Where hatreds meet

This was going to be an article about how the British arts scene has had the life and colour leached out of it by the omnicause blob. Then two Jewish men were stabbed in Golders Green by a racist, in the same neighbourhood as four Hatzolah ambulances were set alight a few weeks earlier, by racists. Cancellations in the arts suddenly seem less important given the gravity and immediacy of what British Jews are facing. 

As the broadcaster and comedian Josh Howie observed on X, many British Jews are finding their daily lives marked by threat:

Dropped wife at work, a few helicopters in the sky from when two Jewish men got stabbed earlier. Off to pick up kids from school that was scoped out most likely by a terrorist last week. On the way I’ll drive past two synagogues that have been firebombed. This is being a Jew in the UK in 2026.

But this is not new. After years of marches where fanatics have chanted about “globalising the intifada”, after arson attacks and escalating intimidation, politicians still claim to be shocked/ horrified/ disgusted/dismayed (to be deleted as the PR advises) when “the perception” of Jewish people being unsafe is proven to be a reality. 

A society which has become accustomed to a background hum of antisemitism will always find a way to blame Jewish people

Beneath the performative outrage is an unacknowledged sentiment. A society which has become accustomed to a background hum of antisemitism will always find a way to blame Jewish people for the hostility and anger their existence provokes. At this juncture I should say I’m not Jewish, but what I’ve learned about sexual politics has helped me see the obvious. And here is where I want to invite a comparison — if misogyny is the oldest hatred, then antisemitism is surely the second oldest. 

Much like the rape victim who wears a short skirt, if the men stabbed in Golders’ Green hadn’t been so “openly Jewish”, flaunting their provocatively Jewish hats in the street, perhaps their attacker wouldn’t have targeted them. If only they were less conspicuously Jewish. Less present. Less themselves. 

It seems whatever befalls them, women and Jewish people are said to have asked for it. Women have always been blamed and resented for the feelings we provoke in men. Meanwhile, to exist as a Jew is to be read as political. For both groups, there’s no way to opt out. Just as women carry the blame for male violence, Jewish people are made to carry the political weight of a modern state while dragging a history of lies about blood libel and conspiracies. 

There is a deep seated reluctance to see Jewish people as victims in any way, because that would cast the majority as either bystanders or perpetrators. It forces us to see prejudice, which might be close to home. Of course, it is also an unsettling reminder that while Jewish people might be the first target for the growing number of Islamists in the UK, we are now all at increased risk. 

In these divided times there are two points that unite morons across political divides. The first is that women are to blame for the collapse of civilisation, whether as Trump-voting Karens or liberals undone by “suicidal empathy”. The second is that the Jews are to blame, whether imagined as puppet-masters of global finance or architects of the Davos agenda. 

Should you want proof of how rampant antisemitism is, I invite you to post any comment that’s supportive of Jewish people on X. Because just as any post about feminism is guaranteed to bring out the misogynists who prove the point, if you express support for Jewish people online you will quickly see why they need it.

On Monday, at the launch of Freedom in the Arts’ The New Boycott Crisis, I posted about Josh Breslaw, a drummer with the band Oi Va Voi, whose gig was cancelled after complaints from Bristol Palestine Action. The response was immediate and revealing; scores of commenters descended to tell me I was lying, in the pay of Zionists and that the band deserved to be cancelled.

Some suggested that Jewish people are genocidal “baby killers.” One compared Breslaw to a Russian operative (he’s a musician who happens to be Jewish). A right-winger was adamant that Jewish people have invited immigrants into the country by shadowy control of borders and international migration policies, while a self-identifying “anti-fascist” explained that Jewish people are “white northern Europeans identifying as Middle Eastern ‘victims’.”

Social media wasn’t a thing when Edward I passed the Edict of Expulsion, which forced all Jews to leave the realm. But the feverish fear of “demonic” Jews expressed online today is straight from the ergot-riddled medieval mind.

The possibility that Breslaw and his band might have been unfairly discriminated against, or that, despite being Jewish, he might not have an agenda, triggered those who can only see Jewish people as aggressors. As David Bennun noted in an article following the Supreme Court ruling on sex, this is to be expected from the omnicause foot soldiers: 

Women and Jews are now familiar with being smeared as dupes or agents of far-right conspiracies, or outright branded child-killers and Nazis.  Those once at home in the arts, academia, charities, or left-leaning media – territory ruled by The Good People™—find themselves blacklisted, careers and lives destroyed.

This is what makes the present moment so grubby. Not just the violence itself, though that is ugly enough, but the instinctive recoil from recognising Jewish people as victims. Because to do so would force an uncomfortable reckoning. It would mean admitting that the threat is real, that it is near, and that it is not coming from some faraway fringe.

Far easier, then, to imply. To hedge. To suggest, sotto voce, that visibility invites danger. That safety could be bought, if only Jews were prepared to pipe down and apologise. But that is not safety. It is submission. And a society that demands submission in exchange for not being stabbed has already conceded more than it dares to admit. 

Ultimately, the future of Britain as a whole will be determined by how we respond to the threat facing British Jews today.