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Anti-Semitism is alive and well in Britain

As the Jewish New Year enters its final few days – the denouement Yom Kippur, our day of atonement, is on Wednesday – we Jews have been enjoying a bit of our own company. Most people don’t know it’s Jewish New Year, which contains the most important two days on our calendar, and nor do most organisations, which plough ahead with important events and meetings regardless. Perhaps that’s fair enough – there aren’t very many of us; about 290,000 or 0.4 per cent of the UK population.

It’s odd, then, how much attention we continue to attract: and not of the good kind. A recent survey of 4,010 people by Hope Not Hate, a charitable trust that campaigns against racism and fascism, found that one-third of the British population believe anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. So much for virtuous Gen Z: 34 per cent of those between 18 and 24 said that it was “probably” or “definitely true” that Jews have excessive influence over global finance. This is amid a sharp increase in anti-Jewish incidents perpetrated by under-18s.

The Corbynite Left made things immeasurably worse for Jews in this country. Universities, for all their obsession with stamping out “structural” racism, and their extreme, holier-than-thou attitudes to social justice, have not been helping the younger age cohort.

Last month, the odious former University of Bristol sociology lecturer David Miller – too extreme even for Bristol’s powers that be – ranted on Iran’s Press TV, where he has his own programme called “Palestine Declassified”, about how Jewish kids are indoctrinated with Zionism at certain schools.

Even so, a sleek website set up to support him bills him as “one of the world’s leading experts on Islamophobia” and insists he was unfairly dismissed from Bristol due to “outrageous censorship” by the “UK’s Israel lobby”. The website also has a section devoted to materials on “the Israel gravy train”. And yet there it sits, under cover of sleek graphics and an apparently right-on cause.

I get the sense that people are bored of hearing Jews go on about anti-Semitism; it’s far worse than boring to be its target – and it doesn’t seem, after millennia of this most tenacious, deadly ism, there is any let-up in sight.

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2022-10-02T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-10-02T07:00:00.0000000Z

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Daily Telegraph