Mick Hartley

Everyone goes on about the difficult conversations we need to have about the rise in antisemitism, but they then back away from actually having any of these difficult conversations. Paul Stott in the Spectator on the refusal to name names:

To address any problem, it must be named. In Golders Green, ministers and senior police officers were explicit that it was British Jews who were under attack and that it was an act of anti-Semitic terrorism which had occurred.

So which ideology is actually powering this upsurge in violence in the UK today? Hardline Scientology? Buddhism? Or Zoroastrianism – of the kind which the late Freddie Mercury grew up in?

Speaking in Golders Green, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley stated: ‘Anti-Semitism is fuelled by hateful and extremist ideologies. It comes from hostile states, the extreme right and the extreme left. These are terrorist and hateful belief systems but they are all rooted in racism. They are given space to operate when civic debate is weak, when hatred is excused and when people are unwilling to challenge it directly’.Again – which ‘hateful and extremist ideologies’? And how is ‘racism’ the sole driver of the oldest hatred in history, which also has its roots in religion, myth and conspiracy theory?

Standing next to the Commissioner in Golders Green was Sarah Sackman, MP for Finchley and Golders Green, and Minister of State for Courts and Legal Services – and a highly articulate rising star in the Labour party.

But Sackman, too, seems to have an almost maiden-aunt aversion to letting horrid words such as Islamist, Jihadist or Islamism pass her lips. In a Guardian column, Sackman evoked Anne Frank and a united community response to the English Defence League in 2013.

Again, she told us precisely nothing about which ideology is responsible for the current wave of violence against her own constituents. Rightly, she has expressed frustration that wide swathes of the left are failing to speak up against anti-Semitism, while herself saying nothing about Islamist anti-Semitism. Perhaps she should lead by example?

Correctly, Sackman further laments that there is little in the way of a civil society campaign against anti-Semitism. But why is this pushback absent? Because of fear of offending Islamists and their allies. All of which she doesn’t challenge, call out and confront. So there continues to be no civil society campaign. The problem is thus self-reinforcing.

All this points to wider inconsistencies across government. Consider the Commons statement by Security Minister Dan Jarvis MP on anti-Semitic attacks that made six references to Iran – but avoided any reference to the motivating ideology of the Khomeinite strand of Islamism.

Sticking to the general, in one answer Jarvis spoke of the ‘the threats we face from extremists’, once more without telling us what type of extremists.

Sometimes the term Islamism does appear, but is conjoined with other threats as if it were improper for it to stand exposed to public scrutiny all alone.

Sometimes the term Islamism does appear, but is conjoined with other threats as if it were improper for it to stand exposed to public scrutiny all alone.

Thus, when Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC) was raising the terrorism threat level to severe, she observed: ‘The terrorist threat level in the UK has been rising for some time, driven by an increase in the broader Islamist and extreme right-wing terrorist threat from individuals and small groups based in the UK.’

Extreme right-wing terrorist threat? A vanishingly small problem, surely. It’s like Jeremy Corbyn, who can’t mention antisemitism without bringing up “Islamophobia” – in effect to minimise and evade the real issue. Islamism is the problem here – enabled, of course, by the red-green alliance: the support of large swathes of progressive opinion for the Islamist project, perfectly encapsulated by the Greens in their current iteration.

Where now? After the Manchester Arena massacre of 2017, Theresa May spoke of the need for ‘difficult conversations’ about radical Islam. They never really occurred then. So before tomorrow’s ‘Forum on tackling anti-Semitism’ is underway, it seems appropriate to ask once again: when are the difficult conversations finally going to start? The early signs aren’t promising.