By Khaled Hassan, Telegraph
Britain’s approach to tackling anti-Jewish hatred is dangerously inadequate
For the past fourteen years, my professional life has been dedicated to a single discipline: mitigating risk. In this field, one anticipates the usual obstacles – a scarcity of resources, a failure to grasp the scale of a threat, or a simple deficit in technical know-how. These are the standard hurdles of the trade.
Since relocating to Britain in 2016, however, I have been confronted by a challenge of an entirely different order. It is a cognitive and moral blind spot so profound it has redefined my understanding of risk itself.
In this country, we excel at recognising the peril of anti-Semitism. We meticulously document the alarming rise of the world’s oldest hatred. We convene conferences, host government briefings, and launch parliamentary inquiries to dissect and decry it.
We do everything, in fact, except the one thing that truly matters: applying our vigilance where the threat is most acute and culturally entrenched.
You see, I was born and raised in Egypt. My formative experience with anti-Semitism taught me a harsh lesson that many in the West struggle to comprehend: it can be the norm.
It can be not merely the province of a fringe, but the lingua franca of a nation, the subtext of its media, the unspoken foundation of its foreign policy, and a thread woven deep into the fabric of its collective national identity. It can be ambient, pervasive, and normalised to the point of invisibility for those within it.
Consequently, since arriving in Britain, my advocacy has been consistent and, I believed, self-evidently sensible: we must direct enhanced resources and tailored strategies to combat anti-Semitism within communities where it is not an aberration but the default setting.
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