews] were hated because of their racism and their filthy behaviour.”
…It was Abbas himself who explained to Palestinians why Europeans committed massacres of Jews “every 10 to 15 years” for centuries and eventually the Holocaust: “Why did this happen?... The hatred of the Jews is not due to their religion, but, rather, due to their social role... due to their social role that was connected to usury and banks and so forth.” Thus Abbas confirmed the antisemites’ deception that Jews brought Antisemitism upon themselves.
Abbas’s appointees in the PA religious and political frameworks likewise disseminate hatred of Jews. Mahmoud al Habbash, whom Abbas appointed to be the head of the Islamic Courts and who served as his personal adviser, taught that the conflict with Israel is not about territory but is against the Jews because they are Satan’s ally on earth, disseminating evil and falsehood. Israel is therefore “Satan’s project,” he taught.
Palestinian children are taught the same hate ideology. Children recite poems on official PA TV stating that “our enemy, Zion, is Satan with a tail,” and that Jews were “condemned to humiliation and hardship” and are “the most evil among creations, barbaric monkeys, wretched pigs.”
PA antisemitism reaches its pinnacle by presenting Jews’ existence as a fundamental threat to all humanity. PA religious figures have worded it in various ways on official PA TV: “These are the Jews... always fighting, always corrupting, always scheming, and always plotting against humanity”; “There is no global corruption that they are not behind”; “Systematically working to incite wars and strife in the entire world”; “Humanity will never live in peace or fortune or tranquility as long as they are corrupting the land.... If a fish in the sea fights with another fish, I am sure the Jews are behind it.”
At times the PA has explicitly stated its horrific conclusion: The Jewish threat to humanity will be stopped only by exterminating all Jews. One preacher on official PA TV explained it: “These malignant [Jewish] genes and cursed characteristics continue in them. They transfer them from generation to generation. They inherit it from father to son.... Humanity will never be able to live together with them.... Our prophet [Muhammad] informed us [that] at the end of time the Muslims will fight the Jews.... Jews hide behind a stone or a tree, and the stone or a tree will say: ‘Muslim, servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him’.... Allah... count them and kill them one by one, and do not leave even one.”
Since killing any and all Jews is self-defence, every act of Palestinian murder is packaged as a heroic act with Allah’s stamp of approval. After a Palestinian terrorist murdered two Israeli co-workers, Abbas’s Fatah sent the murderer a message on its official Facebook page: “Allah is protecting you and taking care of you.”
This is what British and American so-called “progressives” — including, appallingly and tragically, many “progressive” Jews — are actually supporting when they endorse the Palestinian cause. But the point is that this horrific collusion has been going on for decades. And there’s a direct line connecting the west’s systematic incitement against Israel and incitement against Jews.
Over the years, demonstration after demonstration against Israel on the streets of London and elsewhere has featured mobs of Muslims marching shoulder-to-shoulder with leftists, liberals and other useful idiots behind the banners of Hamas — whose charter is committed to the genocide of the Jews, whom it dementedly accuses of every perceived ill of the world from the French Revolution onwards.
Such pro-Hamas demonstrations therefore represented a threat to British Jews. No-one ever did anything about this.
For years, such mobs have screamed on the streets of Britain the genocidal jihadi war-cry: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — in other words, a call for the eradication of Israel. This represented at the very least intimidation of British Jews for whom Israel is intimately bound up with their identity. No-one ever did anything about this.
These mobs have also screamed in Arabic, as they did again on Saturday: “Khayber Khayber Ya Yehud jaish Mohammed Sauf Ya’ud”. This means, “Khayber Khaybar oh Jews, Mohammed’s army is returning” — and is an inflammatory reference to Mohammed’s seventh century slaughter of the Jews of Khybar, and a threat to replicate it.
This represented an unmistakeable menace against British Jews. Not Israelis. Not Zionists. Jews. But no-one ever did anything about it. And unabashed western “progressives” continue to support these people’s cause.
But the threat isn’t limited to this chilling alliance. It’s deepened yet further by the fact that the murderous lies about Israel, which are so dangerously inflaming emotions against Israel and the Jews, are never repudiated by those who shape British political discourse.
