OPINION: The road from cowardice to carnage
The government must stop mouthing platitudes and tackle Islamists and their hard-left lackeys poisoning public life in this country
Last year, Jewish News was looking to build a new website. We put the work out to tender, as any publisher would, and one company stood out. They were professional, creative and, on paper, perfect. We were excited to get started. Then came the email.
The company had decided it “wasn’t comfortable” working with a Jewish newspaper. The boss told me that while he could insist his staff does the project, “their hearts wouldn’t be in it and the outcome would not be the best it could be for Jewish News”.
How terribly thoughtful of him.
That was it. No further explanation. Just moral objection to our existence. The company (which I’m sorely tempted to name and shame but will resist… for now) is signed up to a movement called B Corp, whose stated aim is to promote “high standards of social accountability and address society’s most critical challenges”. You couldn’t make it up. I wrote twice to B Corp asking whether a company carrying its seal of approval refusing to work with Jews was in keeping with its “high standards”. I was told to complete an online form and wait 90 days for a response. That was 446 days ago.
I was angry, upset and quietly heartbroken, but dismissed it as a wretched one-off.
A few months later, the head of a theatre company Jewish News had interviewed to help promote her new Jewish-interest show withdrew permission for us to publish our article, saying “political issues between us” made her uncomfortable appearing in a Jewish newspaper.
I remember reading her email in a Waitrose car park, shortly after strolling past the kosher food aisle, where a sign had been put up announcing: “These products are monitored by CCTV.”
Security cameras for biscuits. How fucked up is that?
These are just two examples of the quiet isolation we’ve experienced at Jewish News in recent months. Two years in which I’ve kept assuring myself, and others, that this madness will pass and no one has been seriously hurt.
Then two Jews were murdered on Thursday morning outside a synagogue in Manchester. The first deadly antisemitic attack on British soil since the 17th century.
Every time a theatre has cancelled a Jewish performer, every time a company has decided it’s “uncomfortable” working with Jews, the line between silent and savage antisemitism has blurred just a little more
Since Hamas’s massacre in Israel, Jews in Britain have been pushed, slowly – and ever so politely – out of public life.
Jewish actors have been dropped from shows. Jewish comedians told their Edinburgh Fringe gigs are off under the pretext of “staff safety”. Venues have quietly cancelled Jewish musicians. Holocaust survivor visits to schools have been pulled “for security reasons”.
Every time a theatre has cancelled a Jewish performer, every time a company has decided it’s “uncomfortable” working with Jews, the line between silent and savage antisemitism has blurred just a little more.
Now that line no longer exists. On Thursday, Britain became a place where a knife-wielding man called Jihad can convince himself that driving a car into Jews outside a synagogue isn’t an atrocity but a statement.
Tonight, I’m off to a batmitzvah party hoping there’s enough security on the door. That’s life for British Jews now. And death.
The question to our government is simple: what are you going to do? Not say. My God, how they love to say and say and say. Empty words won’t keep us alive. WHAT. ARE. YOU. GOING. TO. DO?
British citizens who still believe in what this country is meant to stand for need an unafraid, coordinated response to Islamist extremism and how it is being enabled by the Corbynite hard left. It must be handled with the same seriousness the state confronted the IRA in the 1980s.
Strengthen laws on incitement. Invest significantly in the Prevent programme. Fix the broken culture at the Crown Prosecution Service. Deport radical preachers and shut down “charities” funnelling money to Iranian-backed groups. Expel foreign nationals who incite violence on the streets and social media. End the indulgence of doctors, academics and others in positions of public trust who openly support Hamas. And stop the boats.
Have the courage to tell hard truths about an evil that has been indulged in plain sight. An evil that has infected our politics, culture, courts, media, education, the NHS and every other corner of public life.
It’s even dehumanised people who just build websites for a living.
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