Brendan O’Neill

I’m old enough to remember when it was neo-Nazis who smashed up Jewish-owned businesses. Now it’s so-called progressives. Not long ago, a Jewish business in Stamford Hill in London had its windows smashed and its doors kicked in and red paint sprayed all over its walls. Only it wasn’t Combat 18 or the oafish dregs of the National Front that carried out this mini-Kristallnacht – it was Palestine Action. Israelophobia is the safest, most celebrated political position in Britain Yes, the lobby group that is gushed over by Sally Rooney in today’s Guardian, and which is cheered by every bourgeois leftist with an X account, wielded its hammers against a Jewish-owned company. It was on 28 May.

‘When history is written as it ought to be written’, said the great Trinidadian Marxist CLR James, ‘it is the moderation and long patience of the masses at which men will wonder, not their ferocity’. On no historical calamity is this truer than the rape-gang scandal. When future scribes look back at this violent tear in the British social fabric, it is the forbearance of the public they will marvel over. It will dazzle them. These vile prejudices were the fuel of this scandal The spectre of public volatility has stalked this scandal from the start. The establishment’s irrational dread of the feral masses shaped its yellow-bellied decision-making.

Remember when Leo Varadkar egged on someone with male strength who was punching women in the face? It sounds made up, I know. Varadkar, the former Taoiseach of Ireland, is painfully PC. He might have started his political career as a small-c conservative. But he ended up guffawing with Justin Trudeau over their shared penchant for virtue-signalling socks, slamming Israel like a Trinity brat in a keffiyeh, and getting so lost in the weeds of transgenderism that he once said his government had ‘no official position’ on how many genders there are. (Leo, bro: it’s two.) ‘Truth is dying!’, they wailed for years, and yet now they kill biological truth with their own bare hands Surely a man like that would never whoop as someone with male strength smacked a lady? Not so fast.

It’s the 21st century and Jews are being arrested for making fun of fascists. The Telegraph has revealed that last September a Jewish protester was nabbed and detained by cops in London for the speech crime of mocking the then leader of Hezbollah, Hasan Nasrallah. The man – who wishes to remain anonymous, which is wise in these febrile, anti-Semitic times — was holding a placard featuring a cartoon of Nasrallah with a pager and the words ‘beep, beep, beep’. It was clearly a reference to Israel’s pagers operation against Hezbollah’s top dogs, which some beautifully call ‘Operation Grim Beeper’. Nasrallah was alive at the time this fella held aloft his blasphemous banner, but it’s obvious what the guy was saying: tick tock, Hasan, your time is coming.

What happened to Gary Lineker? For years he was football’s Mr Nice Guy. To some he was the Steve Davis of footie: a tad dull but a good egg. Now he’s been let go by the BBC after sharing an Instagram post that seemed to compare Jews to rats. That’s one hell of a tumble. I have seen many good men lost to the religion of centrism My view? He was radicalised online. We often hear about kids being led astray by digital fruitcakes like Andrew Tate. Now we need to talk about the full-grown adults whose minds are turned to mush by drivel on the internet. In Lineker’s case it wasn’t the Tate-like promise of fast cars and sexy women that drove him crazy – it was the fame and glory he won from an even freakier online subculture: toxic centrism.

When a US citizen, just 19, was taken captive by a fascist militia, what did America’s progressives do? They cosplayed as his captors. They wrapped their faces in the keffiyeh in gleeful mimicry of the militants who seized their compatriot. They cheered the jailers of their fellow citizen. ‘Glory to our martyrs’, some cried, ‘martyrs’ meaning the radical Islamists who had dragged their teenage countryman into a hellish lair and kept him there for 583 days. Beyond these Hamas-loving agitators, even milder ‘progressive’ voices will have helped to make Alexander’s life in captivity harder The release of Edan Alexander, the last living American hostage in Gaza, is cause for celebration. He was born in Tel Aviv and raised in New Jersey.

This week Lucy Powell, leader of the House of Commons, did something unusual for a politician: she spoke from the heart. Her dismissal of the rape gangs as a ‘dog whistle’ was no gaffe. It was not a ‘blunder’. It was a brutally honest expression of the government’s exasperation with this pesky scandal. It was savagely candid, pulling back the curtain on Labour’s gross and haughty indifference to this outrage in which thousands of working-class girls suffered the most unspeakable abuse. Powell has essentially scoffed at thousands of working-class women by calling the scandal that ravaged their girlhoods a ‘little trumpet’ It was on Any Questions that Powell gave voice to her party’s elitist vexation with all the public blather about rape gangs.

I look forward to Keir Starmer hosting a special summit on the Channel 4 documentary, Groomed. And to hearing him gush about it every time a reporter puts a mic anywhere near his mouth. And to seeing his proposals for showing it to teens in schools across the land in order that we might prise open their innocent eyes to the dangers of so-called grooming gangs. These girls were sacrificed at the altar of preserving the ideology of multiculturalism After all, he did all that for Adolescence, a Netflix drama about a made-up crime against a fictional working-class girl. So surely he’ll do it for a documentary that lays out in grim, eye-watering detail the industrial-scale horrors that were inflicted on real working-class girls by gangs of mostly Muslim men in towns across England.

If someone pulled on a Ku Klux Klan hood and went up on a stage and shouted ‘Up the KKK!’, what would you think of that person? Call me a literalist but I’d think that person supports the KKK. I would interpret his donning of the pointy hood and his singing of the KKK’s praises as fandom for that monstrous movement. No one gets into a KKK cloak by accident. Kneecap expect us to believe that even though they’ve waved the Hezbollah flag, they don’t actually support Hezbollah And yet Kneecap expect us to believe that even though they’ve waved the Hezbollah flag and hollered ‘Up Hezbollah!’, they don’t actually support Hezbollah.

How did it come to this? How did we arrive at a situation where it fell to a court of law to tell us what a woman is? That’s my overriding emotion today. I’m delighted the Supreme Court has ruled that a woman is legally defined as a person with female biological characteristics. But I’m gobsmacked that we apparently needed five judges to tell us something our species has known since we first came down from the trees. What sweet relief the judges made the right decision. But the garlands should go to For Women Scotland The ruling of the Supreme Court is fantastically sensible. It unambiguously states that the sex-based rights outlined in the Equality Act 2010 are based on biological sex. So where the Act refers to ‘women’, it means biological women.

We are all betrayed by our body language eventually. It’s our inner quisling, itching to expose to the world the feelings our more sentient side would prefer to keep hidden. Yesterday it was Jess Phillips’s turn to be snitched on by her own mannerisms. The surliness with which she listened to MPs speak about the ‘grooming gang’ scandal was a true mask-off moment. Without words it told us all we need to know about this government. Ms Phillips, the minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls, came to the chamber to tell MPs that the government might not proceed with the five inquiries into ‘grooming gangs’ promised by the Home Secretary. Instead there’ll be a ‘more flexible’ approach, possibly including the setting up of victim-led local ‘panels’.

Israel’s denial of entry to two Labour MPs is a truly shaming moment. Not for Israel, which, like all sovereign states, is perfectly at liberty to permit or deny entry to anyone it chooses. No, for Labour. That our ally, the Jewish nation, is so wary of Britain’s ruling party that it felt compelled to banish two of its representatives should generate some serious soul-searching in Labour. The flap over Israel’s ejection of the MPs Abtisam Mohamed and Yuan Yang has been mad. It’s the hissy fit heard around the world. Leafy London is up in arms. ‘I am outraged’, thundered Emily Thornberry on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg. Israel will ‘rue the day that they did this to British parliamentarians’, she said. What’s she going to do – write a mean tweet?