There was a time, not that long ago, when the word ‘antisemite’ conjured up images of rabid conspiracy theorists and racist skinheads. Now, though, Jew hatred has found a new home—on campuses, in op-eds and at north London dinner parties.
According to a new report, backed by the UK government and set to be published tomorrow, antisemitism has become “normalised in middle-class Britain.” The co-authors of the review, government antisemitism adviser Lord Mann and former defence secretary Penny Mordaunt, wrote in the Telegraph over the weekend that Jewish people are facing discrimination “in our professions, cultural life [and] public services.” Particularly under fire were the arts sector, universities, and the NHS. The UK, they warned, has turned into a place where Jews feel “tolerated rather than… respected.”
The numbers certainly point to an increase in antisemitism across the board. According to the Community Security Trust (CST), antisemitic incidents increased by 147% in 2023, in the aftermath of the October 7th massacre. In 2024, numbers remained the second-highest in recorded history, after only 2023. Last year, CST logged over 200 cases in every month except December.
Specifically, though, antisemitism has taken a firm root among Britain’s well-educated and well-to-do. As this new report points out, it’s not just the “noisy demonstrations and how intimidating people find the current environment” that is driving the wave of anti-Jewish discrimination. Antisemitism has become deeply embedded into British institutions. Just look at the parade of disruptive pro-Palestine protests we’ve seen take over university campuses. At top institutions like Oxford and Cambridge, students set up tent encampments in ‘solidarity’ with the people of Palestine. They wailed about the supposed genocide in Gaza, pressured their schools to cut all ties with ‘apartheid’ Israel, and in some cases intimidated Jewish students who simply wanted to attend classes at the university they paid for.
The activism in universities has gone well beyond merely expressing concern over the war and has entered much more sinister territory. According to Mordaunt and Mann’s new report, they heard evidence from one campus where “staff members who Jewish students trust with their health records [were] shouting for an intifada.” In fact, according to CST, there was a 117% increase in reports of verbal abuse, threats, and assaults against Jewish students and staff in the 2023-24 academic year, leaving many Jewish students feeling unable to fully participate in university life.
It’s not just students facing vile antisemitism, either. In a truly sickening incident last year, the Jewish chaplains at Leeds University—a married couple—began receiving aggressive phone calls, and even death threats. One caller, in a message directed at the wife, threatened: “We’re coming to his house and we’re going to kill him, and you as well you f**king racist b**ch. Stupid little slag.” Another said: “You killed innocent Muslims, and they’re going to get you. I promise you now, we’re going to get you, I’m going to get you.” The university’s Jewish community centre was also graffitied with the words “IDF off campus” and “free Palestine.”
Perhaps it’s no wonder that universities have become such hotbeds of antisemitism and blind anti-Israel hatred, given it was in academia where the poisonous ideologies of identitarianism, grievance politics, and critical race theory were first developed and disseminated. Professors and students who teach and are taught that the world can be neatly divided into victim and oppressor will no doubt view the conflict in Gaza through that same simplified lense. More surprising, however, is how widespread antisemitism has become in healthcare. In the NHS, treated as one of the UK’s most hallowed institutions, Jewish doctors have reported a massive surge in racist abuse from colleagues since October 7th, according to the General Medical Council. Mordaunt and Mann wrote that “from evidence that we heard, we can identify that there is a specific unaddressed issue of antisemitism within the NHS.” This included the fact that “many Jewish employees within NHS organisations” felt their concerns about discrimination were being “swept under the carpet.”
In one case, a GP named Dr. Wahid Asif Shaida was discovered to be the former leader of an Islamist group, before it was proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the UK government last year. Dr. Shaida also celebrated October 7th as a “welcome punch on the nose.” He was temporarily suspended by the NHS, but a panel later determined he should be allowed to continue practice, as there was “insufficient evidence to warrant removal.” The panel even attempted to justify Dr. Shaida’s comments on the grounds that they “were made in the heat of the news feeds he was receiving.”
