A British minority faces a murderous threat on our streets. Where are the so-called anti-racists? |
For me, it’s mostly sadness. Among others, the overriding emotion is fear. For some, it’s anger. It was certainly anger that was most vividly on display in Golders Green after the stabbing on Wednesday of two men, both Jews, in the broad daylight of a spring day – much of that fury directed at the government. When the prime minister came to visit, they shouted: “Keir Starmer, Jew harmer.”
I understand that fury, even if I think it’s aimed at the wrong address. British Jews are angry because this was just the latest in a spate of attacks that has included, among other incidents, the torching of ambulances belonging to a Jewish charity and the attempt to burn down not one but two synagogues, all in the course of a few weeks. Jews want those in charge, the government, to make it stop.
Ministers say the right things and pledge more money for the security measures that have been necessary at Jewish buildings for decades – the guards who stand outside Jewish schools and synagogues, the reinforced glass in our windows – and, of course, community organisations are grateful. But no one wants to live in a fortress. The solution cannot be to confine ourselves behind ever-higher walls.
There are some indications that these attacks could be orchestrated by Iran, paying local people with a history of violence or criminality to attack Jews. Hence the demand for the government to proscribe Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organisation. It would be comforting to tell ourselves that this is all the work of foreign actors, that we have no homegrown problem of our own. But let’s say Tehran is involved: that it could recruit Britons so easily to the task of attacking Jews would tell its own story.
For those reasons, it’s not enhanced security or a ban on the IRGC that will placate those who heckled Starmer in London on Thursday. What they want is a crackdown on what they call the “hate marches”, the demonstrations against Israel that have been staged in London and elsewhere since........