Antisemitism in the UK: evil on our streets?

"With its vibrant gay scene, vegan restaurants and Green MP, Brighton is one of the most liberal towns in Britain," said Jake Wallis Simons in The Daily Telegraph. It is also, apparently, a repository of support for Hamas. 

At a gathering just 24 hours after the 7 October attacks, one speaker, a Sussex University student union officer, declared: "Yesterday was a victory." She went on to describe the butchery as "so beautiful and inspiring to see". 

This wasn't an isolated incident, said Stephen Glover in the Daily Mail. At a pro-Palestinian protest in London last Saturday, the chorus "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" – widely seen as a call for an end to the Israeli state – was heard. Two protesters had pictures of paragliders stuck to their backs, an apparent celebration of Hamas's airborne terrorists.  At a protest in Glasgow, one woman shouted: "Free Palestine! Don't forget where the Jews were in 1940." All this, lest we forget, after at least 260 young people were killed at the Supernova music festival, after whole families, including babies, were slaughtered and mutilated on Israeli kibbutzim. The "evil of Hamas" has seeped "onto British streets, into British universities".

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

'Assault on freedom speech'

What happened on 7 October was appalling, said Aasmah Mir in The Times. If people have glorified such acts of terrorism, that is wrong, and illegal. But a humanitarian catastrophe is now under way in Gaza. It ought to be possible to condemn both. We need to be careful not to stigmatise "any expression of concern or sympathy for a population of 2.3 million people having bombs dropped on them".

There has been an assault on freedom of speech, said Benny Hunter on Open Democracy. The protest in London was a march for Palestine, not for Hamas. Yet Foreign Secretary James Cleverly advised protesters to stay at home. The Home Secretary Suella Braverman has written to police chiefs warning that the waving of Palestinian flags could, in some circumstances, be regarded as an attempt to "glorify acts of terrorism". This is absurd and illiberal. The purpose is "to intimidate would-be protesters and delegitimise criticism of Israel by aligning it with criminality".

'Jews don't count'

This went far beyond legitimate criticism, said Juliet Samuel in The Times. Two days after the massacres, a mob occupied the whole road outside the Israeli embassy, setting off fireworks and chasing a Jewish man who was filming them. A sneering woman with a Palestinian flag on her cheek mocked him: "Are your people dead? Yes? Awww. Good."

Left-wing journalists and academics at respectable universities endorsed the attacks as a form of resistance to colonialism. Antisemitic hate incidents spiked across Britain's big cities. A Jewish school in north London was vandalised with red paint. Synagogues and schools were forced to lay on extra security. Imagine how different the official response would have been with any other form of racism. It's the same old story: "Jews don't count."