‘My four-year-old at a Jewish school in London is taught how to hide in case of antisemitic attacks. It brings me to tears just to talk about it’
By Lianne Kolirin, Religion Media Centre:
Calls for a million people to join a pro-Palestinian march on Remembrance Day are sending chills through Britain’s Jewish community, which has spent the past month facing unprecedented antisemitism.
Organisers of the Million March for Palestine have called on supporters to “make this the biggest march in history”, as they lay on coaches for demonstrators from around the country.
The march will be the fifth of its kind to take place in the capital, held every Saturday since the Hamas terrorist attacks on October 7.
Writing in The Times this weekend, the Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis warned of the “hateful extremism” at these protests. “At the very moment when it should be clearer than ever what is meant by Hamas’s ‘resistance’, ‘jihad’, ‘uprising’, or ‘intifada’, more and more people are now openly calling for these things in cities across Britain and the world,” he said. “This is hateful extremism. We must have the moral courage to call it by its name and to face it down.”
He called for greater moral clarity in the public response to the war in Israel and Gaza, saying the lines were blurred. “Advocating for the welfare of innocent Palestinians must go hand in hand with a clear-eyed condemnation of the barbarity of Hamas,” he said.
The Community Security Trust (CST), a charity protecting British Jews, has recorded at least 1,019 antisemitic incidents since October 7 — a 537 per cent increase on the same period last year. The incidents include assaults, desecration of Jewish property, online abuse and mass production of antisemitic literature.
Read also: A special kind of hatred by Ian Speir, Juicy Ecumenism
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