Hey, Jews – have you ever considered the possibility that you’re making a fuss over nothing? That a few petrol bombs through the windows of your synagogues is not really a big deal? That your feelings of fear after two Jews were slain in Manchester on Yom Kippur and Jewish property was incinerated in Golders Green and Jews were spat at for wearing a Star of David pendant in public might be a tad overblown?
That’s what I heard when Zack Polanski wondered out loud this week if Britain’s Jews are experiencing ‘actual unsafety’ or just a ‘perception of unsafety’. It is one of the most tone-deaf, pitiless sentences I have heard a politician utter. The Jews of London were terrorised all last week. There were attempted firebombings at numerous synagogues. And here is the leader of the Green Party asking if Jews, the poor dears, merely feel unsafe. Callous doesn’t cover it.
Last week was the week ‘anti-fascism’ died in Britain
It was an Israeli journalist who asked Polanski about the recent wave of Jewphobic violence. To be fair, Polanski, who is himself Jewish, did express concern about ‘the rise in anti-Semitic attacks’. But it felt perfunctory. He swiftly moved on to ‘the conversation’ he thinks we should be having. ‘There is a conversation to be had about whether it’s a perception of unsafety or whether it’s actual unsafety’, he said. He generously acknowledged that ‘neither are acceptable’. But there it was, out in the open, that slippery left instinct to minimise Jewish pain.
There is no other way to interpret his Kafkaesque formulation: ‘perception of unsafety’. That turgid piece of academese, which will doubtless go down a storm with the keffiyeh-wearing PhDs who swell the ranks of the Green party, seems expressly designed to downplay Jewish fear. Are you really at risk from the fire and the fists of the Jew-haters in our midst, or are you just imagining it? That was the toxic essence of Polanski’s unfeeling remarks.
To say this after the events of last week is staggeringly tactless, not to mention heartless. Petrol bombs were thrown at synagogues in Finchley and Kenton. A bag of flammable liquid was left outside the former offices of a Jewish educational charity in Hendon. Panorama revealed that Jews are being gobbed on and roughed up and branded ‘baby killers’. Just last month four Jewish ambulances were burnt to a cinder. Just last year two Jews were killed at the Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester. And have we forgotten the mercifully thwarted jihadist plot, also in Manchester, to slaughter Jews in the streets?
This isn’t all in Jews’ heads. They aren’t dumbly falling for a fear narrative. Their safety really has been compromised by the post-7 October frenzy of Jew hate. Imagine if petrol bombs were being thrown at mosques and Muslims had been murdered on Eid by a knife-wielding lowlife. Do you think Polanski would be holding forth on whether Muslims really are unsafe or are merely suffering from a ‘perception of unsafety’? Every single one of us knows he would not.
Jews, though, are different. They enjoy none of the protections of political correctness. They have been branded ‘privileged’ by the ruthless enforcers of the politics of identity, and how can the privileged be victims? It feels to me as though Polanski is trying to appease the anti-Zionist bigots of the English middle classes who make up the vast bulk of the Greens’ growing base. Perhaps he doesn’t want to antagonise those whose entire personality consists of venomously hating the Jewish state and all who support it. If so, he is making a moral error of catastrophic proportions.
Not only is the ‘unsafety’ of Jews real – it has been exacerbated by elements within the Green party and the left more broadly. Can we please dispense with the lethal folly that there is no link between the bourgeois left’s feverish demonisation of the world’s only Jewish state and the rise in animus for Jewish people? If you brand Zionists racist, genocidal blood-spillers, a menace not only to Palestinians but to world peace, then you are hanging a target sign around the necks of Zionists – and that includes a majority of British Jews. Own it.
Last week was the week ‘anti-fascism’ died in Britain. All our preening influencers and affluent socialists who say they would have stood up to fascism were snivellingly silent as synagogues were firebombed. All those haughty liberals who said the votes for Brexit and Trump were ‘reminiscent of the 1930s’ were cravenly schtum as 1930s-style attacks were launched against London synagogues. It’s become a cliché, I know, but it’s true: if you want to know how you would have behaved as Europe succumbed to the fascist disease, look at how you are behaving now. There’s your answer.
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