Author: Blazingcatfur

At Tuesday’s anti-Semitism ‘summit’ in Downing Street, Sir Keir Starmer achieved a personal first. He used the word ‘Islamists’. But in order to utter a word he had previously avoided in relation to the subject, Sir Keir had to approach it crabwise. Instead of identifying Islamists as the main ideological and physical threat to British Jews, he said: ‘We’re clear-eyed about the fact that anti-Semitism does not have one source alone: Islamists, far-left, far-right extremism, all target Jewish communities.’ Islamists were thus inserted into the conversation but also downplayed. It is obsolete not to recognise that the far right in Britain – for the moment at least – more or less leave Jews alone. The far left is indeed a breeding ground for anti-Semitism, but not a factor unrelated to the Islamists. Indeed, the two have forged the modern equivalent of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Prime Minister cannot say this, because he is not brave and because that pact is now so strong that he feared further punishment in Thursday’s local elections if he suggested its existence. If you watched Kemi Badenoch dealing firmly, two days earlier, with a verbal attack by a pro-Palestinian activist, you could see a leader who speaks freely because she knows what she thinks. Has poor Sir Keir ever known?

When certain prominent Jewish community leaders in the diaspora denounce Israel’s coalition government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as an “existential threat” to the nation, which then, in their view, risks becoming “incompatible with Jewish values”, it says more about those speakers than about Israel.

Some individuals — even Jews, such as Rabbi Charley Baginsky and Rabbi Josh Levy — who claim that criticism of Israel’s government is a “Jewish obligation,” which, from their perspective, does not amount to “an act of disloyalty.” No one, of course, ever criticizes Israel; they must find that so disappointing.