by Ian Paul, Psephizo
There has been a record-breaking rise in antisemitic incidents in the UK since the attack by Hamas on October 7th 2023.
Antisemitic incidents reached the highest level recorded, the monitoring and community safety organisation the Community Security Trust (CST) said. In the 12 months after the 7 October attacks there were 5,583 incidents in the UK – including abusive behaviour, threats, assaults, damage and desecration – a 204% year-on-year increase.
Jews in Britain are now more actively considering whether they are safe here, and whether they should move to Israel themselves, the one country in the world where—ironically—they might feel safe. This follows a pattern since the establishing of the State of Israel in 1948, particularly in Muslim Arab nations. In that time, 900,000 Jews have left or been driven from their homes, so that ancient, historic communities have simply disappeared.
Earlier this year I visited Morocco on holiday, and in every city we visited we came across ‘The Jewish Quarter’, ‘The Synagogue’, and ‘The Jewish Cemetery’—but no Jews. The famous Blue City, Chefchaouen, is blue because houses in the Jewish quarter were painted blue to set this area apart from the rest of the city. When tourists came to visit, they realised in the 1990s that more tourists might come if more houses were painted blue—but of course by then there were no longer any Jews. It is rather ironic that people come to see something which is a sign of a community that no longer exists.
This therefore is a good time to repost this article, first written three years ago. I should note at the outset that some claim ‘antisemitic’ should apply to hatred of both Jews and Arabs, since they are both semitic peoples. But that is to commit the genetic fallacy: words do not mean what their etymology says (a ‘lady’ is not someone who kneads bread, despite that being the origin of the term). Antisemitism, in any decent dictionary, is ‘hostility to, prejudice against, and hatred of Jews; discrimination against Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group.’ It is all too prevalent in the UK and Western culture—and I hear no protests about it.