OPINION: The fight against Islamist antisemitism is a battle for Britain’s soul

Two years have passed since the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. It was carried out, not by neo-Nazis, but by members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, together with substantial numbers of Gazan civilians. And less than a week has passed since the UK’s first lethal terrorist attack on a synagogue. It was carried out, not by a white supremacist, but by Jihad Al-Shamie: the son of a Syrian-born surgeon who described the 7 October pogromists as ‘men of God on earth’.

Britain’s Jews knew that such events had to be coming. Years of polling data show that the community had long recognised Islamist antisemitism as the greatest threat it faced. And yet, across Parliament, quangoland, and the civil service, British officialdom has wrapped itself in denial, seemingly too fearful of the accusation of Islamophobia to acknowledge the elephant in the room.

In June, Counter Extremism Group bravely published my report on Islamist antisemitism, with a foreword from Lord Blunkett. It was a response to Sir William Shawcross’s urgent recommendation that Prevent — a programme intended to dissuade people from becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism — cease wasting time and resources on imaginary and exaggerated threats, recognise the centrality of antisemitism to multiple forms of extremism, and prioritise attention to the UK’s principal terrorist threat, i.e. Islamism. A fortnight later, I was honoured to present oral evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee, and took the opportunity to restate much of my case.

As my report shows, hatred of the Jews — a Middle Eastern people historically repressed and persecuted across Christendom and the Muslim world alike — not only unites extremists across the Sunni-Shia divide, but enabled Arabs to make common cause with a white racist like Hitler: a man praised and admired by Islamists from the 1930s to the present day. But as it also shows, this antisemitism — sometimes thinly disguised as ‘criticism of Israel’ — is by no means confined to members of formal Islamist groups. Thanks to hate preaching and to the relentless demonisation to which Israel and its supporters are routinely subjected in Britain today — whether on social media, university campuses, or city streets — antisemitic attitudes are becoming normalised. And where such attitudes have taken root, extremism is flourishing: my analysis shows, for example, that British Muslims with strongly antisemitic views were many times more likely to support Islamic State than their more tolerant co-religionists.

The remedy is clear. Support for Hamas and other Muslim Brotherhood organisations is illegal throughout much of the Muslim world, and those who indulge in it should have no place in the UK either. Extremists and their muddle-headed fellow travellers should no longer be allowed to monopolise public spaces — much less educational spaces — with their rolling campaigns of disinformation and incitement. Hate preachers should no longer be given free reign to spread prejudice and discord. And everyone involved in counter-extremism — from government ministers downwards — must make it their business to understand and challenge the poisonous ideology of Islamism and the virulent antisemitism which lies at its rotten heart.

But none of this will happen until the public demands action from its elected representatives. What I sense from my Jewish friends, and what burns now in my non-Jewish heart, is not a fearful but an angry form of grief. It is time to fight for Britain’s very soul.