A few years ago, a video emerged of former UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn saying: British “Zionists… don’t want to study history” and despite “having lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives, they don’t understand English irony either.”
The comments, made in 2013 and publicized five years later when Corbyn was making a bid to become prime minister, have been on my mind as a wave of antisemitic attacks hits the UK, the country I left for a life in Israel more than 45 years ago.
The sense of irony and history were on display on the front page of the British Jewish News weekly last Friday. The cover was designed as a mock Bingo board, featuring a photo of the stabbing attack last week in Golders Green, where two identifiably Jewish men were seriously wounded by a Somali-born man.
Lacking, perhaps, characteristic British understatement, the paper’s headline stated: “Bull$# @ # bingo” “Jews bleed. Cue the clichés…”
Among the standard phrases heard by the suffering community, after the fifth attack on Jewish targets just that week: “This is not who we are as a country,” “We stand with the Jewish community,” “We must choose unity at a time like this,” “Our hearts go out to the victims and their families,” and, the most clichéd of all: “Our thoughts and prayers are with you.”
The thoughts and prayers seem to have been fleeting. The same trite words were said after two people were murdered on Yom Kippur at a synagogue in Manchester.
Corbyn, by the way, soon discovered that people didn’t fall for that ruse of referring to “Zionists” instead of “Jews.” Following the uproar, he said: “I am now more careful with how I might use the term ‘Zionist’ because a once self-identifying political term has been increasingly hijacked by antisemites as code for Jews.”
Takes one to know one.
Corbyn came out from under a rock or somewhere to publish on X/Twitter last week: “The stabbing of two Jewish men is horrifying. So too is the attack on a Muslim man the same day, ignored by much of our media. All human lives are equal – and we should oppose all hatred and violence wherever it appears. That’s how we build a safe & peaceful society for all.”
British journalist Nicole Lampert Brockman posted a Facebook response about “this sort of dog whistle attack in which Jews are somehow being seen as hogging the limelight in our own oppression. How dare we!
“It’s a bit like the people who attack us for making the Holocaust – the genocide of the Jews – all about Jews. Apparently that’s ‘Jewish supremacist’ behaviour…
“All forms of racism are equally abhorrent… But that’s not what is going on here. This is about trying to hint that Jews are whinging. That the threat against us isn’t as dangerous as being made out. That there’s some nefarious reasons why this attack is being made all about antisemitism.”
Global wave of antisemitism
The wave of antisemitism is global – like global jihad. It has taken a toll in countries once considered tolerant and calm, like Canada and Australia (where the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion is examining the Bondi Beach massacre, where 15 people were murdered at a Hanukkah party by an apparently ISIS-inspired father and son). Friends in places ranging from New Zealand to Belgium express emotions starting with “concern” and escalating to “fear.”
Discussions of moving, trying to find a safe place to live as a Jew, are not theoretical. Countries once considered a good place to live are becoming good places to leave. British Jews aren’t scared they will be kicked out of their homes (like the expulsion of 1290), but some are worried there will come a day when they no longer feel they can live there. And, yes, the comparisons with Germany in the 1930s are being made.
For many, even during a war, Israel is looking like an attractive option. I, for one, appreciate the irony. It must be my British upbringing.
The Iran-sponsored, Hamas-led invasion and mega-atrocity of October 7, 2023 – the barbaric attack on Israel – continues to serve as a weapon for Israel’s destruction. The red-green alliance – the Progressive Left and Islamists – uses and distorts Israel’s response to attack the Jewish state and Jews everywhere.
Add to that the hatred of the far-Right, and you have a toxic mix that doesn’t threaten Israel’s existence so much as the nature of the West. There is a moral inversion that portrays Israel – and by extension all Jews – as “baby killers” and “genocidal” monsters.
Every act that Hamas and Islamic Jihad perpetrated against Israelis in their homes, on the streets, and at the Supernova music festival – the rapes, the mutilations, the burning, the beheadings, the abductions; these acts familiar from jihadist ISIS videos – have been twisted into a blood libel in which the Jews are the guilty ones.
Palestinian supporters screaming “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” (i.e., there will be no Jewish state) accuse Israel of “apartheid,” “genocide,” and “ethnic cleansing.” And can there be greater irony than Brits accusing Israelis of “colonialism”?
The attacks in the UK and in several European countries have been linked to the Iranian terrorist group Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia (HAYI). Apart from mobilizing local operatives to perpetrate the physical attacks, the Iranian regime is also spreading its message of hate online and in media networks. This inevitably leads to blood on the streets – Jewish blood and the blood of other “infidels.”
There have been some brave voices who have spoken out. Among the most notable British non-Jews who know history and want to stand on the right side of it are former army officers Richard Kemp and Andrew Fox, and journalists Douglas Murray, Brendan O’Neill, and Tom Slater.
They have more moral courage than the Green Party leader Zack Polanski, who uses his nominal Jewishness to justify outrageous verbal attacks on Israel; spoke about the need to discuss whether British Jews suffer from “a perception of unsafety” or “actual unsafety”; and whose electioneering is more about “Palestine” than Britain.
As O’Neill wrote on the British online magazine Spiked: “There is a determined effort to draw a moral distinction between ‘real antisemitism,’ like that in Golders Green, and anti-Zionism. No, no, no. Anti-Zionism is the foul soil in which violent Jew hate has taken root. It is the most menacing hate movement of our time.
“It has power and clout. It is the ideology of the new ruling class. It is ruthlessly communicated through the digital highways and popular culture. And it is hanging a target sign around the necks of Jews everywhere on Earth. It must be defeated, urgently.”
MP Zarah Sultana, a co-founder with Corbyn of Your Party, condemned the Golders Green stabbing as “deeply shocking” and a “stark reminder of the very real danger antisemitism poses on our streets” along with the obligatory “our thoughts are with the victims.” This led writer J.K. Rowling, to retort: “I assume this is a different Zarah Sultana MP to the one who was recently filmed clapping along to loudspeaker chants for Intifada, on a street in Surrey.”
The voices of support from King Charles and others are welcome, but not enough. The additional funding for the Community Security Trust, the replacement of the Hatzolah ambulances, and the visit by Prime Minister Keir Starmer to a Jewish community do not prevent the next crime.
There needs to be a real reversal in the climate – antisemitism in all its guises needs to be called out. The online hate needs to be halted; antisemitic sermons in mosques and toxic activities on university campuses need to come to an end. Freedom of expression is important, but as the saying goes: “The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.”
Nice phrases are meaningless if they are not translated into action, enforced by the police and the courts. Jews – people – are being killed, and it starts with the blood libels and the marches with the slogan “Globalize the Intifada.” The Intifada looks like this: stabbings, firebombings, car rammings, and suicide bombings by “martyrs.”
Jews and non-Jews alike should turn out on Sunday to “The Standing Strong: Extinguish Antisemitism” rally in London. We need to show that antisemitism is unacceptable – not just mourn and bemoan the results.
