Labour was dead right to suspend Diane Abbott. Britain is experiencing one of the worst eruptions of anti-Jewish hatred in decades. Jewish schoolkids are being roughed up. Synagogues have been desecrated. Plots to murder Jews have been uncovered. The internet overflows with the effluent of Jew-hating invective. Any MP who minimises anti-Semitism in such febrile times deserves the shortest of shrift.
It is a staggeringly naive thing for Abbott to say
Abbott will say she was not minimising anti-Semitism, she was just saying it is different to the racism experienced by black people. Okay, let’s look at what she said. It was in an interview with the BBC’s James Naughtie. She said there are ‘different types of racism’. Anti-black racism is more widespread, she implied, because bigots can ‘see straight away’ that a person is black. But when there’s ‘a Jewish person walking down the street’, you don’t know they’re Jewish. They blend in. They could be any Tom, Dick or Harry.
In short, it’s easier to be a Jew than a black person in a ‘racist society’. This is a staggeringly naive thing to say. For a start there are many outward symbols of Jewishness that racist scumbags can easily see. Britain’s Orthodox Jews, with their distinctive dress, have been abused and assaulted in the anti-Semitic fervour that followed Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October. An Orthodox girl in Stamford Hill was pelted with a glass bottle. Perhaps Abbott would like to explain to that girl how privileged she is to blend in.
Britain’s non-Orthodox Jews have also felt the heat of the Jew hatred that followed Hamas’s day of barbarism. Jewish students reported hiding their kippahs under baseball caps to avoid the barbs of anti-Semites. Kids at the Jewish Free School in London were given permission to remove their blazers on the way to and from school, lest some Hamasnik should target them for insults, or worse. And who can forget when a man in a kippah was blitzed by a foul chorus of ‘Zionist scum’ when he encountered one of those ‘pro-Palestine’ hate marches.
This has been the reality for Britain’s Jews for two years. A kippah, a shtreimel, a Star of David necklace, even a school uniform – all have been enough to attract the bile and ire of Israelophobes. I’m not Jewish and even I have experienced it. I wear a yellow ribbon to show my solidarity with the hostages still being held by Hamas. And I have twice been insulted in public. ‘Zionist c**t’, said one. ‘Genocide supporter’, said the other.
It strikes me as unforgivably blasé for Diane Abbott to say it’s harder to clock a Jew at a time when Jews are absolutely being clocked and are being insulted and attacked. Anti-Semitic incidents in the UK have sky-rocketed since Hamas’s pogrom. There were a record 4,103 incidents in 2023, many occurring after 7 October. There were 3,528 in 2024. How cold and out of touch to muse on the lucky invisibility of Jews when Jews are being rounded on by both physical and digital mobs of bigots.
Then there’s Abbott’s breezy revelation that she has no regrets ‘at all’ over what she said in April 2023. That’s when she wrote a letter to the Observer saying Jews, unlike black people, are not ‘all their lives subject to racism’. They experience ‘prejudice’, she said, like ‘redheads’ do. It was for that crass comparison of Jew hatred with ginger mick-taking that Abbott was first suspended from Labour. It will surprise only the witless that she’s been suspended again for standing by such daft and hurtful words.
Saying Jews experience prejudice but not racism is historical illiteracy on steroids. In that letter, Abbott said Jews were never required to sit ‘at the back of the bus’ in pre-civil rights America. No, but they were being rounded up in Europe in their millions for industrialised gassing and burning by a regime hell-bent on extinguishing the ‘Jewish disease’. That was the worst act of racist mania in human history. To overlook it is shameful. It thoroughly deserves party suspension.
Abbott is not alone. The British left has a crazy blind spot on Jew hatred. These ‘anti-racists’ haven’t issued so much as a whisper of solidarity with Britain’s Jews these past two years. They call themselves ‘anti-fascists’ and yet fail to condemn Hamas’s fascistic assault on the Jews of Southern Israel or the fascistic menace it birthed in the West. Last month an 82-year-old Jewish woman in the United States was burnt to death by a man yelling ‘Free Palestine’. And yet from the ‘anti-fascists’, nada, not a word.
This is the poison of identity politics. It is their devotion to the neo-religious belief that all white people are ‘privileged’ and all non-white people are ‘oppressed’ that blinds them to the truth and intricacy of racial hatred. They have sacrificed Jews at the altar of their anti-whiteness that falsely calls itself anti-racism – an unpardonable betrayal of our Jewish compatriots.
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