We have to face without flinching what is now undeniable: There is a war across the globe raging against the Jewish people. It’s a war not just to destroy their national homeland but to drive them out of people’s heads, their conscience and their world.
Led by Muslims and the left, with its base in the universities, this war has extended much further than these circles into professional and commercial life.
The Palestinian flag, the symbol of the agenda to destroy Israel and erase the identity and history of the Jews in their ancestral land, is everywhere. Often-murderous antisemitism, once confined to cranks, Nazi supporters and the clinically insane, has been normalized and is surfacing in the most banal, everyday settings.
A Toronto health food restaurant is using the hashtag “#zionistsnotwelcome” in social media posts. In Britain, an ordinary middle-aged Manchester woman declared that Zionist lives weren’t worth saving and that Zionists “need to be finished.”
Palestinian flags sprouted in London at the Wimbledon tennis tournament, during Fashion Week in Berlin and on the lapel of a Delta Airlines flight attendant. In Amsterdam, Anne Frank’s statue was defaced with “Gaza” graffiti. At a Madrid rock concert, the crowd sang: “Let’s go bomb Tel Aviv.”
While this madness has liberals and left-wingers in its grip, its main impetus is coming from the Islamic world. U.S. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines stated this week that the Iranian regime has been actively fueling the Gaza demonstrations by using agents posing as activists online, encouraging demonstrations and even providing participants with financial support.
In addition to Iran, the campaign has been orchestrated by Hamas and other Muslim Brotherhood operatives. The reason for all this is that fanatical hatred of the Jews is fundamental to the religion of Islam, as is the aim of Islamizing the world.
While many Muslims don’t subscribe to fanaticism or fundamentalism, far too many do—and the overwhelming majority subscribe to the demonization and delegitimization of Israel that flow from Muslim Jew-hatred.
The reason the Oct. 7 pogrom in Israel sparked immediate and triumphant Muslim demonstrations was the ecstatic belief that, having destroyed Israeli invincibility by murdering and capturing so many Jews, the way was now open to destroy Israel, wipe out the Jews and conquer the West for Islam.
The far-left, who have latched on to the anti-West aims of this campaign, also believe that their revolutionary time has come.
In France, this is due to the desperate attempt by President Emanuel Macron to fend off the threat of political victory by the far-right National Rally party. To do so, Macron made a deal with a left-wing alliance whose dominant party is the extreme revolutionary grouping of La France Insoumise (France Unbowed).
Its leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has called French Jews and their communal organizations “aggressive,” “arrogant” and “sectarian.” He made a dismissive reference to the Jews killing Jesus, called Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza a “genocide” and said that “peace-loving Frenchmen” cannot express solidarity with the victims of the Oct. 7 onslaught.
In Britain, the left also came to power in last week’s general election with a supposedly moderate Labour government under the new Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer.
Whether or not the French coalition lasts, the prospects for British and French relations with Israel are dismal, as are the prospects for French and British Jews.
Macron is relentlessly hostile to Israel. Last November, he told the BBC that Israel must stop killing babies and women in Gaza and that there was “no justification” for Israel’s bombing campaign. Now he has backed the request by the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor for warrants to arrest Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and has also made an alliance with a pro-Hamas party.
In Britain, Starmer is also taking a hostile position against Israel. Foreign Secretary David Lammy is considering whether to stop U.K. arms sales to Israel and has said that if the ICC issues arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, Britain will arrest them if they come to the U.K.
Starmer has also appointed some extremely troubling ministers. The Justice Secretary Shabina Mahmood is a long-standing supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement aimed at the destruction of Israel.
And the Attorney-General Richard Hermer KC—who describes himself as a “tikkun olam” (social justice) Reform Jew—has put his name on legal opinions and letters that defame Israel and are viciously hostile to its ability to defend itself.
Like Hermer, Starmer spent most of his career as a “human rights” lawyer in a radical left-wing barristers’ set. The “human rights” agenda, which is misleadingly presented as the “center ground,” is in fact a radical ideology that fuels the onslaught against Israel mounted by the United Nations, the ICC and the rest of the international law and humanitarian establishment. It also underpins anti-Western “intersectional” identity politics.
The Labour government combines support for Palestinians with an “identity politics” agenda that is likely to entrench the abuse of children and the threat to women posed by transgender ideology; put the force of law behind anti-white racism and the calumny of “white privilege”; and turn Islamophobia into a crime and thus suppress all criticism of Islam, including Muslim antisemitism.
For these reasons, Starmer is unlikely to deal with the threat that has emerged from the arrival of Islamic sectarian politics in the rise of a Muslim political bloc.
Despite near-mandatory sympathy in the Labour Party for the Palestinian cause, British Muslims were angry that Starmer had supported Israel’s right to defend itself and hadn’t initially called for an immediate ceasefire. A group called Muslim Vote issued a list of demands, including turning Israel into a pariah state, as well as various ways in which Britain should adapt its society to Islam.
As a result of this decline in Muslim support, Labour lost five parliamentary seats to independent candidates standing on a “Gaza-Palestine” ticket while a number of other Labour MPs hung on to their seats by a whisker.
In France, Macron has long lost the battle to contain Muslim violence and rampant antisemitism. Three boys aged 12-13 have been accused of raping a 12-year-old Jewish girl while making anti-Israel slurs against her. A 15-year-old Jewish boy was assaulted in Paris by eight men from the far-left Jeune Garde “because he was assumed to be Jewish.” He was insulted, called a Zionist, beaten and reportedly forced to chant “Long live Palestine” while being filmed. Elsewhere, crowds with Palestinian flags shout “Death to France,” “Death to Jews” and “Death to the police.”
France’s Chief Rabbi Moshe Sebbag has said there’s no future for Jews in France and advised young Jews to go to Israel “or a more secure country.”
Like the Biden administration in America, left-wing parties in Britain and France are displaying hostility to Israel and indifference to Jewish security when Israel is under existential attack, global Jew-hatred has reached stratospheric levels and tyrants everywhere are on a roll because of the West’s refusal to defend itself or even understand the priceless values that it needs to defend.
Diaspora Jews ask where they can be safe. The answer is nowhere. Despite the antisemitic history of National Rally, said the French chief rabbi, the left has been antisemitic in recent times. “The Jews are in the middle because they don’t know who hates them more,” he said.
Everyone is defined by where they stand in this war. There is no middle ground. Whether you are an activist, fellow-traveler or useful idiot; whether you are a gentile or a “tikkun olam” Jew; either you stand unequivocally with the Jewish victims of this war and support their self-defense or you are on the side of those attacking not just the Jewish people but civilization itself.
And in Britain, France and America, the left, whether moderate or extreme, is on the wrong side.