Are Britain’s Jews being thrown under the bus?
The UK’s Jewish community is small. We officially number under 290,000. There are probably a few thousand more non-affiliated Jews who go uncounted but whatever the accurate total, it is far fewer than the several million most non-Jews estimate. This mistaken belief is due – I imagine – to what in social science circles is known as the “availability heuristic” which creates the illusion that a thing (such as plane crashes, lesbians or Jews) are far more numerous than they actually are because plane crashes are splashed all over the news; lesbians feature with abnormal frequency in TV shows and Jews, well, Jews appear to be everywhere all at once.
But whatever the perception – and whatever the reason for it – the Jewish community is tiny and certainly far smaller than the Muslim community, which numbered four million at the last census in 2021 and – unlike the Jewish community – is probably growing. So, there is a Muslim community that is roughly 13 times larger than the Jewish community; that out-votes us by a similar margin.
I do not mention this disparity in community size from Islamophobia, but merely to highlight that in politics size matters – notably the size of a party’s majority – so the basic demographics don’t do Jews any favours. And while we’d like to believe that winning votes or retaining power were not the absolute priority in the minds of politicians, and that most will put principles, fairness and decency above votes, I think the experience of our community over the past few years reveals that, regrettably, that is not the case. Not only are some politicians venal and unprincipled, possibly being funded by enemies of democracy, far too many on the left and far right are in thrall to the “Palestinian cause” that they appear – worryingly for politicians – too stupid to notice is based on a fictional narrative and is actually the Iranian “cause.”
During the past 13 months, the Jewish community has witnessed two-tier policing over criminal acts of Jew-hate on British streets and the turning of a blind eye to hate-mongering organisations such as Hizb ut Tahrir and virulently Israel-hating ones such as Palestine Action.
With that in mind, I feel compelled to ask if – based on recent actions and when it comes to the electoral crunch – the UK government can be trusted to resist the “mob,” or would it cave in if caving in was the only way to retain power? In other words, will Jews be thrown under the bus by the UK government if it is politically expedient? Or indeed will Jews be thrown under buses (or under the tram, perhaps) by governments in other places where the demographics fail to favour Jews?
Let me be perfectly clear. I am emphatically not calling Muslims “a mob”. But I am willing to describe as “a mob” a pack of marauding Muslims combined with a gang of bullying, intimidatory, Israel-hating “liberals,” climate activists and students who have all been indoctrinated by a fictional narrative and are demanding “global intifada.”
This, of course, is where Britain’s famously “free” press should be the bulwark in helping to protect the Jewish community as – ironically – the BBC was instrumental in helping to protect the Jews of Europe in 1942 when it broke the news of Nazi Germany’s death camps.
The press should be calling out political double-standards and venal actions such as reinstating funding for a demonstrably corrupt UNRWA. The press should be castigating police forces for caving in to “mob” rule on London streets and on the streets of many UK cities. The Press should be demanding answers from the authorities for their failure to curb anarchic, violent organisations such as Palestine Action and inciters of hate such as Hizb ut Tahrir. But when sections of the press (notably the Guardian and the BBC, but they are certainly not alone) consistently report Israel – either through carelessness or outright bias – in ways that help demonise and delegitimise the Jewish state and feed antisemitism, it is clear that the Press cannot be trusted to be a “bulwark.”
News outlets that shamefully omitted key facts about the events in Amsterdam (such as that it was an organised, planned attack in which the assailants came wearing balaclavas and armed with knives and clubs) and instead blame the victims and/or frame it as “routine” football violence, similarly cannot be trusted to protect a minority (especially a minority it has been brain-washed to perceive as “victimisers.”)
So who can we count on if – or perhaps when – the government finds it “electorally expedient” to throw us under the bus? Luckily, we are not the Jews of 1930s Europe. We have Israel and the UK is not Germany. The silent majority of this famously free-thinking island is far more perceptive and far less gullible than we (or our government) think, and also more decent. Or, at least, I hope so.