Mick Hartley

The failure to even menton Islam by our great and good, as they desperately search for answers as to why we have this sudden surge in antisemitic violence, almost suggests that we already have a blasphemy law here.

John Ware at Jewish News – The Muslim antisemitism debate Britain keeps avoiding:.

As the carcasses of four burned-out Hatzolah ambulances smouldered in the background, last month, Health Secretary Wes Streeting said: “We have to deal with this hatred at its source. We have to confront and beat the evil ideas that are permeating our society.”

Ministers took a similar line after Wednesday’s alleged attempt by a 45-year-old Somali man to stab two Jews to death in Golders Green. “We need to stamp out this growing tolerance of violence and antisemitism in our country” said Chris Ward, the Cabinet Office Parliamentary Secretary. It was “an absolute poison that we need to root out.”

Inching his cautious way towards identifying the source of that poison, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley named  “….the Iranian state terrorist groups, extreme right and extreme left racists.”

It was left to the plainer-speaking Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation Jonathan Hall KC to identify the one “interesting omission” by Rowley.

To rip this poison from its ideological roots, said Hall, would require “parts of the Muslim community “ to be “addressed. It is something of huge concern.”

Well, yes.

The root cause of the revival of antisemitism here in the UK is the permissive environment in which the febrile politics of the Middle East have become embedded in activism and pro-Palestinian institutions here, several of them Hamas aligned, these past three decades.

As Hall also says, confronting this in all its forms means “politicians will need to step in and start basically risking a degree of unpopularity through what they say.”

Ay, there’s the rub.

The notion that all manifestations of Zionism are intrinsically evil is deeply embedded not just in sections of the left, but even more so amongst British Muslims. “The thing is, the Zionists control everything” opined Birmingham lawyer Akhmed Yakoob recently as he campaigned to unseat Labour in next week’s local elections. Imbecilic though this comment is, since Jews make up just 0.4% of the UK population, sadly it resonates with many Muslims.

In 2019 Labour won around 80% of the Muslim vote. In the 2024 election, it fell to around 60%.  Since then, Labour has further haemorrhaged Muslim support to the Green Party whose local election candidates have been making increasingly inflammatory comments about Zionism.

They know what they’re doing, the Greens.

The scale of the challenge in persuading anti-Zionists to adopt less demonic language in criticising Israel is highlighted by a review of the transcripts of sermons in 80 mosques and Islamic centres across the country in the immediate aftermath of 7 October.

Six days after the attack, Abdur Rashid Holmes from Nottingham cited the same passage as written in Hamas charter: “The Jews will fight you and you will prevail over them. Then a rock will say ‘Oh Muslim, here is a Jew behind me. Kill him.”

The problem, as this oft-quoted hadith illustrates, is that hatred of Jews is hard-baked into Islamic theology. The frenzied hatred of Israel, now spread from its original Muslim sources to most of the western left, is at bottom all about Islam. That’s the issue we face – the issue no one will talk about.