Are Jews in danger?

Yes - but Conservatives are not helping them

Tens of thousands marching against antisemitism in London last year

Down the road from where I live a friend came across a man tearing down pictures of Israeli hostages. You’ve probably seen the portraits by bus stops and railway stations. Activists print them off from sites highlighting the hostages’ plight and fly-post pictures of the men, women and children Hamas kidnapped.

As the hostages are civilians, my friend asked why would anyone want to destroy their pictures.

He was beaten up for his pains. Defending innocent Jewish civilians makes you an accomplice of Benjamin Netanyahu in London today.

And not just in London. Anti-Jewish hatred in the UK has exploded since Hamas attacked Israel – recorded incidents have doubled.  The violence my friend experienced is still rare, thankfully. But the fear of Islamist terrorism or just everyday thugs running riot is everywhere in the Jewish community, and to a lesser extent in wider society as well.

A drumbeat of stories builds the tension.

Belatedly and reluctantly, the Labour party disowned its Muslim candidate in the forthcoming Rochdale by-election. He had all the usual prejudices, and a few I had not heard about before.

He imagined that “people in the media from certain Jewish quarters” were targeting pro-Palestinian politicians, and that the Israeli state had allowed Hamas to rape, shoot and burn alive 1200 of its people because it wanted a pretext to invade Gaza.

As I am writing this piece, there’s news of a (white) comedian, who describes himself as an “experimental fusionist” and an “absurdist laughter chef,” and is just as stupid as his description implies. In a scene redolent of medieval prejudice, he encouraged the audience at the Soho Theatre in central London to chant “get the fuck out” and “free Palestine” at a Jewish member of the audience.

Incidentally the Soho Theatre is on the site of the old West End Great Synagogue, built at a time when Jews were welcome in London

Before that Rabbi Zecharia Deutsch, the Jewish chaplain of Leeds University, his wife and two kids were moved to a safe house on  police advice after receiving hundreds of death threats.

Online “activists” pointed out the rabbi had served in the Israeli Defence Force, and so presumably any number of violent threats were justified.

The justification, such as it is, would have carried more plausibility if incidents of hatred had not exploded as soon as the news of the Hamas massacres broke in October.  They were celebrations of anti-Jewish violence not a reaction to the violence of the Israeli armed forces.

If you doubt that there are reasons to be frightened, go to your nearest synagogue and see the guards. Or talk to the parents of Jewish children and hear them describe how Jewish schools tell pupils to discard uniforms that allow potential attackers to mark them out as targets.

All of this and much more is causing deep alarm in the Jewish community, and a dangerous reaction among right-wing Jewish pressure groups, who are getting the response to racism about as wrong as they possibly can.

Here’s how.