A column condemning cowardice

Every Friday, this column exists for a simple reason, to celebrate courage. To shine a light on people who, in ways large and small, refuse to bow to intimidation, indifference or fear. People who build when it would be easier to destroy, who stand up when it would be easier to sit down. People who choose principle over popularity.

This week, however, I find myself unable to write that column. Not because there is no bravery left to celebrate, but because there is a different theme that has dominated the week.

Cowardice.

Not the obvious kind, not physical cowardice. The more insidious variety that increasingly infects our public life, the cowardice of selective morality. The cowardice of looking away, the cowardice of exploiting suffering, of institutions that retreat when challenged. The cowardice of those who know better, but lack the courage to act.

Every week, this column seeks to honour those who deserve recognition. This week, I have chosen instead to shine a light on those who deserve admonishment.

Because while courage deserves celebration, cowardice deserves exposure.

The first example comes from Toronto.

Thankfully, fourteen-year-old Esther has now been found safe. Her family have been spared the outcome every parent fears and for that we should all be grateful. But her safe return does not diminish what happened while she was missing.

As volunteers searched for Esther, posters carrying her image were reportedly torn down across the city.

Pause on that for a moment, not political posters, not controversial campaign material, not advertisements. Posters appealing for help in finding a missing child.

The fact that Esther has now been found changes the ending of the story, it does not change the behaviour of those who tore those posters down. Nor does it change the obvious comparison.

After 7 October, we witnessed the grotesque spectacle of hostage posters being ripped from walls across Western cities by people who somehow convinced themselves that acknowledging Jewish suffering was an unacceptable political act.

Among those posters were the faces of Ariel and Kfir Bibas. One was four years old, the other was nine months old. Their posters were torn down too, but they were not brought home, they were returned to their family in coffins.

Now, in Toronto, a missing Jewish girl becomes the latest reminder of that same moral sickness. Thankfully, Esther was found safe, but the instinct that led people to tear down those posters remains exactly the same.

This is the cowardice of dehumanisation, because before you can tear down the poster of a missing child, you must first stop seeing her as a child. You must decide that her identity matters more than her humanity, that her Jewishness matters more than her safety, that your politics matter more than her parents’ anguish.

Esther is home, thank God, but the question remains: what kind of society produces people who see the photograph of a missing Jewish girl and decide it belongs in the bin?

Next comes Ireland captain Séamus Coleman.

Coleman declared that he is “a dad”, “a husband”, has “a heart” and knows “the difference between right and wrong” while expressing anger that Irish players were placed in the position of having to face Israel in a football match.

The implication is difficult to miss. The world’s only Jewish state is once again singled out for a standard that appears not to be applied elsewhere. This is the cowardice of selective morality and, sadly, it is becoming a familiar feature of contemporary Irish public life.

From sections of Ireland’s political leadership, to activists, artists and public figures, a culture has emerged in which hostility towards Israel is increasingly treated not as a political position but as a moral obligation. The result is that complexity disappears, facts become secondary, nuance is abandoned. The conflict is reduced to a simplistic morality play in which one side carries all the blame and the other none of it.

Against that backdrop, it is hardly surprising to hear the captain of the national football team echoing sentiments that have become commonplace elsewhere in Irish public discourse.

Sport should be better than this, it is one of the few remaining places where people from different backgrounds, faiths and political beliefs can come together around a shared identity. It should be a bridge to healing, not a barricade to empathy and understanding.

Instead, football increasingly finds itself recruited into the service of performative politics, where every match becomes a statement, every fixture becomes a protest, every athlete becomes a campaigner and somehow it is always Israel that finds itself in the dock.

Israel, the only Jewish state, singled out, the great irony being that Coleman decided to express his views after a match against Qatar!

That is why this matters, not because footballers are forbidden from expressing opinions, but because selective outrage is not moral courage, it is moral cowardice.

True moral courage requires consistency, it requires applying principles even when doing so is inconvenient. It requires acknowledging complexity when simplicity would be easier. Most of all, it requires resisting the temptation to join a fashionable chorus simply because everyone around you is already singing.

Then there is Rupert Lowe.

Britain has suffered one of the most grotesque scandals in modern history through the industrial-scale rape and abuse of vulnerable girls. It deserves exposure, accountability and it deserves justice. What it does not deserve is comparison to the Holocaust.

The Holocaust was the systematic, industrialised attempt to exterminate an entire people from the face of the earth. To invoke it as a rhetorical device in contemporary political debate is not seriousness, nor leadership and it is certainly not courage.

It is the cowardice of exploiting history.

One of the most depressing features of modern politics is that every tragedy must apparently become a prop. Every historical atrocity must be dragged into today’s argument. Every horror must be mined for political advantage.

The result is that eventually nothing means anything. History is not strengthened by constant comparison, it is diminished by it.

Then there is the British Museum.

