There are many ways to do nothing. One is to sit on your hands; another is to call for ‘a conversation’.
I have noticed quite a lot of calls for ‘a conversation’ since the stabbing of two Jewish men in Golders Green last week. Some politicians and pundits have even been bold enough to call for a ‘national conversation’. This is when you can tell people are pulling out the big guns.
One reason I say it is also a variant on doing nothing is because this has happened so many times before. I remember Theresa May standing near the site of the London Bridge attacks in 2017, surrounded by various leaders, insisting that we need to tackle ‘extremism’. The results were a real stunner – even for connoisseurs of inertia.
Our ancestors went through far worse economic times and I do not remember them stabbing Jews
May’s response to three Islamists running over pedestrians on London Bridge before slashing at the throats of pregnant women while crying ‘Allahu Akbar’ was to commission a report into ‘extremism’. The taskforce in question was eventually put together. There was infinite politicking about who it should consist of and who it should consult. It spent its first year trying to work out what ‘extremism’ as a word might mean. Then after more years and more expense, its report and work was delivered and shelved.
It was put alongside all the many other ‘reviews’ and ‘reports’ that consecutive British governments have commissioned and ignored. John Jenkins’s review into the Muslim Brotherhood? Shelved. The reviews by Louise Casey into ‘community cohesion’ and the like? Shelved. The Shawcross report into Prevent? Accepted and shelved.
I was particularly moved last week watching Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, stand on the streets of Golders Green beside the local Labour MP saying it was ‘understandable’ that Jewish Londoners might be feeling unsafe. He suggested that the police were going to do even more than they already have to make sure that henceforth everyone feels safe.
When I mention how interesting this was, perhaps I can retell a slightly personal story. In this magazine several years ago I identified a well-known Islamist street-thug who had inflamed tensions against Jews on the streets of London and against Hindus in the Midlands. The Metropolitan Police did nothing about this person. They never, to the best of my knowledge, investigated his actions. It is a matter of record that the culprit – who goes by the name of ‘Mohammed Hijab’ – sued this magazine and me personally. He lost the case last year at the High Court and has now declared himself bankrupt. Rowley was made aware of these incidents. One of them happened on the very streets he was standing on last week. So I watched his Golders Green press conference with something of a raised eyebrow.
It is the same with the Prime Minister and MPs who have spent the past week saying that we need to tackle ‘hate’ and ‘extremism’. But what hate? And what extremism? Might the government ban the various Iranian proxies which seem to be behind this recent spate of attacks in Britain? Or are we to tackle all hate? And after we have tackled all hate what shall we move on to next? Gluttony? Avarice?
Ask people to get specific on these questions and almost everybody in any position of power melts away. Last week a member of the audience on the BBC’s Question Time asked the Green party’s deputy leader Rachel Millward to specify where the ‘hatred’ she mentioned is coming from. Millward assumed that look people assume when they know the truth but cannot speak it. She pretended to find the question imponderable before finally saying that the two men who were attacked in Golders Green were the victims of our ‘cost-of-living crisis’, ‘rip-off Britain’ and more. Which is strange, because our ancestors went through far worse economic times and I do not remember stabbing religiously identifiable Jews being one inevitable consequence.
Perhaps Millward, like her party’s leader, Zack Polanski, is hampered by a certain voting demographic and by people in the party? After all, the Greens’ other deputy leader is Mothin Ali, who appeared to celebrate the attacks of 7 October. On the day that Israeli citizens were raped, murdered and abducted from their homes, he tweeted: ‘White supremacist European settler colonialism must end!’ He also seemed to defend the slaughter of men, women and children by Hamas as being the right of ‘indigenous people to fight back’. On winning the subsequent local elections in Leeds he dedicated his win to ‘the people of Gaza’ and finished his victory speech with the trad-itional electoral cry of ‘Allahu Akbar’.
It is easy enough to point to Polanski’s Green party as being a special hotbed of anti-Semitism. Two of their candidates were actually arrested by the police for alleged anti-Semitism in the week of the Golders Green attack. But the problem isn’t with the Greens. It is with Britain as a whole.
I have said for too many years now that Britain is pursuing several things that make no sense. One is the pretence that turning a pretty homogenous society into a ‘multicultural society’ has no downsides: that it is a blessing and that – all together now – ‘diversity is our strength’. Whereas the fact is that if you import a lot of people who bring a backwards worldview into your country then at some stage diversity actually becomes your greatest weakness – especially if you go on pretending that even identifying the sources of contemporary anti-Semitism constitutes a different form of ‘hate’, ‘bigotry’ or even ‘racism’. Several British Muslims have admitted in recent years that anti-Semitism in Britain’s Muslim communities is ‘rife and commonplace’. We know that only a quarter of British Muslims believe Hamas carried out any rapes or murders on 7 October.
There are some very simple answers to all this. And we don’t need another ‘conversation’ in order to arrive at them.
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