Half of Britain’s Jews think their future is not in the UK

The rampant state of anti-Semitism in Britain has raised the question, long completely implausible, of the legitimacy of the United Kingdom’s claim to be a civilised country. As The Spectator pointed out on January 17, ”violence against British Jews is more common than at any time since their readmission in the 1650s,” by Oliver Cromwell, 366 years after they had been expelled by Edward I. Recent public opinion polls found that half of Britain’s 277,000 Jews do not feel that their future will be in the UK and over 60 per cent have contemplated leaving.  The most clangorous recent outrage has been the decision of the chief constable of the West Midlands police to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from attending a football match because of anticipated “hooliganism” (which police are supposed to be able to control). The authorities eventually admitted that an attempt to use artificial intelligence to judge the level of risk of disturbances had been bungled and produced an unfounded concern.

West Midlands police claimed that the Jewish community supported this decision and were subsequently forced to admit that this was also false. It has also come to light that a local mosque known for radical views and incitements to illegal conduct had been influential in the nomination of the chief constable. This is only one police force but there is plenty of evidence that its attitude is not unique. No one should underestimate the appalling state of British society when any significant police force, much less a large section of the constabulary, is so riddled with cowardice and hypocrisy that instead of upholding the laws, it restricts the rights of Jews, or any minority.

The country has effectively followed the contemptible Starmer government: The British Labour Party is profoundly dependent upon the support of the UK’s Muslim population of 3.9 million people. Presumably, the majority of these are reasonable and are not inflamed on racial or sectarian grounds. But a sufficient number of them, and of their spokespeople, including much of the Muslim clergy, has bullied the (barely) governing party into an antagonistic and negligent attitude toward the Jews, who are only seven per cent of the number of the country’s Muslims, as an electoral free lunch for placating the Muslims.

It has long been a tenet of Britain’s self-confidence that faced with such a choice, the government and people of the United Kingdom would choose justice to a minority rather than injustice to that minority to please the bigoted elements of a larger minority. Almost the entire country appears to have forgotten that Israel’s war in Gaza was a response to the brutal massacre of 1,200 Jews and seizure of 250 hostages: The worst day of Jewish slaughter since the liberation of the Nazi death camps and by any criterion, an act of war creating a state of war and justifying Israel in conducting a war to eliminate the possible repetition of such an atrocity.

The BBC has consistently operated at almost Goebbels-like levels of bigotry in covering the Gaza War, and the entire academic community from pre-schoolers to Oxbridge dons has subscribed to an evil blood libel that Israel is a genocidal country and that the British co-religionists of the Jewish state are somehow implicitly blameworthy. A Jewish Labour MP was barred from visiting a school in his constituency in September because of “safeguarding concerns”, as opponents crowed that supporters of Israel “are not welcome in our schools”. The appropriate UK government official described this as an “absolute outrage” but nothing was done about it. Anti-Semitism has been hugely encouraged by the official backslide into blaming victims of abuse for the abuse. The UK has become a country that has respectabilised bigotry to the point of ignoring its own laws. The Britain of Cobden, Bright, Shaftesbury, Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign, not to mention Disraeli, Churchill, and Thatcher, and distinguished Jewish statesmen such as Lord Reading, Herbert Samuel, Leslie Hore-Belisha, Keith Joseph, Leon Brittan, and Nigel Lawson has, in current parlance, “been disappeared” to please a rag-tag of bigots.

The prime minister waffles as he does on almost everything. He denounces anti-Semitism in the abstract but celebrated the release into Britain of an Egyptian advocate of murdering “Zionists” (i.e. Jews). The failure to assure the elemental guarantees of civic rights and personal liberty that has been the birth right of every citizen of the United Kingdom for centuries is reflected in the regime’s pusillanimous equivocation between the Democratic state of Israel and Hamas, which the UK government continues to identify as a terrorist organisation.

In the time of Donald Trump, it is more fashionable than ever for the British to look down their noses at the Americans. But as a society that upholds the civic rights and dignity of every individual, Britain today is not fit to shine the shoes of the average citizen of the United States of America. All those who have allowed this to happen in “this United kingdom” should be put to the pillory, electorally, if not otherwise.