This atmosphere is obviously highly concerning for any Jewish healthcare professional who fears for their job, and even more so for any Jewish patient who entrusts the NHS with their health. It just goes to show that antisemitism is virtually inescapable in the UK today. Only recently, we saw how even a leading music festival like Glastonbury can be turned into another opportunity to call for the destruction of Israel and chant slogans against Israelis. Literary events, too, like the Hay Festival, have been forced to drop sponsors after celebs threatened a boycott over their ties to Israel. And author Sally Rooney—darling of the middle classes—has called for a blanket boycott of Israeli cultural institutions, which she sees as being complicit in a supposed genocide in Gaza.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that aggressive Israelophobia and even outright antisemitism is becoming so normalised in the UK, when we are bombarded with it at every turn. Since October 7th, the mainstream media, in particular the BBC, have been unrelenting in advancing the agenda of Israel’s enemies. The state broadcaster has routinely repeated unverified claims from Hamas, as though the group of bloodthirsty Islamists were an unbiassed and reliable source. It was also recently caught airing a documentary that was essentially thinly veiled Hamas propaganda. It turned out that the programme’s main narrator, a 13-year-old boy called Abdullah, was the son of Hamas’s deputy minister of agriculture. Other children featured in the documentary were used in Hamas propaganda films and another was the child of a Hamas police captain. The BBC was forced to pull the doc from its streaming platform, iPlayer, earlier this year, but not without asserting that it was apparently still “a powerful child’s eye view of the devastating consequences of the war in Gaza.” Now, though, in a review published today, the BBC has admitted that the documentary should never have been signed off in the first place. Naturally, the Beeb refuses to take any accountability for this mistake—apparently, three members of the independent production company behind the programme knew about Abdullah’s family connections, but “no one within the BBC knew prior to broadcast.” The review maintained there was no evidence “to support the suggestion that the narrator’s father or family influenced the content of the programme in any way.” In other words, the BBC’s own report into itself found that it had basically done nothing wrong.
When this kind of hostility towards Israel is spouted by the mainstream media without consequence, hostility towards Jews themselves is bound to follow eventually. This is what makes this modern reincarnation of antisemitism so insidious. It’s no longer just being spewed by knuckle-dragging neo-Nazis or terrorists in faraway lands. Family doctors, university professors, broadcasters, and household names can be just as hateful. Worse still, antisemitism is no longer shameful, but fashionable. Among certain sections of the progressive, pro-Palestine set in the West, it is a marker that someone is following trendy politics and parroting all the right slogans.
The oldest hatred has resurfaced, except this time under the guise of social justice. The same medieval blood libel about Jews sacrificing Christian babies is today couched in a concern over Israelis supposedly murdering Palestinian children. The Nazi myth of a global Jewish conspiracy has been recast as a ‘Zionist lobby’ funding Western governments. I have no doubt most of the marchers, artists, students, and progressive professionals would never think of themselves as antisemites. Many of them will never even cross the ever-thinning line between despising Israel and despising Jews. But it is this environment that allows true, unabashed antisemitism to fester and be normalised. Tolerating this is just the first step towards something much darker.
The Rise of ‘Respectable’ Antisemitism
Protesters gather with a large banner at The University of Manchester for a “Demonstration against British complicity and in honour of Palestinian martyrs”, in central Manchester on October 7, 2024. )
Paul Ellis / AFP
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There was a time, not that long ago, when the word ‘antisemite’ conjured up images of rabid conspiracy theorists and racist skinheads. Now, though, Jew hatred has found a new home—on campuses, in op-eds and at north London dinner parties.
According to a new report, backed by the UK government and set to be published tomorrow, antisemitism has become “normalised in middle-class Britain.” The co-authors of the review, government antisemitism adviser Lord Mann and former defence secretary Penny Mordaunt, wrote in the Telegraph over the weekend that Jewish people are facing discrimination “in our professions, cultural life [and] public services.” Particularly under fire were the arts sector, universities, and the NHS. The UK, they warned, has turned into a place where Jews feel “tolerated rather than… respected.”
The numbers certainly point to an increase in antisemitism across the board. According to the Community Security Trust (CST), antisemitic incidents increased by 147% in 2023, in the aftermath of the October 7th massacre. In 2024, numbers remained the second-highest in recorded history, after only 2023. Last year, CST logged over 200 cases in every month except December.
Specifically, though, antisemitism has taken a firm root among Britain’s well-educated and well-to-do. As this new report points out, it’s not just the “noisy demonstrations and how intimidating people find the current environment” that is driving the wave of anti-Jewish discrimination. Antisemitism has become deeply embedded into British institutions. Just look at the parade of disruptive pro-Palestine protests we’ve seen take over university campuses. At top institutions like Oxford and Cambridge, students set up tent encampments in ‘solidarity’ with the people of Palestine. They wailed about the supposed genocide in Gaza, pressured their schools to cut all ties with ‘apartheid’ Israel, and in some cases intimidated Jewish students who simply wanted to attend classes at the university they paid for.
The activism in universities has gone well beyond merely expressing concern over the war and has entered much more sinister territory. According to Mordaunt and Mann’s new report, they heard evidence from one campus where “staff members who Jewish students trust with their health records [were] shouting for an intifada.” In fact, according to CST, there was a 117% increase in reports of verbal abuse, threats, and assaults against Jewish students and staff in the 2023-24 academic year, leaving many Jewish students feeling unable to fully participate in university life.
