Brendan O’Neill

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.

Explain this to me. Why is it that a gathering of mostly white working-class men protesting about a rape is met by a line of menacing riot cops, and yet a gathering of primarily non-white youths running riot on a high street is given the kid-glove treatment? Following the events in Epsom last night, this query should be on everyone’s lips. Tooled-up riot officers formed a battleline against the angry men The scenes in Epsom, Surrey were extraordinary. In response to reports of a rape, a large crowd gathered to express their fury. A local woman reported being stalked by several men after leaving a nightclub before being subjected to a sickening assault outside Epsom Methodist Church.

At first I thought it was a scene from one of the battlefronts in the Middle East. The hellish glow of an out-of-control fire. A thunderous explosion. And innocents fleeing in terror. Only this was no warzone. It was Golders Green. It was that peaceful Jewish enclave in north-west London. And last night it was subjected to what seems to have been an act of apocalyptic Jew hatred, a fiery pogrom designed to terrify London’s Jews. This was a blazing statement of loathing for Britain’s Jews Actually, scrap that – this was a warzone. Last night’s sickening assault was the latest vile strike in a war on the rights of Jews. Four Hatzola ambulances were set on fire. Hatzola is a non-profit organisation that provides emergency medical care to the Jewish community and others.

Would you rather live in a society where a man is free to criticise religious practices or one where such a man might be dragged to the public square to be damned and shamed as a blasphemer? For me it’s a no-brainer. It’s the former. I want the freedom to object, as scurrilously as I like, to every pious ritual and godly doctrine. We used to call it 'freedom of thought', and our ancestors gave their lives to gift us that most cherished of liberties. The scandal surrounding Nick Timothy has really horrified me This is why the scandal surrounding the Conservative MP Nick Timothy has really horrified me. The digital mobbing of the shadow justice secretary merely for criticising the Islamic practice of mass public praying has been profoundly chilling.

Maybe it’s because I’m getting on in years, but I remember when being “progressive” meant supporting women’s rights, believing in gay liberation and opposing the persecution of ethnic groups. Yet now “progressives” are giddily cosying up with the fanboys of a foreign regime that ruthlessly represses women, hangs gays by the neck and funds proxy armies to rape and murder a certain ethnic group. Something’s gone wrong, hasn’t it? Vylan is a man who fancies himself as hyper-progressive. He subscribes to every lazy orthodoxy of the dinner-party left Just look at Bob Vylan.

For the first time, I am grateful to Zack Polanski. For, in branding Keir Starmer ‘Islamophobic’ simply for criticising Mothin Ali, he has shown just how slippery and despotic that word is. He has confirmed what most decent folk have long suspected – that accusations of ‘Islamophobia’ are a cynical ruse to shut down entirely legitimate public discussion. Starmer said not one bigoted word about Ali, the deputy leader of the Green party. Or about Islam. He didn’t diss the Koran or crack a gag about Muhammad. (All of which he should be at liberty to do, of course.) All he said is that he was ‘shocked’ to see Ali at a pro-Tehran gathering in London on Saturday.  Polanski slammed Starmer’s ‘blatant Islamophobia’. What gibberish.

Two big pop events took place on Saturday. In Manchester, there was the Brit Awards. One by one the bourgeois brats who swell the ranks of popular culture blubbed like babies over the rise of Reform. ‘I’m genuinely terrified’, said someone called Self Esteem. Britain is becoming a ‘fascist state’, wailed Irish singer CMAT. ‘The rise of Reform is a really bad thing’, said the fella who plays bass in indie band Wolf Alice. Saturday's gig at the O2 felt like the revenge of Morrissey. It was one in the eye for cancel culture Then there was the Morrissey show at The O2 in London. As those sons and daughters of privilege opined the rise of populism while picking up their golden gongs in Manchester, Manchester’s most sullen son was enthralling a crowd of 20,000 down south.

Imagine if Matt Goodwin had given an interview to a media outlet that regularly platforms far-right agitators like Nick Griffin. Imagine if he’d been pictured dancing next to a man who once called a Jewish rabbi a ‘kind of animal’. Imagine if he had made a campaign video trying to tap into the animus that certain white-skinned bigots feel towards India and her people. The media’s failure to grapple with the iffy worldview of the modern Greens is deeply worrying We would never have heard the end of it. It would have been on the front page of the Guardian every day. The left would be hoarse from hollering ‘Fascist!’ at him. And yet Gorton and Denton's new MP, who did do all that stuff, has had a free pass.

The first thing the mob kills is its own humanity. Long before they sink their collective claws into the target of their flapping ire, they lay waste to their own decency. We see this in the digital hounding of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. Behold the ugly gloating over a man’s downfall. Witness the peddling of false accusations. The shame, right now, belongs less to Andrew than to those who have made a bloodsport from his troubles. We don’t even know if Andrew is guilty. He hasn’t even been charged What do we want from Andrew? When will the mass stalking of him like a wounded deer finally be satiated? When his head is on a spike? When all memory of him is scrubbed from the public record? I get it – Andrew is far from a sympathetic character.

Imagine getting angrier over a word than a rape. This will go down in history as the week when there was more digital fury over one man’s criticism of mass immigration than there was over the dire impact those untrammelled flows of people are having on Britain’s women and girls. Millions of decent Brits are worried about our broken borders. And some might express themselves in an un-PC way The conviction of an Afghan illegal migrant for the rape of a 12-year-old girl in Nuneaton barely seemed to trouble the conscience of the virtuous of our chattering classes. But Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s lamenting of our broken borders? Worse, his use of the word ‘colonisation’ in relation to migrants? That pricked their hollow souls. That got them tweeting.

That’s it, I’m out. I’m finished with the Epstein scandal. This morning I read about a man who is on the cusp of cancellation because he once sent a flirtatious email to Ghislaine Maxwell, years before her crimes were known about. This is getting ridiculous. It feels like MeToo on steroids. There’s a medieval vibe of finger-pointing and rumour-mongering The man is Casey Wasserman. He’s chair of the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics. And there are hollers for him to stand down. All because he once got digitally horny with Ms Maxwell. ‘I think of you all the time’, he wrote in one email. ‘What do I have to do to see you in a tight leather outfit?’, he asked. That’s it. A little bit of lame middle-aged wooing.

Imagine talking about the Holocaust and not mentioning the Jews. It would be like holding forth on the transatlantic slave trade without saying the word ‘African’. Amazingly, the Green Party did just that last week. They de-Jewed the Holocaust. They offered remembrance for the greatest crime in history without mentioning the people it was designed to destroy. That was it. No heart. No anger. No Jews I’ve been thinking about this for days. About what would drive someone to erase the Jews from the Shoah, to engage in such eerie Jewless mourning. All the parties mentioned the six million Jews vaporised by fascism in their social-media posts on Holocaust Memorial Day. All except the Greens. Their X post felt horribly perfunctory.