One of the world’s great cultural institutions chose to postpone an event centred on Jewish antiquity and the historical connection of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel because of fears that protesters would target it.

Think about that for a moment, this was not a political rally, not a fundraiser, not an event organised by the Israeli government. It was an event focused on history, archaeology, artefacts and antiquities.

The very evidence that demonstrates something many activists would prefer not to confront: that the Jewish connection to the Land of Israel did not begin in 1948, nor in 1917, nor even in the modern Zionist movement, but that it stretches back thousands of years.

The irony is impossible to ignore. So much of the demonisation directed towards Israel today begins with a single premise: that Jews are foreign interlopers, colonial settlers, white Europeans occupying somebody else’s land. A people with no legitimate historical claim to the place from which their national story emerged.

The only problem with that narrative is that it collapses when confronted with history. History is stubborn like that, it survives slogans, hashtags and political fashion. It survives attempts to erase it, as long as people are brave enough to keep pointing to it

The attack on Israel’s legitimacy begins with an attack on Jewish history itself, that is precisely why events such as this matter. Archaeology does not care about ideology, artefacts do not bend to political pressure. Ancient history remains ancient history regardless of how inconvenient some may find it.

Which is why it should concern all of us that a museum, a place whose very purpose is the preservation and presentation of historical truth, appears to have bowed to pressure from those who wished to prevent that history from being discussed.

This is not the cowardice of paralysis, it is the cowardice of surrender. Museums exist to preserve evidence, to protect history, to present facts. If they become unwilling to do so whenever activists threaten disruption, they cease to be guardians of history and become hostages to contemporary politics.

Institutions do not exist merely to function when conditions are easy, their purpose is to stand firm when pressure arrives. If museums, universities, cultural organisations and public bodies increasingly decide that Jewish history is simply too controversial to discuss, too noisy to defend or too risky to present, then they are not preserving culture, they are surrendering it.

If the British Museum represents the cowardice of institutional surrender, the final example this week represents something even worse. Because some institutions are no longer surrendering, they are choosing sides.

And finally, the Southbank Centre.

For months now, Misan Harriman has used his position and platform to amplify rhetoric that has repeatedly demonised Israel, invoked inflammatory Holocaust comparisons and alienated a significant section of Britain’s Jewish community.

This matters because Misan Harriman is not simply a private citizen. He is the chairman of one of Britain’s most important publicly funded cultural institutions.

An institution whose mission is to bring communities together. An institution funded by taxpayers of every background, faith and ethnicity. An institution that claims to champion inclusion.

The question is therefore not whether Misan Harriman is entitled to hold controversial views. The question is whether someone who repeatedly divides communities, rather than bringing them together, is fit to chair an organisation whose stated purpose is to do precisely the opposite.

The greater failure, however, belongs to the Southbank Centre’s board, because this is the cowardice of institutional betrayal.

The board has looked at this controversy and reached an obvious conclusion. Not that nothing is wrong, but that one community’s concerns matter less than another group’s outrage. That upsetting Britain’s Jewish community is a more acceptable outcome than risking a backlash from the progressive activist circles that dominate so much of the contemporary cultural world.

That is not leadership, it is not neutrality, that is moral cowardice.

Leadership requires difficult decisions, it requires choosing principles over convenience. Instead, the Southbank Centre board has chosen the path taken by too many institutions today, hoping that if they remain silent long enough, the problem will go away.

Silence is itself a decision, it is complicity and cowardice, when dressed up as pragmatism, remains cowardice all the same.

That is perhaps the thread connecting every one of these stories. The issue is not really Israel, it is not football, it is not museums, it is not politicians.

Antisemitism runs through much of this piece, but antisemitism alone is not the story. The deeper problem is the cowardice that allows it to flourish, excuses it, rationalises it and ultimately rewards it.

The issue is cowardice, the cowardice to apply principles consistently, to show empathy equally, to treat history with respect, to defend culture. The cowardice to lead and the cowardice to defend civilisation’s values when doing so becomes uncomfortable.

For nearly two years I have written repeatedly that what starts with the Jews never ends with the Jews. That is because cowardice never confines itself to a single target. Once a society becomes comfortable looking away from one form of prejudice, one act of intimidation or one erosion of principle, it inevitably becomes easier to look away from the next.

Civilisations are not destroyed only by those who hate, they are also diminished by those who know better but lack the courage to act.

So this week there are no Shabbat Shaloms, no heroes, no celebrations. Only a simple plea:

Be braver than the people in this column.

Be brave enough to show empathy for a missing child.

Be brave enough to apply your principles consistently.

Be brave enough to defend history from those who would exploit it.

Be brave enough to stand up to intimidation.

Be brave enough to lead.

Because bravery is not the absence of fear, it is the willingness to do the right thing despite it. If we allow cowardice to become our culture, then our culture itself becomes impossible to defend.