RUTHFULLY YOURS

It’s been said that a measure of the health of a society is how it treats its Jewish citizens. On that score, Britain is looking very sick indeed.

Since Hamas’s pogrom in Israel, the world’s oldest hatred has made a devastating comeback in Britain.

Anti-Semitic incidents have soared. British Jews have been assaulted. Men in cars have shown up outside synagogues, waving Palestine flags and letting off flares, shouting ‘Kill Jews’ and ‘Death to Israel’.

A swastika and ‘Kill Jews’ were recently daubed on the walls of the toilets at an elite London private school. Some Jewish schools have closed their doors on certain days, fearing they cannot ensure their pupils’ safety.

Jewish university students, meanwhile, are reportedly hiding their kippahs under baseball caps and their Star of David pendants under their shirts.

Hardline Islamic preachers have been caught spewing racist bile in some mosques. One preacher, at the Redbridge Islamic Centre, invited his congregation to ‘curse the Jews and the children of Israel’.

‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ – a thinly veiled call for the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Israel – is chanted with abandon on London’s now weekly ‘pro-Palestine’ demonstrations. Some protesters have been filmed shouting Arabic war slogans about the slaughter of Jews in the 7th century.

In Manchester, home to Britain’s largest Jewish community outside of London, anti-Semitic incidents are up 880 per cent. Manchester’s Jews have had to endure Nazi salutes and fireworks being shot at them.

That barbarous assault on Jews in Israel seven weeks ago – the most lethal attack on Jews since the Holocaust – has inspired pond-scum racists to menace British Jewry. To deface their businesses and places of worship. In some cases, to assault them.

Where is the outrage? Where is the solidarity? Where are the full-throated condemnations? I know many British Jews have been asking these questions.

Our institutions have, at best, stared at their shoelaces – displaying the most appalling double standards. Organisations that have fallen over themselves to express their fealty to every questionable woke cause going in recent years apparently find sticking up for Jews too uncomfortable, too ‘political’.

The BBC has reportedly told its staff not to attend the big March Against Anti-Semitism, which is being held in London this Sunday, over fears doing so would compromise their impartiality. However, attending Pride marches, according to BBC guidelines, is fine.

The police seem to agree that peacefully protesting against Jew hatred is too controversial.

Posters bearing the names and faces of the Israelis kidnapped by Hamas have been taken down by police in London, citing ‘community tensions’. Activists from the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, which is organising the march on Sunday, were recently told by police in Westminster to turn off their billboard vans, highlighting the plight of the hostages, ‘for their own safety’.

Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Police have been remarkably relaxed about Islamists chanting for jihad on London’s streets, as infamously happened at one of those ‘pro-Palestine’ demos a few weeks back.

Britain is not an anti-Semitic nation. The vast majority of Brits are appalled by what is happening. While we must not shy away from the scale of the bigotry before us, nor should we catastrophise about it.

The problem is that the anti-Semites we do have clearly feel emboldened at the moment. They act as though they have been given licence. And with some reason. Indeed, our mealy mouthed elites, those with power and influence, have allowed Jew hatred to burst out of the box which any civilised society must keep it in.

They have made excuses for it. They have gestured vaguely to it being ‘complicated’. They have bought the BS that the protests that have roiled the capital are all about peace and Palestine, rather than bigotry.

Indeed, even describing those ‘pro-Palestine’ protests – which have been organised by groups linked to Hamas and attended by open racists – as ‘hate marches’ is enough to cast you as some kind of right-wing nutter. It could even lose you a cabinet position.

Meanwhile, the woke establishment – the columnists and professional activists, the self-appointed keepers of the anti-racist, anti-fascist flame – are happily marching alongside the Islamists and anti-Semites.

Some on the woke left openly celebrated 7 October, welcoming this racist slaughter as an act of ‘resistance’. I’m sure many more felt the same way, but were savvy enough to keep it to themselves.

Clearly, we cannot rely on the elites to stand up to the new anti-Semitism. But, in a sense, nor should we. In the end, this menace cannot be tackled through pious words from on-high. And certainly not through censorship. We cannot ban this problem away.

Now, as ever, it falls to members of the public to take a stand themselves – for gentiles to stand in solidarity with Jews as they fight this tide of hatred.

On this front, Brits have a rich tradition to draw on.

The Battle of Cable Street in 1936 – where East End leftists and Jews faced down Oswald Mosley’s fascist Blackshirts – still looms large in our collective memory, among Jews and non-Jews alike.

A year earlier, football fans also took a stand at White Hart Lane, home to Tottenham Hotspur and its large Jewish fanbase, which had been chosen to host an England match against Nazi Germany.

An anti-Nazi demonstration descended on Tottenham before the game. While, inside the ground, the German team and fans did Nazi salutes, left-wing protesters clashed with cops and Nazi sympathisers outside.

A swastika flew over the Lane, until Ernie Wooley, a 24-year-old turner from Shoreditch, climbed up on to the stand and cut the flag down. Wooley was arrested and fined for doing so, but he reportedly received his punishment with a smile on his face. ‘That Nazi flag is hated in this country’, he said.

That’s what solidarity looks like. And we need more of it today. On that front, this weekend’s March Against Anti-Semitism is a great place to start.

So, if you can, get yourself to London on Sunday. The march will set off from the Royal Courts of Justice at 1.30pm. You can register for updates with the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism here.

The spiked team will be marching alongside our friends from the October Declaration. See you there.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on Twitter: @Tom_Slater_