We should confront the brand new anti-Semitism

The world’s oldest hatred has made a grotesque comeback. In Israel, our bodies are nonetheless being discovered following Hamas’s barbaric incursion into its southern territory. Greater than 260 corpses have been recovered from the now notorious music competition the place younger individuals had been gunned down, raped and kidnapped. Within the tiny farming neighborhood of Beeri, 100 our bodies have been discovered: 10 per cent of its inhabitants. It’s been revealed {that a} Holocaust survivor is amongst these kidnapped by Hamas. 9-hundred individuals, the overwhelming majority of them Israeli-Jewish civilians, have been killed. Saturday is already believed to be essentially the most lethal day for Jewry because the Holocaust. We’ve witnessed evil.

Now, on the streets of London, we’re witnessing the celebration of that evil. Final night time, 1000’s gathered close to the Israeli embassy on Kensington Excessive Avenue. An obvious mixture of Islamists, SWP varieties and Goldsmiths first-years waved Palestine flags, set off fireworks, danced and chanted. ‘Generally you must struggle, freedom isn’t received simply by phrases’, stated one protester, when requested by the Mail about Hamas’s acts of barbarism. One other, handing out ‘Free Palestine’ merchandise, plainly advised the reporter the assault was ‘justified’. ‘I do really feel it’s one thing the Palestinians assist’, he added. Chants of ‘Allahu Akbar’ rang out. As did ‘From the river to the ocean, Palestine shall be free’. I can solely hope a few of them had been simply blind to what this slogan actually means: which is the destruction of Israel, the ethnic cleaning of Jews. That’s actually what Hamas – whose founding constitution fantasises in regards to the homicide of Jews and whose main lights name for Jews to be beheaded – means by it. And final night time, British residents gathered in our capital metropolis to mark that genocidal outfit’s murderous spree by means of Israel, even squaring off towards small teams of Jews who bravely went alongside to oppose them.

Simply throughout London, in Golders Inexperienced, a kosher restaurant was smashed up and robbed on Sunday night time. The police – in a press release that has raised eyebrows – have stated they aren’t treating it as a hate crime. Maybe it was additionally one large coincidence that somebody sprayed the phrases ‘Free Palestine’ over the railway bridge in Golders Inexperienced that very same weekend – a racist taunt masquerading as a liberation slogan. Probably the most quietly heartbreaking story from current days was a brief e-mail despatched to the dad and mom of pupils on the Jewish Free Faculty in Kenton, telling them their kids don’t must put on their blazers to highschool, bearing their faculty’s badge, if it makes them really feel safer, and reassuring them that faculty safety measures have been ramped up.

Jewish colleges already, as a matter in fact, keep a stage of safety that might shock a lot of the inhabitants. It’s a reminder that anti-Semitism stays among the many most pervasive types of racism to blight Britain, and but it’s among the many least mentioned or understood. Jews account for 0.5 per cent of the British inhabitants, however are the victims of 1 / 4 of all religiously motivated hate crimes. Google ‘Jewish graves desecrated UK’ and also you’ll see reams of circumstances you’ve in all probability by no means heard of. Earlier this yr, a Jewish cemetery in Rochester, Kent was vandalised for the eighth time in 10 years. Final yr, 30-year-old Abdullah Qureshi was discovered responsible of religiously aggravated grievous bodily hurt and assault after he travelled all the way down to north London, all the way in which from Dewsbury, simply to punch Jews. He managed to assault three, together with a 14-year-old boy, throughout his flying go to.

Each time the Israel-Palestine battle flares, British Jews metal themselves for extra of this hate – they’re held collectively liable for the crimes, actual or imagined, of the Israeli authorities. However what has turn into abundantly clear this week is that this actually isn’t about Israel. That is about Jew hatred, pure and easy. Anti-Zionism is now simply the masks anti-Semitism wears, and the disguise is fooling nobody anymore. Chanting genocidal slogans. Overtly celebrating Hamas. Overtly mocking the lifeless. Taking to the streets in glee earlier than their our bodies are even chilly. The sickening scenes in current days have about as a lot to do with Palestinian rights as these scumbags who drove round London in 2021, as Israel and Hamas had been exchanging missiles, chanting: ‘Fuck the Jews… Fuck their moms… Rape their daughters.’ (A grim foreshadowing of the horrors of final weekend.)

If we don’t confront this hatred, we give up the proper to name ourselves a civilised nation. We should stand in solidarity with the Israelis underneath assault by Hamas’s terrorism and with the British Jews being menaced by Hamas’s gloating British cheerleaders. We should oppose anti-Semitism in all of the tumorous kinds it now is available in – from its Islamist to leftist varieties. And we should ask some looking out questions on how we ended up right here – the place some British residents are so stuffed with hatred, or so marinated in propaganda, that when fascists assault the Jewish State their rapid response is to take to the streets and rage towards the Jewish State.

First, we have to discuss integration. The overwhelming majority of British Muslims could have no truck with the Jew hatred spilling out on to our streets. However to disregard the problem of Muslim anti-Semitism whereas Muslim Brits chant ‘Allahu Akbar’ and reward an Islamist group that has simply slaughtered Jews, all for worry of being referred to as names, could be past shameful. Now greater than ever, we have to embrace a politics of universalism aimed toward binding all Brits, of all backgrounds, collectively. We have to champion freedom and tolerance. And we have to junk the genuinely racist notion that these values are in some way alien to our British Muslim brothers and sisters.

Second, we have to problem the Islamist grievance politics that’s being promoted by unseemly influencers to our Muslim youth – usually to youngsters from households who’ve zero connection to such extremism. As a substitute, the British state appears intent on pushing its personal model of identitarianism, encouraging younger individuals to hunt refuge in non secular or racial victimhood. This should cease now.

Third, we should refuse to permit the woke left – and the harebrained dregs of the previous left – to pose on the ethical excessive floor ever once more. This previous week has proven, past doubt, that what passes for the novel left is now fully past saving. It has turn into an inversion of every thing it as soon as stood for. It’s tolerating anti-Semites within the title of anti-imperialism; taunting essentially the most menaced of minorities within the title of anti-racism.

Above all, we have to problem the ideologies which have fuelled the brand new anti-Semitism. From radical Islamism, with its goals of wiping Israel off the map, to conspiratorial considering, the gasoline for anti-Semitism for millennia, to identitarianism, positing racial battle because the means to liberation, to Israelophobia, the bigoted conviction that Israel is essentially the most evil nation on earth, the rebel concepts of our age all level in direction of one factor: Jew hatred.

We have to struggle this hatred. And British gentiles can not depart it to British Jews to take action alone. Because the late Jonathan Sacks, the previous UK chief rabbi, as soon as put it: ‘The sufferer can not treatment the crime. The hated can not treatment the hate. It could be the best mistake for Jews to consider that they’ll struggle it alone. The one individuals who can efficiently fight anti-Semitism are these energetic within the cultures that harbour it.’ It shames us all that the UK, in 2023, is harbouring the world’s oldest hatred as soon as once more.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Comply with him on Twitter: @Tom_Slater