“There is a subset of people who see Jews being massacred and are really excited by it”

The Lowdown on how war in the Middle East fuels racism in the west

There’s a video doing the rounds this morning of Russell Rickford, a history professor at the supposedly elite Cornell University in the US, revelling in Hamas’s ability to kill Jewish teenagers at a concert, execute babies in their cots and kidnap grandmas from their homes.

“It was exhilarating,” he cried. “It was energizing.”

As the blood lust rises, as Jewish schools close because of threats of racist violence here in the UK, I thought it would be worth interviewing Dave Rich, the director of policy at the Community Security Trust, which protects the UK’s Jewish population from attack.

Dave is not just a security adviser. He is the author of two jaw-dropping books: The Left’s Jewish Problem,  on the strange alliance between the post-socialist left and radical Islam, and “Everyday Hate: How Antisemitism is Built into our World.”

You can hear our interview on Apple (see player)

Or on Spotify, Android, Amazon and every other podcast host.

I thought it was also worth putting up a long read from me on how the survival of ancient hatreds threatens our complacent belief in liberal notions of progress.

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The antisemitic past is never dead. It isn’t even past

22 Feb 2023

Diversity is the official ideology of the progressive west. As the future unfolds, and the long arc of Martin Luther King’s moral universe bends towards justice, people of all colours of creeds will build a better society.

It’s a poweful vision. Powerful enough to push many into denying the existence of antisemitism and to refuse to recognise its swindling lies –   in the mouths of others and their own mouths, too.

Jews spoil the progressive story. Jewish people are England’s oldest ethnic minority. If we were moving to a progressive future, anti-Jewish racism should have died long ago. Jews are also a tiny minority: about 300,000 live in the UK and 15 million globally. (Wayne Rooney has more Instagram followers than the world has Jewish people.) And yet, and despite the Holocaust, anti-Jewish tropes are everywhere in modern conspiracy theory, and, indeed, in the brutalities of everyday life.

In England and Wales, where a significant sections of progressive opinion does not consider racism against Jews racism but anti-Zionist activism,  almost a quarter of all religious hate crimes were directed against that tiny minority  in the year ending March 2022.

People throw around words like “medieval” and “fascist” when discussing antisemitism.  Their talk of “blood libels” and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion has a reassuringly dated feel, as if prejudice isn’t a restless modern phenomenon but a throwback to the Middle Ages or mid-20^th century: terrible times, to be sure, but safely confined in the dustbin of history.

Modern antisemitism threatens this central liberal belief that humanity progresses.