Brendan O’Neill is Spiked's chief politics writer. His new book, After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation, is out now.
Over the years, on the streets of London, I have heard so much praise for the Iranian regime and its brutish proxies. I’ve seen witless radicals cry: ‘We are all Hezbollah!’ I’ve seen leftists cheer the Houthis, that avowedly anti-Semitic army that does the mullahs’ bidding in Yemen. I’ve seen Islamists with placards featuring the
I’m starting to feel sorry for progressives who are schtum about the revolution in Iran. My contempt for them is giving way to pity. Imagine watching women fling off their hijabs in glorious defiance of the cruel mullahs who rule over them and feeling nothing. Imagine seeing brave youths swarm the streets to confront the
Imagine if a UK police force had information suggesting white supremacists were planning to attack black football fans from overseas. Imagine they suppressed that information. Worse, imagine if their solution to this sickening threat was to ban the black fans from coming here, effectively giving the menacing supremacists exactly what they wanted: a ‘black-free’ zone.
Finally, the left has found a ‘kidnap victim’ it cares about. Having spent more than two years making excuses for Hamas’s savage seizing of 251 Israelis, having violently torn down posters of those stolen Jews, now the activist class has suddenly decided that abduction is bad after all. Why? Because a dictator they admire, Nicolas
And just like that, the left loses interest in the Middle East. In 2025, they spoke of little else. They culturally appropriated Arab headwear, poncing about in China-made keffiyehs. They wrapped themselves in the Palestine colours. They frothed day and night about a ‘murderous regime’ – you know who. And yet now, as a Middle
‘Top priority.’ Those two words in Keir Starmer’s tweet about Alaa Abd el-Fattah stung the hardest. What an affront to the country. On Boxing Day, as people came down from Christmas revelry that they could ill-afford, here was their prime minister prioritising the wellbeing of an Egyptian loudmouth most Britons couldn’t name. Rarely has the
Finally the left is showing an interest in freedom of speech. And all it took was a police clampdown on cries for violence against Jews. They turned a blind eye when cancel culture ran riot on campuses. And when gender-critical women were gagged for telling the truth about biology. And when people lost their jobs
From our US edition
The unhinged hatred for the world’s only Jewish state has reanimated a medieval-like loathing for the Jewish people
This is not a time to mince words. Moral clarity is our sole duty on this dark day. What happened in Bondi in Sydney was an act of fascist barbarism. It was a pogrom on a beach. It was a massacre of Jews that brought to mind the horrors of the mid-20th century. If this
It’s hard, in 2025, to call out anti-Semitism. You’ll find yourself besieged by digital armies of apologists for bigotry. ‘It’s just criticism of Israel!’, they’ll wail if you express alarm about someone calling the Jewish State a ‘Nazi entity’ or protesters carrying a Jew effigy complete with horns and bloodstained mouth. It’s all the rage
Everything about that rape of a 15-year-old girl in Leamington Spa is horrifying. First and foremost, the barbaric act itself. It took place on 10 May. Just after 9pm the girl was separated from her friends and abducted by Jan Jahanzeb, a 17-year-old Afghan asylum seeker. He frogmarched her to a darkened park with the
The scandal of the Maccabi Tel Aviv ban keeps getting worse. Now we discover that West Midlands Police (WMP), in their report calling for the barring of Maccabi fans from the football game against Aston Villa last month, cited an entirely fictitious football match. Their report said the last time Maccabi played in the UK
Now Ireland is erasing its Jewish history. This week Dublin City Council will vote on a proposal to change the name of Herzog Park in the south of Dublin. The park was named for Chaim Herzog, the Belfast-born, Dublin-raised Jew who later became the sixth president of Israel. ‘Following consideration, the Committee agreed… that the
It’s back. The lie that led to the slaughter of so many Jews has returned to public life. The calumny that caused so much anti-Jewish persecution, expulsion and bloodshed has stirred, zombie-like, from its historic slumber. Jews drain the blood of Christians and use it to make bread – incredibly, unconscionably, this most appalling falsehood
The rot at the BBC is worse than people think. It’s far more serious than the occasional twisting of facts to get one over on a politician the Beeb hates, like Donald Trump – an act of journalistic malpractice for which director-general Tim Davie and News CEO Deborah Turness have now resigned. This scandal exposes
‘Scum’ barked at a Jewish man for the crime of taking a small Israel flag from his bag. ‘Get the f**k out of my city’ hollered at Jews. Masked men hanging signs saying ‘Zionists not welcome’. Posters inviting the public to phone the anti-terror hotline ‘if you see a Zionist’. ‘Baby killers’ yelled in the
So there you have it: the feelings of white men matter more than the rights of black lesbians. That’s the takeaway from the mad fracas at a Gold’s Gym in Los Angeles this week, where a female gym-goer by the name of Tish Hyman says her membership was unceremoniously revoked. Her offence? She dared to
His name was Wayne Broadhurst. He was 49 years old. He reportedly worked as a refuse collector. He was by all accounts well liked in his local town. And yesterday his life was ended in the most savage manner imaginable. He was stabbed to death as he walked his dog on a brisk, bright Tuesday
What’s more scary? A gaggle of old UKIP voters gathering to vent their spleen about mass immigration? Or a march of hulking young men, all masked and clad in black, hollering ‘Allahu Akbar’ and ‘Zionist scum off our streets’? At the risk of being branded with that cheap and meaningless slur of ‘Islamophobe’, I’m going
Who really won the by-election in Caerphilly? I know officially it was Plaid Cymru, and I wouldn’t want to diminish that funny little party’s glee. Congrats, etc. But the true victor was a far newer party. An angry party. A party of the fretful and anxious. A party so fresh it doesn’t even have a
