RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/02/12/why-jews-are-fleeing-the-west/

Jewish history has long been defined by migratory movements away from trouble and towards safer places. Over the past half millennia, the safest harbours for ‘the world’s foster children’, as David Mamet put it, have generally been English-speaking countries, first Britain, then especially the US, Canada and Australia.

This is increasingly no longer the case. The British Jewish community is being battered by a rising tide of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish agitation from both the left and segments of the UK’s much larger Muslim population. In Australia, Jewish childcare centres and an MP’s office have been attacked. Even the United States and Canada, where over 70 per cent of the Jewish diaspora resides, are showing signs of increased anti-Zionist and openly anti-Semitic sentiment. Indeed, in the US, anti-Semitic hate crimes now dwarf hate crimes against Muslims, blacks or Asians. No wonder many Jews are thinking of departing for safer pastures new.

The potential decline in the Jewish Anglosphere has been presaged by a more precipitous fall in Europe and throughout Asia. The Jewish population in Europe stood at 3.5million in 1950, after the Holocaust. Today it has fallen to well under 1.5million. France is home to the world’s third-largest Jewish community, but it’s shrinking. Since 2000, nearly 50,000 Jews have left France, mostly for Israel. Even more shocking has been the virtual annihilation of Jews in Islamic countries – one million strong until the 1960s, there are fewer than 15,000 Jews living in these places today.

Anti-Semitism, driven by attacks from Islamists and their leftist allies, has been a prime driver of this decline. A survey found that barely 13 per cent of anti-Semitic attacks in Europe were traceable to right-wingers. To be sure, there’s cause to worry about some right-wing anti-Semities within the ranks of Austria’s Freedom Party (founded by former SS officers), the AfD in Germany and Jobbik in Hungary. But right now, the immediate danger lies elsewhere.

Until recently, the Anglosphere provided a bulwark against anti-Semitism. As Barbara W Tuchman explains in Bible and Sword, Jews have long had ties to Britain, reaching back to before Roman times. In 1290, Edward I did announce the expulsion of Jews, but many returned largely at the behest of Oliver Cromwell in the 17th century. Cromwell’s Roundheads drew a lot of their inspiration from the Old Testament. Of course, at the same time, Britain’s Jews have suffered considerable discrimination over the past half millenia, and were unable to vote in parliament until 1858.

In the late-19th century, Britain’s Jewish population swelled thanks to migration from Russia-dominated regions in Europe’s east, notably Poland. Many helped shape the British left, and the Labour Party, while others went off to participate in Britain’s robust economy, including as migrants to the colonies, notably South Africa, Australia and Canada.

But over the past half century, the Jewish population in Britain has declined. Today, with central London often resounding to the sound of pro-Hamas demonstrations, a vibrant centre of Jewish life has been turned into a no-go zone. As secular Jews migrate or intermarry, one study predicts that England’s Jewish community will largely be Orthodox by the century’s close.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/02/10/the-strange-reluctance-to-see-jews-as-victims/

The words of Vasily Grossman, the great Soviet writer, rang in my ears on Saturday: ‘Tell me what you accuse the Jews of, [and] I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of.’ For as those three weak, skeletal, stolen Jews finally tasted freedom after 16 months of bondage in Gaza, it became clear that Hamas is guilty of the very crime it accuses the Jewish State of committing. Famine. The use of hunger as a weapon of war. The infliction of humiliating malnourishment on those judged a lesser people. The Jews are starving us, Hamas cried, when in truth Hamas was starving Jews.

The scenes were chilling. Surrounded by well-fed and heavily armed Hamas gunmen, Eli Sharabi, Or Levy and Ohad Ben Ami cut frail, gaunt figures. Their 491 days in the captivity of that neo-fascist militia had clearly been hellish. On its Instagram page, Israel posted images of the men before and after their kidnapping. Three fit, tanned men had become haggard creatures. They’d clearly been deprived of both food and sunlight – the stuff of life – while chained in Hamas’s dank tunnels. The glee of their loved ones gave way to dread. ‘He [looks] like a skeleton’, said Ben Ami’s mother.

Hamas’s inhumanity continued even during the men’s release. There was a profoundly unsettling moment when Eli Sharabi, flanked by Hamas brutes, said into a mic that he was looking forward to seeing his wife and daughters. As Hamas knew very well, his wife and daughters are dead. They were murdered in the 7 October pogrom. They were shot to death by Hamas militants who invaded their home crying, ‘Die Israel!’. Their bodies were found ‘cuddled together’. For Hamas militants to watch as a man they starved expressed his hope of being reunited with his family that they butchered is a testament to their depthless moral depravity.

It is unimaginable cruelty. You would need to wade back decades to find equal acts of wanton savagery against a Jewish family. Sharabi’s wife, Lianne, was a British citizen. She was from Wales. Their daughters, aged just 13 and 16, will have been Welsh-Israeli. The silence of Britain’s ‘progressives’ on Hamas’s slaughter of these British women for nothing more than the fact that they were Jews in Israel is horrifying. Hamas’s calculated cruelty towards Eli Sharabi finds its echo in the pitiless indifference of Lianne Sharabi’s fellow Britons towards the barbarism inflicted on her and her girls on 7 October.

Or Levy, 34, also didn’t know his wife was dead: she was slain alongside 363 others at the Nova music festival. These men were robbed of their liberty for 16 months and then freed into unthinkable grief. Yet the virtuous of the West look the other way.

ttps://www.frontpagemag.com/spencer-video-antisemitism-history-and-myth/

This new Glazov Gang episode features Robert Spencer, the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. His latest book is Muhammad: A Critical Biography. Follow him on Twitter here.

Robert discusses Antisemitism: History and Myth, reflecting on Why the ancient evil of antisemitism has returned—and how to counter it.

Monday is Holocaust Memorial Day – and the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. This year, as every year, the phrase Never Again will be at the centre of the commemorations. But more than at any time since 1945, it will be meaningless.

In the 80 years since the end of the Holocaust, Never Again has been uttered as if it is some kind of benediction. Merely to say the words shows you to be a caring, thoughtful and, above all, decent human being. You have seen the previously unimaginable evil of the Holocaust and you are revolted. So, never again.

But rarely has there been a clearer example of how actions speak far louder than words. For most of the past 80 years Never Again has been no more than an abstract expression of goodness. It has carried no real, practical, living meaning because it didn’t need to. Anti-Semitism was almost a historical curiosity – a hatred that had been buried after the Holocaust showed where it could lead.

Today, however, when the threat to Jews is real and clear, Never Again is exposed as a platitude.

Israel has had to fight many existential wars since its creation in 1948. But here in Britain, there was no serious threat to the Jewish community – but a new and worrying wave of Jew hatred started emerging at around the time of the arrival of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader in 2015.

In the past fifteen months, however, anti-Semitism has skyrocketed. Naked and unashamed Jew hate is now a regular feature on the streets of London and elsewhere as hundreds of thousands assemble to demonstrate their loathing of “Zionists” – in other words, of Jews.