RUTHFULLY YOURS

If you take the mainstream media’s word for it, Britain and much of the West have been gripped in recent years by a long-overdue reckoning with our racist past and present. 2020 – the year Black Lives Matter went global – was supposedly a high watermark for ‘anti-racist’ activism, which was only bristled against by bigots or dumb proles oblivious to their own privilege.

None of that was true, of course. As was clear even at the time, the BLM convulsions had nothing to do with a bottom-up backlash against racism and everything to do with a top-down attempt to mainstream woke racial identity politics – an ideology that is by turns divisive (carving people up along racial lines) and trivial (insisting that the existence of a statue in Bristol was among the primary obstacles to black British success).

But if you were still labouring under the misconception that our cultural elites are now all dogged anti-racists, entitled to indulge in their incessant moral preening, witness their stony, silent reaction to the sulphurous re-emergence of anti-Semitism over the past year. Following Hamas’s pogrom in Israel, Jew hatred has made a devastating comeback on Britain’s streets, and the knee-takers have had bugger all to say about it.

A golf course in Hendon has become the latest canvas on which disgraceful anti-Jewish racism has been splashed. On Friday, groundskeepers discovered swastikas, ‘Heil Hitler’ and ‘Fuck the Jews’ raked into the bunkers. Jews make up 17 per cent of the population of Hendon, sitting at the heart of Jewish north-west London. Whoever did this apparently timed the stunt to coincide with the start of Yom Kippur.

Still, you’d be forgiven for not knowing this took place at all. The wall-to-wall coverage, the days of ostentatious soul-searching, that greeted, say, Lady Hussey asking a black woman where she was from or Boris Johnson making a joke about burqas has been conspicuous by its absence following the Hendon incident. As it always is whenever it comes to anti-Semitism. Ours is an age in which we obsess over fantasy forms of racism – desperate as we are to find it lurking in every clumsy comment or headline-grabbing gag – while we ignore unvarnished expressions of the world’s oldest racism.

There’s certainly been no shortage of the latter of late. In February, the Community Security Trust (CST) reported a 96 per cent rise in anti-Semitic assaults following 7 October. Bricks and bottles have been thrown at British Jews. One man, on his way home from a synagogue, was kicked by ‘pro-Palestine’ protesters and told, ‘We are going to rape your mother, you dirty Jew’. No doubt, this was just misplaced anger about the goings on in Gaza, because racially menacing British Jews is a totally normal response to a war raging in the Middle East.

Sarcasm aside, those still trying to pretend that this is anything other than pure anti-Semitism would do well to read that CST report from February. The peak in anti-Semitic incidents, it found, came just a few days after Hamas’s barbaric assault on Israel – weeks before Israel’s ground invasion into Gaza began. It represented a grotesque kind of ‘celebration’ of the pogrom, it concluded. Holding British Jews responsible for the actions of the Israeli government is disgusting enough. But even that doesn’t capture what has been going on.

Anti-Semitism has been metastasising for years now, yet the ‘anti-racists’ have been determined not to notice. Even before 7 October, British Jews were suffering a quarter of all religiously motivated hate crimes while making up just 0.5 per cent of the population. Stories of elderly Jewish men being sucker-punched on the street or Jewish sites being desecrated came and went without much comment. There’s a synagogue in Kent that has been smashed up eight times in 10 years, yet that story has struggled to break out of the local and Jewish press.

My mind often drifts back to those racist scumbags who drove around Finchley Road, another Jewish area of north-west London, in 2021. They chanted ‘Fuck the Jews… Fuck their mothers… Rape their daughters’ out of megaphones, in cars decked out with Palestinian flags. There they were, calling for precisely the kind of violence and sadism we saw meted out on the innocent Jews of southern Israel a few Octobers later. This was a call for barbarism dressed up as national liberation, in the middle of our capital city. And yet it provoked little more than perfunctory tweets from the great and good.

If they were willing to let that slide, they were willing to let anything slide. The silence of the ‘anti-racists’ since 7 October won’t have surprised anyone who has been paying attention. But it must deprive the woke set of the moral high ground for good. After years of raging against cultural appropriation, microaggressions and inanimate objects, they clammed up when genocidal terrorists achieved the most deadly assault against Jews since the Holocaust, and anti-Semitic marches became part and parcel of British city life. They showed once and for all that they don’t care about racism, particularly when it’s levelled against Jews. Never let them forget it.