Mick Hartley

Robin Simcox, Commissioner for Countering Extremism, in the Times this morning:

A good test for the health of any society is to consider how it treats its Jewish population. By that metric the UK, and even more so, much of Europe, is very sick indeed.

In the aftermath of the single worst atrocity perpetrated against Jewish people since the Holocaust, tens of thousands of British citizens went online and took to the streets, not to mourn the innocent victims, but to voice support for the “Palestinian resistance”.

Whatever chants such as, “Long live the Palestinian resistance” or “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” might arguably have meant three weeks ago, their deployment in the aftermath of October 7 takes on precise operational clarity: death to Jews, and the erasure of Israel from the map.

Some of those whose jubilation and support for Hamas’s pogrom was literal and explicit have rightly been arrested. But the overwhelming majority have been careful to construe their public displays of support just below the legal threshold for hate crime, glorification of terror, or public order offences. They are successfully exploiting one of our proudest British values, freedom of expression, to pursue a shameful extremist agenda, the normalisation and promotion of antisemitism.

According to the Community Security Trust, we have seen a 581 per cent increase in antisemitic incidents on British streets since October 7….

When cars drive through Jewish neighbourhoods waving Palestinian flags, chanting “F*** their mothers, rape their daughters”, without criminal consequence; when protesters march through London calling for the violent destruction of Israel without arrest; when the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, which smears the only democracy in the Middle East as an apartheid state and uniquely singles out the Jewish state for economic boycott, is rife on British campuses, in trade unions, and on the hard left; when a direct action group, Palestine Action, is able to wage a campaign of criminal damage, intimidation, and vandalism against Israeli businesses in the UK; when hate preachers and hostile state actors are able to peddle antisemitic conspiracy theories in British mosques and educational institutions; and when Hamas’s patron, Iran, can brazenly threaten British citizens and other nationals in the UK, without any apparent consequence, is it any wonder that we find ourselves where we are?

It is also the price that Britain and other Western European countries are paying for a three decade-long failed policy mix of mass migration and multiculturalism. The UK is one of the world’s most successful multi-ethnic democracies — we are a better country for it and should be immensely proud of that tradition. But that success relies on a basic level of integration….

But it's not just Muslim hatred we're dealing with here. The hard left – and often the not-so-hard left – are fully on board with this antisemitism masquerading as anti-Zionism.