Mick Hartley

Hadley Freeman drops a serious point into her “how to be better in 2026” Sunday Times column – Feel free to talk about antisemitism when there is antisemitism:

Two days after the Bondi Beach massacre last month, in which 15 Jews were murdered during a Chanukkah celebration because they were Jewish, a guest on the Today programme made this striking point: “Jews are not the only community that are targeted, and right now there’s Muslims, or immigrants, or trans people, or black people. Other people have their stories which are not to be minimised.”

I guess I missed the meeting in which it was decided that reporting the killing of Jews “minimises other people’s stories”, and I definitely missed stories about trans people being executed in the West on a regular basis. But can we maybe re-examine that edict? Because as that guest was speaking, menorahs in public spaces in Britain were being desecrated and a plot to carry out mass slaughter of Jews in Manchester was averted. Which you might think would give some people in this country pause. But given the speed with which they then defended Alaa Abd el-Fattah, insisting he doesn’t hate Jews, only Zionists, apparently not.

That Today remark was made, I believe, by Philippe Sands – a Jew himself, but also a regular BBC interviewee and contributor to the London Review of Books, so it all fits. One of the “community of the good”, in other words.