Brendan O’Neill

Those of us who believe in freedom of expression have felt mighty lonely this week. We have watched as, one by one, our fellow opponents of cancel culture have given into the temptations of censorship. Many on the right in particular appear to have fallen under the spell of suppression. Gone is their devotion to the ‘marketplace of ideas’ and in its stead comes a chilling cry for a literal police clampdown on speech they don’t like. The target of these overnight converts to cancel culture? Saturday’s ‘March for Palestine’ in London. For the fourth weekend running, tens of thousands of people will gather in the capital to rage against Israel. Worse, this time their orgy of Israelophobia will take place on Armistice Day. Enough is enough, many are saying. The police must act.

One of the most curious things following Hamas’s massacre of the Jews on 7 October was the silence of Britain’s fascism-spotters. You know these people. They see fascism everywhere. Everything from a fiery speech by a Tory politician to millions of ‘gammon’ going out to vote for Brexit reminds them of the 1930s. The minute someone says something they don’t like or votes for a thing they disapprove of, they’re logging onto Twitter to wail: ‘Is this Nazism?!’  It's striking that someone so interested in contemporary events that echo the evils of the 30s has had so little to say about the worst anti-Jewish pogrom in 75 years?  And yet when Hamas carried out the worst assault on Jews since the Holocaust, the fascism-spotters were nowhere to be seen.

We have seen many grim images over the past two weeks. Images of the apocalyptic, Isis-style violence visited upon the people of Israel by Hamas. Images of destruction and grief in Gaza as Israel hammers Hamas for its crimes against the Jewish people, as is its right. And yet it is an image from London, not Sderot or Gaza City, that has haunted me all day today. Which has made me feel a visceral revulsion. It’s a photo of two sisters who were kidnapped by Hamas. Emma and Yuli are their names. They are twins, just three years old. They are hugging and smiling in the photo. They are a picture of innocence. Then you notice the black scrawl above their smiling mouths – someone has daubed a Hitler moustache on them. Read that again.

I knew the police had lost the plot, but even I didn’t expect them to start issuing chin-stroking theological justifications for jihad. It happened on Saturday during the ‘March for Palestine’ in London. Protestors chanted for ‘Muslim armies’ to commence ‘jihad’ against Israel. To most ears, it will have sounded menacing, threatening even. To the ears of London’s Jews it must have sounded terrifying: just two weeks after a self-styled ‘Muslim army’ invaded Israel and visited the most unspeakable ‘jihad’ upon the Jews there, including British Jews, here were people on the streets of London calling for more ‘Muslim armies’ and more ‘jihad’.

For more than a year, English footballers took the knee in solidarity with a petty criminal who was murdered by a cop in Minneapolis. Yet after the racist slaughter of more than a thousand Israelis, the worst act of anti-Semitic violence since the Holocaust, England's Football Association can’t even be bothered to light up the Wembley arch in Israel’s colours. It is reported that the FA is ‘unlikely’ to light the arch with the Israeli flag. It is worried about being seen to ‘take sides’. It also fears ‘a backlash from some communities'. So it’s taking the knee again. This time to the feelings of certain members of minority groups who hate Israel.

I have a question about the events of the past few days: where is Antifa? Where are those self-styled anti-fascists who love to rage against anything that is even vaguely reminiscent of the 1930s? Jews in Israel have been rounded up and murdered. Disgusting anti-Semites are on the streets of Sydney screaming, ‘Gas the Jews! Fuck the Jews!’ Mobs in London have taunted Israel, essentially laughing over its dead Jews. Britain’s Jewish schoolkids are taking off their blazers lest anyone recognise them as Jews and attack them. Across Europe security is being beefed up at Jewish establishments — schools, synagogues, museums — out of fear that Hamas-supporting mobs will invade and desecrate them. And yet Antifa is nowhere to be seen.

Leftists love to fantasise about how heroic they’d have been when Jews were being rounded up in the 1930s. ‘I’d have said something’, they insist. Well, Jews are being rounded up again. They’re being kidnapped, humiliated, paraded through the streets, slaughtered. And leftists are definitely saying something. They’re saying: ‘Good’. These are war crimes. They are acts of genocidal bigotry carried out by a movement whose founding charter committed it to an existential ‘struggle against the Jews’. If you ‘celebrate’ this, you are truly lost.   The radical gloating over Israel’s suffering today is beyond the pale. It’s a new low for a left that was already in the moral gutter.

It is often on the back of public fury that dangerous new precedents are set. Authoritarianism can sneak in when we’re all hopping mad about something or someone. So mad that we don’t even notice that society’s rules are being rewritten in an illiberal way. I fear it’s happening again, with YouTube’s demonetisation of Russell Brand. This is a risky thing to say. The climate is febrile right now. Criticise any aspect of the censure of Brand, following the publication of very serious allegations against him, which he strongly denies, and you risk being damned as a Brand defender. Worse, his weird online army, that ‘scamdemic’ mob that views Brand as a Jesus-like slayer of ‘the Covid regime’, might mistake you for a fellow traveller. Guys, please don’t.

Imagine if the Mayor of London was a Tory and his website featured an image of a black family alongside the words: ‘Doesn’t represent real Londoners.’ Imagine if this right-leaning mayor had weird rules on ‘branding’, one of which was that images of young black families should not be used in mayor-related publicity because these people, with their dark skin, are not reflective of ‘our’ vision of London.  If someone can explain how judging a family on the basis of their whiteness is any better than judging a family on the basis of their blackness, I would be most grateful There would be uproar, possibly protests, and rightly so.