Mick Hartley

With far right antisemitism, the left is quick to condemn. With Islamic antisemitism, it’s not quite the same. Dave Rich notes the difference:

The bald fact is that the anti-racist left abandoned Britain’s Jews a generation ago. Whereas they had stood roughly shoulder to shoulder with Jewish and other communities against the National Front and the British National Party, this solidarity evaporated when wave of antisemitism that hit European Jewry during the Second Intifada came primarily not from the far right but from radicalised Islamist extremists. It was al-Qaeda who murdered Jews in Tunisia, Turkey and Morocco in the early 2000s; and it was French Muslims who killed French Jews with increasing regularity in the years following. This reality was at first denied, then justified or excused. When neo-Nazis killed Jews, this was rightly recognised as a racist murder; but when jihadists did it, it was seen as an illegitimate expression of a legitimate anger about Israel.

The Jews are clearly victims when attacked by the far right. Brown-skinned Muslims, however, by the simplistic logic of racial hierarchies, rank below supposedly successful “white” Jews, so their antisemitism is an unfortunate but justified response to their oppression. It’s an easier position to maintain when you believe, as the Free Palestine crowd seem to do, that all Jews are somehow European (“go back to Poland”), and you deny that Israel is the Jews’ ancestral home – and deny the reality that a good half of Israelis, the Mizrahi, have no historic connection to Europe but were driven out of Arab lands where they’d lived for millennia.

Anti-Jewish diatribes that would evoke left wing outrage if they came from far right racists go completely ignored when they come from mosque pulpits. We are repeatedly told that “resistance” doesn’t mean slaughtering Jews in their homes, when on October 7, that is exactly what it meant. The pro-Palestinian movement in this country may like to think of itself as anti-racist, but there are an awful lot of anti-Jewish racists who seem to feel quite at home there.

The problem is that now, on the hard left, it’s not so much that they don’t condemn antisemitism – they embrace it.