For the first time in my life, I’m now beginning to think Britain is finished

Feb 16, 2024 by Jill

by Allister Heath, Telegraph:

The country’s self-image as tolerant, decent and hard-working is being smashed. It’s only going to get worse.

[…] Yet while all of these instances of national enfeeblement are tragic, they pale in comparison with the most terrifying regression of them all. We thought that we had progressed decisively as a society, that we had vanquished racism and religious discrimination, that the institutions of our liberal state would prevent a minority from facing persecution, and that our ruling class would never allow any subset of the population to be openly hated and othered again.

How wrong we were. That anti-Semitism, the oldest of hatreds, is back on the streets and screens of Britain, is terrifying enough; but the fact that this explosion of prejudice is being treated in such a cavalier fashion by the authorities and the mainstream broadcast media – and in some cases is even being rationalised and normalised – is a catastrophic development that casts doubt about Britain’s very future.

This is the worst moment for Britain’s Jews since the pogroms that disgraced Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester in the summer of 1947. The double-standards, the never ending “pro-Palestine” marches that are inevitably marred by egregious, open, anti-Semitism and evil slogans, the bullying, the victim blaming, the spreading of fake news, the wilful, blatant lies and denialism of Hamas’s atrocities, the obsessive interest in, and delegitimisation, of Israel, a state that accounts for just 0.25 per cent of the Middle East’s landmass, is its only multi-religious democracy and which is fighting for survival against neighbours that reject its very existence, stink of a replay of the 1930s.

The return of anti-Semitism is not just an existential threat to Britain’s tiny, 292,000-strong Jewish community, but a damning indictment of a Britain that is regressing into darkness. As Lord Sacks put it in 2016, “the hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews … the appearance of anti-Semitism in a culture is the first symptom of a disease, the early warning sign of collective breakdown.”

Read here (£)