Voice of the Jewish News: Thinly-veiled attacks on our communities

It took a man with unconcealed ambition to be the next Conservative leader saying something diabolical about Muslims to finally knock the Labour leader’s anti-Semitism crisis off the front pages this week (although not this newspaper’s).

It was heartening to see our community among those speaking loudest against Boris Johnson’s Daily Telegraph column, in which he called the full face veil “ridiculous” and “weird” and said the women who wear them look like letter-boxes or bank robbers.

JLC chairman Jonathan Goldstein branded the former foreign secretary’s comments “disgraceful”, the Board of Deputies called them “totally unacceptable, on the street or in our politics”, while Dr Edie Friedman, chief executive of the Jewish Council for Racial Equality accused Johnson of “dog whistle racism”.

We live in extraordinary times, when senior political figures feel free to write repugnant words and defend indefensible loyalties, while somehow still expecting to remain electable.