Gary Grant

It breaks my heart to write this, but I fear that the Britain we loved is no more, a mere fading memory that our children will have to read about in history books. The almost unspeakable truth is that the savage Yom Kippur attack on worshippers at a Manchester synagogue came as a terrible shock, but it wasn’t a surprise.  All of us with ears to listen and eyes to see knew that something like this was coming – yet when it did, it still felt like a hammer had been taken to our hearts.  This has been a truly shameful week for our country, our institutions and our grossly inadequate political establishment. Britain, once the most tolerant, best integrated nation in Western Europe, a beacon of democracy, opportunity and freedom, a nation that by the 1990s was embracing colour-blind and meritocratic ideals, has turned into a cesspit of anti-Semitism, a case study in what a country should not do.  Britain’s descent into Jew hatred is not a mere outbreak, a passing virus: it’s a deep-seated cancer that has already started to metastasise into the despicable terrorist violence seen at the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation Synagogue.  I blame our politicians – Tory and Labour, with a few exceptions – for allowing this disease to spread in recent years. Why didn’t the Tories listen to Suella Braverman? Nigel Farage gets it. Kemi Badenoch gets it, and it isn’t her fault that her predecessors failed so disastrously. But Labour are most to blame. They claim to believe in diversity and tolerance, but have behaved in an unacceptably cavalier fashion. It is not good enough for Labour politicians to express their regret at the atrocities in Manchester, or proffer their condemnations, or appeal to tolerance, or beg the organisers of the latest marches not to go ahead with their vindictive demonstrations.  It is not good enough to condemn a generic “hatred” when this is very much a specific detestation of Jewish people, an age-old loathing dressed up in new Israelophobic garb. It is a scandal that the Labour Government decided to reward Hamas for its attack on Israel by recognising a Palestinian state; it is despicable how so many on the Left pretend to believe that Israel is committing a “genocide”, while in fact it is waging a just war which has killed far fewer civilians than any previous urban conflicts.  There is a clear connection between dehumanising and delegitimising Israel, holding it to unachievable standards, and the rise of anti-Semitism in Britain. To claim otherwise is not to be honest. It is obviously possible to criticise any country, its politicians and its policies: I criticise Britain all the time, and yet I’m not Britophobic. Israelis criticise their own government all the time too, and they are not Israelophobic.  But what we are seeing today is a deranged obsession with Israel in some quarters, at the expense of every other conflict or every other problem in the world. Israel is never given the benefit of the doubt, unlike any other country; it is never forgiven for any mistakes, unlike any other country; and its problems are assumed to be self-inflicted, to have been caused by its own actions. This is a classic case of modern anti-Semitism. Britain’s model of tolerance, developed since the 1850s when Jews were finally allowed to serve in Parliament and non-Anglicans to attend Oxford University, is facing an existential threat. The fact that there were so many “pro-Gaza” demonstrations across the country, leading to numerous arrests, in the immediate aftermath of the vicious terror attacks in Manchester disgraced the organisers as well as the authorities that allowed them to go ahead.  Why do so many who purport to support the Palestinian cause not back the Trump peace deal, which is widely supported by the Arab and Muslim countries in the region? Why do they not urge Hamas to surrender, release the hostages and stop the bloodshed?