by Brendan O’Neill, spiked
It is remarkable how swiftly the unthinkable returns. How easily the guardrails of morality crumble to dust. That was my thought upon watching a seething mob besiege Edgware United Synagogue yesterday. They screamed abuse at Jews. They hollered for the destruction of the Jewish nation. Some were adorned in the inverted red triangle that signals support for the Jew killers of Hamas. And there you have it: Jews, once more, are being terrorised at their places of worship. What comes next?
The pretext for the vile swarming of a synagogue in a heavily Jewish part of north-west London was that it was holding a Great Israeli Real Estate Event. It was an event for ‘those thinking of moving to Israel’, as the Guardian described it. These ‘thieves’ are selling off land that isn’t theirs to sell, wailed the wild-eyed Israelophobes. In their warped worldview, no Jew should be permitted to buy property in ‘Israhell’. ‘From the river to the sea!’, they chanted, giving voice to that fever dream of all bourgeois bigots: that the world would be a better place if the Jewish nation were annihilated.
Yet however much the hordes at the synagogue doors try to dress up their agitation in the finery of radical politics, there’s no escaping the truth: it is 2026 and Jews’ holy places are once more surrounded by snarling crowds. The mob accused the event organisers of hawking properties in the ‘occupied territories’ of the West Bank. But the organisers firmly deny this. In the words of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, to fume outside a synagogue on ‘false pretences’ looks like a desperate scrabble for any old ‘excuse’ to ‘harass and intimidate’ Jews.