by Allister Heath, Telegraph
What is happening to our country? When did we give up on truth, democracy and Western values? When did we choose to reward terrorists, butchers, kidnappers and barbarians? Why is Britain turning its back not just on Israel, a democracy on the front line against Islamism, but also, increasingly, against its Jewish citizens?
The explosion in anti-Semitic sentiment and crimes in the UK is a national emergency, an existential threat to the liberal society painstakingly constructed since the 1850s, yet, unlike other kinds of racism, it is dismissed or ignored. Why? Is it elite prejudice of the sort Emile Zola exposed in France all those years ago? Is it electoral politics? Can’t Labour see that it is making everything worse with its unfair, mendacious attacks on Israel?
The double-standards are sickening. There was anger that Isaac Herzog, Israel’s Left-wing president, is in Britain meeting Sir Keir Starmer; yet the PM’s tête-à-tête with the Palestinian Authority dictator Mahmoud Abbas, holder of an anti-Semitic PhD from a Soviet university and proponent of pay-per slay support for the families of Palestinian terrorists, was uncontroversial. How can this be right?