It’s not just students facing vile antisemitism, either. In a truly sickening incident last year, the Jewish chaplains at Leeds University—a married couple—began receiving aggressive phone calls, and even death threats. One caller, in a message directed at the wife, threatened: “We’re coming to his house and we’re going to kill him, and you as well you f**king racist b**ch. Stupid little slag.” Another said: “You killed innocent Muslims, and they’re going to get you. I promise you now, we’re going to get you, I’m going to get you.” The university’s Jewish community centre was also graffitied with the words “IDF off campus” and “free Palestine.”
Perhaps it’s no wonder that universities have become such hotbeds of antisemitism and blind anti-Israel hatred, given it was in academia where the poisonous ideologies of identitarianism, grievance politics, and critical race theory were first developed and disseminated. Professors and students who teach and are taught that the world can be neatly divided into victim and oppressor will no doubt view the conflict in Gaza through that same simplified lense. More surprising, however, is how widespread antisemitism has become in healthcare. In the NHS, treated as one of the UK’s most hallowed institutions, Jewish doctors have reported a massive surge in racist abuse from colleagues since October 7th, according to the General Medical Council. Mordaunt and Mann wrote that “from evidence that we heard, we can identify that there is a specific unaddressed issue of antisemitism within the NHS.” This included the fact that “many Jewish employees within NHS organisations” felt their concerns about discrimination were being “swept under the carpet.”
In one case, a GP named Dr. Wahid Asif Shaida was discovered to be the former leader of an Islamist group, before it was proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the UK government last year. Dr. Shaida also celebrated October 7th as a “welcome punch on the nose.” He was temporarily suspended by the NHS, but a panel later determined he should be allowed to continue practice, as there was “insufficient evidence to warrant removal.” The panel even attempted to justify Dr. Shaida’s comments on the grounds that they “were made in the heat of the news feeds he was receiving.”
This atmosphere is obviously highly concerning for any Jewish healthcare professional who fears for their job, and even more so for any Jewish patient who entrusts the NHS with their health. It just goes to show that antisemitism is virtually inescapable in the UK today. Only recently, we saw how even a leading music festival like Glastonbury can be turned into another opportunity to call for the destruction of Israel and chant slogans against Israelis. Literary events, too, like the Hay Festival, have been forced to drop sponsors after celebs threatened a boycott over their ties to Israel. And author Sally Rooney—darling of the middle classes—has called for a blanket boycott of Israeli cultural institutions, which she sees as being complicit in a supposed genocide in Gaza.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that aggressive Israelophobia and even outright antisemitism is becoming so normalised in the UK, when we are bombarded with it at every turn. Since October 7th, the mainstream media, in particular the BBC, have been unrelenting in advancing the agenda of Israel’s enemies. The state broadcaster has routinely repeated unverified claims from Hamas, as though the group of bloodthirsty Islamists were an unbiassed and reliable source. It was also recently caught airing a documentary that was essentially thinly veiled Hamas propaganda. It turned out that the programme’s main narrator, a 13-year-old boy called Abdullah, was the son of Hamas’s deputy minister of agriculture. Other children featured in the documentary were used in Hamas propaganda films and another was the child of a Hamas police captain. The BBC was forced to pull the doc from its streaming platform, iPlayer, earlier this year, but not without asserting that it was apparently still “a powerful child’s eye view of the devastating consequences of the war in Gaza.” Now, though, in a review published today, the BBC has admitted that the documentary should never have been signed off in the first place. Naturally, the Beeb refuses to take any accountability for this mistake—apparently, three members of the independent production company behind the programme knew about Abdullah’s family connections, but “no one within the BBC knew prior to broadcast.” The review maintained there was no evidence “to support the suggestion that the narrator’s father or family influenced the content of the programme in any way.” In other words, the BBC’s own report into itself found that it had basically done nothing wrong.
When this kind of hostility towards Israel is spouted by the mainstream media without consequence, hostility towards Jews themselves is bound to follow eventually. This is what makes this modern reincarnation of antisemitism so insidious. It’s no longer just being spewed by knuckle-dragging neo-Nazis or terrorists in faraway lands. Family doctors, university professors, broadcasters, and household names can be just as hateful. Worse still, antisemitism is no longer shameful, but fashionable. Among certain sections of the progressive, pro-Palestine set in the West, it is a marker that someone is following trendy politics and parroting all the right slogans.
The oldest hatred has resurfaced, except this time under the guise of social justice. The same medieval blood libel about Jews sacrificing Christian babies is today couched in a concern over Israelis supposedly murdering Palestinian children. The Nazi myth of a global Jewish conspiracy has been recast as a ‘Zionist lobby’ funding Western governments. I have no doubt most of the marchers, artists, students, and progressive professionals would never think of themselves as antisemites. Many of them will never even cross the ever-thinning line between despising Israel and despising Jews. But it is this environment that allows true, unabashed antisemitism to fester and be normalised. Tolerating this is just the first step towards something much darker.
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