The newest hatred

Shame is not the right response to Manchester

‘Men like these prove that they are men of God on earth and regardless of who leads them, they are the real compass of men who are confident of their victory.’ These were the words of Syrian immigrant Faraj Al-Shamie, a man of notably robust views, describing the actions of Hamas after the mass murder of October 7.

Mr Al-Shamie arrived in Britain in the 1990s and, despite being a qualified doctor, managed to acquire social housing in an area of north Manchester, paid for by British taxpayers, just like so many foreign nationals. His eldest son Jihad grew up less than a mile from the synagogue where last Thursday, Yom Kippur, he set upon worshippers armed with a knife and fake suicide vest. Just to add to the perfectly scripted UK-story-of-our-time, he was on bail for rape at the time. (Lucy Connolly, remember, didn’t get bail for writing a tweet).

Rather unwisely, when Faraj – or the RICU team which scripts the response to terror events – issued a statement on his Facebook page expressing his ‘profound shock’ about the actions of his son, he forgot to delete the various posts expressing glee at the murder of Israelis.

The Manchester attacker

Two days before the attack I was at the launch of Jake Wallis Simons’s new book about anti-Semitism, which makes the argument that the West’s self-hatred has become a danger to its Jewish minority. It did occur to me that evening how unfortunately well timed his last polemic had been, and I could not help wondering whether he would again have the curse of prescience. I remember when that earlier book was published, thinking it might be a bit out of date because hatred of Israel has surely peaked. That was September 2023 - this is the high-quality analysis you pay for.

On Thursday evening, after two British Jews had been killed, a number of pro-Palestinian demonstrations went ahead as planned, in Manchester as well as London and Glasgow; in the latter they blocked commuters from going about their business. I wonder if there’s any other movement, in the wake of a terror attack carried out by a sympathiser, that wouldn’t have cancelled the protest. I imagine that such a gesture did not even occur to anyone.

Perhaps the importance of stopping the war negates the need to respect the dead, an argument I would find more believable if it wasn’t for the fact that these protests began even before the military response to October 7, less than 48 hours after 1,300 Jews had been murdered, with a noisy demonstration outside the Israeli embassy in Kensington.

They were at it again on Saturday, occupying central London as they have done continuously almost every weekend for almost two years, and Matthew Syed got a flavour of the march. Reflecting on some of the hateful comments he had witnessed, he wrote that ‘I wish I could tell you that this was a one-off but I spoke to at least two dozen people and, with two exceptions (including a lovely black guy from north London who conversed intelligently and politely), the motivation for being here was obvious, potent and implacable. The hatred of Jews. I heard conspiracy theories (October 7 was a false flag operation), blood libels, and the pervasive view that the Manchester atrocity was not a heinous attack but righteous comeuppance for an evil people. My sense is that many felt liberated to say what they really thought by the proximity of like-minded others; the classic symptom of mob mentality.’

I’m sure there are countless people at these marches who don’t share those views, but I don’t think they are especially rare. Many of you will have heard variations of the theme become more common in the past two years. It’s not surprising that anti-Semitism should rise in periods of conflict between Israelis and Arabs, and in particular when civilian casualties are high - and the level of human suffering in Gaza has clearly been intense.

It may be legitimate to think that Israel is in the wrong, or the world’s greatest warmonger, or even that it’s a historical mistake, although I wish people would read more about the history. I also think it’s essentially impossible to decouple ‘Zionists’ and ‘Jews’, and there just aren’t easy answers to this.

You’re disgusted by the behaviour of the Israeli government? Fine. Many Jews are. I hear it repeatedly in my corner of north London. But a simple test of whether you’re a good faith protester against the suffering in Gaza is whether or not you condemn Hamas, who started the conflict and whose agreement to peace would end the slaughter.

After the Manchester attack we were told to reject ‘hate’ in all forms, as Scotland’s first minister declared. David Lammy warned against division, having the previous week suggested that Nigel Farage was somehow linked to the Hitler Youth and having a record of comparing opponents to Nazis.

The idea that ‘hate’ is the enemy is part of a broader worldview in which all racial narcissism and hostility to out-groups is suppressed: that is a good idea, but the notable problem is that this taboo has only successfully immersed the native population. Only Europeans have developed an immune response to anti-Semitism in this way, because only Europeans collectively come from a civilisation that produced the Holocaust, and from a culture that emphasises guilt.

Christian guilt culture has played a major part in this change of attitudes, and it makes us unusual. It’s worth bearing in mind that there is a European power which in the 20^th century committed seven-figure genocide against a religious minority who were resented for their dominance in trade, a mass murder fuelled by intense racial animus. Not only do the Turks not have a genocide memorial in their capital city, but they deny the genocide of Armenians even occurred, except when a politician occasionally voices the view that they deserved it.

Rejecting hate means rejecting the devil in all its forms, not just anti-Semitism but Islamophobia too. Yet even the very concept of ‘Islamophobia’, although originating with hardline Muslim groups linked to unsavoury regimes, owes its continued existence to Christian guilt, and the new sins of prejudice which emerged out of post-war taboos. It is a sense of guilt that obviously sectarian activists with an illiberal agenda have been quick to use to their own advantage.

As Christopher Caldwell observed, pointing to a campaigner who compared blasphemy against Islam to mockery of Ann Frank, his ‘remark was not just vicious but obtuse. He was quite right that Europe had taboos and sacred cows. What he ignored was that he and his followers were their primary beneficiaries.’ Was he ‘foolish enough to believe that Europe’s Jews were the main winners in the postwar moral order? It was too late for most of them.

‘But the shock to Europe’s conscience that followed their murder had made the continent safe for other minorities. An immigration of the sort that brought Muslims in such numbers to Europe would have been unthinkable without the anguished moral self-examination the Holocaust brought in its wake. Such an immigration would have provoked mistrust, xenophobia, and violence. It takes very little reflection to know how Europe – minus its guilt over the Holocaust – would have reacted to a radical Arab nationalist pressure group headquartered in Flanders.’

Without that sense of guilt, the idea of paying for Mr Al-Shamie to live in Britain, in subsidised housing, and tolerating his obviously hostile views, would have been totally absurd, as would the widespread settlement of Muslims in Europe. The war made us repulsed by ethnic chauvinism, but the sense of repugnance has extended to a degree of self-hatred which, as Wallis Simons argues, is actually dangerous for Jews.

We are told to reject hate; we are also told that we shouldn’t politicise this attack, but the rising threat of violence against British Jews is downstream of political decisions. If public safety is not a political issue, then what is?