RUTHFULLY YOURS

The first question anyone should ask is: Who invited this “Salafist megastar,” who denies the Holocaust and is known for making anti-Semitic statements, to visit Malmö?

What do you do when anti-Semitism in Sweden’s third largest city is so normalized that children in a public school can endorse a conference with anti-Semitic elements?

Antisemitism, is, in fact, such a gigantic problem in Malmö that even senior politicians and officials in Malmö cannot understand how it became so normalized. They seem to dismiss it as part of a non-Swedish culture that, in a multicultural society, must be tolerated, even accommodated.

If there are children in Swedish public schools today who are promoting an anti-Semitic conference, what will these children do in the future?

Is Sweden really turning into a country where Jews are no longer welcome, someday to become a country without Jews? And if that happens, what does that say about Sweden? And about who will come next after the Jews?

Malmö, Sweden’s third largest city is an important, visible part of Sweden. If you read the Municipality of Malmö’s political objectives, which the Municipal Council of Malmö has endorsed, you will see that “racism, discrimination and hate crimes do not belong in open Malmö.” The reality, however, is different. Antisemitism there has reached bizarre levels — with politicians and other policymakers in Sweden doing nothing about it.

On a crisp, sunlit morning in March, I ceased to feel at home in London. It dawned on me that the city where I had been born 58 years ago was no longer safe. I was walking past two men at a stall outside my local Underground station. Their beards and dress revealed them as Salafists; they were proselytising for their fundamentalist form of Islam. My face must have betrayed my anxiety, because they started pointing and talking while I entered the station. As I looked round, both men were grinning at me.

Why did I find their presence disquieting? A couple of hours earlier in Brussels, three suicide bombers had detonated nail bombs in the airport and on the Metro, killing 32 passengers outright and inflicting horrific wounds on another 312 people, of whom 62 were critically injured — all in the name of the Islamic State. It was hard to believe that the two jovial gentlemen outside the station could have been unaware of what had just taken place less than 200 miles away. That was presumably why they were there.

As I descended into the Tube, my thoughts went back to a similar morning, July 7, 2005, when four suicide bombers struck the London transport system. I was going to work on one of the Tube lines that was attacked, having just delivered my two youngest children to their school. Like thousands of others, I was lucky to be on a different train and to have escaped injury, but 52 died and 700 were maimed in the name of al-Qaeda. At the time, Londoners assumed that this terrorist threat would eventually pass, just as the IRA threat with which we had grown up had passed. Though Madrid had already been attacked, killing 192 and injuring more than 2,000, nothing on the scale of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington had then seemed likely. But over the past decade the threat has grown steadily worse. Above all, last year there had been the attacks on Paris, since which the French capital had yet to return to normality. After Paris and Brussels, I looked back on the horror of London 11 years ago with a sickening feeling of dread. Was there any reason to suppose that such attacks would not be repeated, now that jihadis loyal to IS had multiplied across Europe and notably in London? We now know that Mohamed Abrini, the “man in the hat” bomber who survived the Brussels airport attacks, was not only also involved in the Paris massacre, but visited Britain last July and allegedly met more than a dozen Islamists here. At the time of writing, five Britons have been arrested.

“Meanwhile, on Sunday morning TV, the most hate-filled studio “discussion” took place between Israel bashers and defenders, hand-picked, it would seem, by Katie Hopkins. Lunatic, petrifying, anti-Semites — the worst being self-hating Jews who prefaced each remark with “I’m Jewish myself, but . . .”. Shame on the researchers. It made me feel sick all day.
The Palestinian cause is as important a cause as the occupation of Tibet, Chechnya, Crimea, Kurdistan, Northern Cyprus. I won’t go on because they will accuse me, as they always do, of “what-about-ism” and never, never give me an answer as to why they don’t give a flying fart about the “right to return” of any of these other oppressed peoples. So, as I said, I did not respond. I am too tired. I am 4,000 years too tired.”

“So what do you think?” people keep asking me. Would I come on the Today programme, Newsnight, breakfast television for heaven’s sake, and talk about it. “It” was not the opening of a new play, the surprisingly good reviews, or the fact that one of the four actresses had to leave the show permanently after the first night due to family illness. Nor the broken limbs of two audience members who tumbled down the theatre steps, on two different nights (making the term “break a leg” a no-go area for ever more), stopping the show while paramedics were called.

Nor was it for my thoughts on Barack Obama’s gig as a stand-up comedian — good — or his lecturing us on the consequences of a Brexit — bad — or even the terrible shock of losing the bright and beautiful Victoria Wood, whom I had not even known was ill.

What they sought was my response to Ken Livingstone’s response to Naz Shah’s delicate 2014 tweet on the Jewish question. I turned them all down. I was — am — too tired.

I read and listened and watched, though, and came to a cynical conclusion. For the Jews in the diaspora, as for the state of Israel, one thing is for sure: we’re damned if we respond and damned if we don’t.

Out of the blue, the papers and the airways are filled with the word “anti-Semitism”. It is all about us. Again. Why? Have I missed something? Did Israel attack a neighbour in response to rocket fire? No. Have Jews attacked, surrounded, blown up, beheaded, caged, destroyed, proselytised, rounded up, raped or hijacked anybody? No. Have any recent terrorist attacks been perpetrated by Jewish groups? No. Have we vowed in our constitutions, on our websites and on social media to destroy any one of the Muslim states or Catholic or Christian countries of the world, or urged young Jews to stab members of other faiths? Have we flown planes into tower blocks or trained suicide bombers to blow themselves up in marketplaces, on buses, and in hospitals? No.