Mick Hartley

Hadley Freeman in today’s Sunday Times:

Oh look, it’s an email from my youngest child’s school. The end-of-year concert is moving to another venue — fine, whatever … oh wait, what’s this? The concert was going to be in a local synagogue but because of safety concerns the school, which is non-denominational, will find an alternative venue. Well, that’s a grim sign of the times, I think. So grim that it takes me a beat to realise this synagogue that has been deemed too dangerous is, in fact, our family synagogue. Where my children and I go every Saturday morning, where I drop them off for Hebrew school every week. That is now seen as such an obvious target for terrorism that it’s not safe for my children’s concert. Now I know how a lobster feels when the pot starts to boil….

“Yes, but Zionism,” people say, not justifying the attacks. Just explaining them. It used to be “but Israel” in the explanations, on the placards, in the protest chants, as if it were normal to terrorise a minority group for the actions of a foreign country. Now it’s “but Zionism”. A slippage from criticism of the country to anyone who believes a Jewish homeland should exist at all. That is something else I notice.

There is an even faster linguistic progression in the now daily videos of members of the public saying what would once have been unthinkable but is now seen, by them, as righteous. A Tube driver saying Jews won’t be safe on the Bakerloo train if he’s driving it. A man in Slough shouting “dirty mother***ing Jew”. Young men going to Jewish areas, like Golders Green in London, to film and taunt Jews, ratcheting up millions of online views by engaging in the latest online sport: Jew-baiting. Those are all just from the past few days.…

This is the entirely predictable result of three years of antisemites and fools screaming that Israel is uniquely evil, Zionism is fascism and Hamas are freedom fighters. That is not political criticism — it is hysteria and monomania, and the cause and result are antisemitism.