After every one of Israel’s (always defensive) wars, there’s invariably a sharp upsurge in both physical and verbal attacks on British Jews. Yet despite hand-on-heart platitudes from British politicians pledging their undying love for Britain’s Jewish community, none of them ever sees fit to address the incitement by denouncing the serial libels against Israel and the sanitising of those trying to destroy it and murder Jews.
When did you hear any leading British politician tell the British people about the Palestinians’ Nazi-themed antisemitism? Never. On the contrary, they maintain the Palestinians deserve a state of their own.
When did you hear a British prime minster tell the British people that the Israel Defence Force goes to lengths greater than any other country’s military — including Britain’s own armed forces — in trying to avoid the loss of enemy civilian life? Never. Instead, British politicians call for Israel to halt its attempts to neutralise Hamas. Thus they connive at the continued attempts at the mass murder of Israeli civilians, year in, year out. Yet they themselves continue to bomb Islamic State targets in Iraq — and of course, without Israeli-style warnings to any civilians to evacuate.
When did you hear the British government tell the British people that Israel is not only legally entitled to what is now Israel, the “West Bank” and Gaza (from which it evacuated every Israeli citizen in 2005, and just look at it now) but are the only people who have ever had any legal, historical or moral entitlement to these territories, having been granted sole residency rights to the whole lot as their historic national home by the precursor to the UN, the League of Nation, in 1922?
Never. And you won’t ever hear that undeniable fact. Because it was Britain that acted against international law in the thirties and forties, when it tore up its commitment to settle the Jews throughout post-First World War Palestine, barred entry to it by the desperate Jews of Nazi Europe and proposed to give part or even all of it instead to the Nazi-linked Palestinian Arab attackers of the Palestinian Jews.
Instead of telling the public the truth about Israel’s entitlement to the land, the British government itself exacerbates the hysteria and incitement by repeatedly making the legally illiterate claim that Israel is in “illegal occupation”.
And when did you hear British politicians denounce the systemic media falsehoods and distortions about Israel, and call out the newspapers and broadcasters for helping incite murderous hysteria and antisemitism?
Never. Instead, Starmer actually contributed to this himself, as I wrote here when he tweeted about the violence on Temple Mount which preceded the rocket barrages from Gaza — and which was instigated by the Palestinian “worshippers”:
The violence against worshippers during Ramadan at the al Aqsa mosque was shocking. Israel must respect international law, and must take steps, immediately, to work with Palestinian leaders to de-escalate tensions.
And so we are where we are, and Britain is in a very bad place indeed. Over the past few days:
Rafi Goodwin, a rabbi from Chigwell, Essex, was taken to hospital after being attacked in the street and abused with antisemitic slurs.
A 97 year-old Auschwitz survivor in north London has been inundated with antisemitic abuse over Gaza on social media. The Times reports:
Messages posted on her feeds included ones that read “Happy Holocaust”, “Peace be upon Hitler” and “Ask her if she thinks the treatment of Palestinians reminds her [of] the treatment she got in the camp”.
Jewish schoolchildren are being subjected to antisemitic harassment at school.
But hey ho — after the FA Cup Final on Saturday, two Leicester City players unfurled a Palestinian flag.
Oh — and here’s a British police officer, no less, chanting “Free Palestine” with a raised fist, to the cheers of the mob. The Mail reports:
A Muslim policewoman is being probed by Scotland Yard today after footage emerged of her chanting “Free Palestine” while on duty at a protest outside the Israeli embassy in London. The officer appears to say she is “praying day and night” to Allah, before embracing the woman despite Met rules saying “officers must remain independent and impartial in carrying out their duties”.
She then raises her arm in the air and repeatedly chants: “Free free Palestine, free free Palestine,” sparking cheers from the thousands of people walking to the protest at the Israeli embassy, where nine Met. officers were injured after being pelted with bottles and eggs over the weekend.
“No place for antisemitism in our society,” Boris Johnson? Thanks to the inertia, cowardice and malice of the political and media classes, it’s now horrifically out of control.
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