Mick Hartley

Trevor Phillips in the Times – Time to stand with the Jews, come what may:

For Jews, Britain is no longer the home of the easy-going multiculturalism routinely invoked by this Labour administration. This small group, fewer than 300,000 strong, increasingly finds itself in danger of being confined to small areas populated largely by their co-ethnics, heavily policed and surrounded by walls both virtual and material. Other nations have been here before and learnt that the ghetto is the pathway to nowhere.

So what to do? We should start by being honest about the nature of contemporary Jew-hate. And this is me saying the quiet part out loud. We are not all equally complicit. It is perfectly legitimate for British Muslims to feel hostility to a state they believe is trampling over the rights of their co-religionists. The issue is what they do about it.

Prominent Muslims are increasingly uneasy that the leaders of mainstream British Muslim communities are allowing themselves to be smeared with the mark of extremist Islamism.

Fiyaz Mughal, the founder of Tell Mama, the government-backed group monitoring hate against Muslims, said yesterday: “Whilst the vast majority of Muslims are an asset to our country, unless we have a root and branch rejection of Muslim antisemitism, calls for commiserations with British Jews are futile.”

Baroness Falkner of Margravine, my redoubtable successor as head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, wrote in The Times: “When members of the Muslim community commit violence against Jewish people for simply being Jewish there are no mosque vigils or prayers, and no loudhailers condemning the perpetrators … This silence speaks volumes.”

Security chiefs say three quarters of the terrorist threats we know about come from Islamists. According to a 2020 survey by the respected pollster ICM, British Muslims are twice as likely as the average Brit to believe that Jews have too much control over the global banking system, and over our own political leaders, and that they are more loyal to Israel than they are to Britain.

These are crazy views. But Labour’s failure to include and inspire Pakistani and Bangladeshi voters has driven them to the likes of George Galloway and Zack Polanski, who yesterday described Baroness Falkner’s words as “inflammatory”.

“The likes of George Galloway and Zack Polanski.” Yes. That’s a comparison that’s been waiting to be made.

Islam’s built-in antisemitism clearly needs to be called out, but what’s particularly shocking in our present situation is the extraordinary spread of the crudest antisemitism in progressive circles (for instance), under the guise of anti-Zionism and “Free Palestine”.

Added, this comment:

Hamas and their Mahidist apocalyptic death cult backers in Iran knew exactly what the outcome of their terror attack on 7th October 2023 would be. The creation of hundreds of miles of tunnels under civilian infrastructure had been going on for years in anticipation of this. These tunnels were for the use of Hamas only, civilians were left exposed. Every death is their responsibility, do you not get that these regimes have no empathy for the civilian population? Most recently illustrated by the murder of over 30,000 Iranian’s. Assad was also backed by Iran and he murdered over 200,000 Syrians. No protests about any of that though, as it has to be all about the tiny successful and democratic nation of Israel that has been under continuous attack since 1948. The left’s vapid fixation is fuelling the fire of anti semitism on the streets of Britain. The lie that the tiny state, less than the size of Wales was ‘stolen’ by the Jews is another anti semitic myth propagated by the left. The Jewish people have maintained a continuous presence in the Land of Israel for over 3,000 years. While major exiles occurred under various empires, a segment of the Jewish population always remained in the region.