LFI honorary chair Mark Sewards MP has written the below article for PoliticsHome. Click here to read the original.
From Manchester to Sydney, we’re now seeing just where calls by the far left and Islamist extremists to “globalise the intifada” lead – to the murder of Jews on the streets of Western cities.
Those who committed these heinous crimes are, of course, responsible for their own actions.
But we can’t ignore the noxious environment which incites and encourages antisemites to murder our fellow Jewish citizens.
In Britain, Australia and throughout the West, the 7 October 2023 pogrom has unleashed a wave of antisemitic hatred.
We’ve witnessed that hatred in the protests, which started while Hamas terrorists were still engaging in barbarous acts throughout southern Israel.
We’ve seen it in the shameful manner in which Jewish community centres and places of worship have been deliberately targeted by anti-Israel protesters.
I heard about it when I visited Leeds University, the same place I graduated from 14 years ago, last month.
I was there to talk to students at the Jewish society. They told me about being abused on their way to Shabbat dinners; of a lecturer boasting that he was “proud” of his son who had been arrested for supporting Palestine Action; and of being subjected to chants of “Free Palestine” for the crime of being Jewish.
We cannot defeat this hate until we acknowledge its source: anti-Zionist antisemitism, fuelled by the relentless and obsessive effort to demonise and delegitimise the world’s only Jewish state.
We see this effort all around us. We see it in some of those who choose to ignore every other conflict in the world, only ever passing comment on Israel.
Broadcasters and media organisations that propagate lies and disinformation about Israel and platform those guilty of spreading vile antisemitism. BBC Arabic, for instance, gave airtime to a contributor who said Jews should be burned “as Hitler did” 244 times in 18 months, while another, who labelled Jews as “devils”, featured 522 times in the same period.
International organisations that talk about women’s rights, but have to be dragged into condemning the rape and mutilation of Israeli women.
Charities and pressure groups that exploit the compassion and decency of the public while peddling malicious calumnies against Israel.
And politicians who have brought extremist ideas about Israel into mainstream political discourse.
But the origins of this noxious dogma don’t lie in Gaza, Palestine or the Middle East.
It was contrived by the Soviet Union during the Cold War, drawing on far-right conspiracy theories, including the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and propagated by the far left throughout the West.
Its tenets are ones we all know well: “Zionism is racism”; “Zionists are Nazis”; “Israel is an apartheid state”; “the Zionist lobby controls the media”; and “Zionists invoke antisemitism to silence criticism of Israel”.
It is difficult to think of more egregious crimes of which a nation can be accused – and these charges inevitably lead to the dehumanisation of Israel, the Israeli people and all those, including the vast majority of the Jewish diaspora, who believe in the Jewish state’s right to exist.
In the short term, security around Jewish venues is being further tightened.
However, as the Chancellor suggested in her speech to Labour Friends of Israel’s annual lunch last week, we should not settle “for a country where Jewish schools, community centres and synagogues have to be protected by a ring of steel and security guards around the clock”.
If we are to have any hope of preventing further tragedies like that which occurred in Sydney yesterday, we must confront the root causes of antisemitism, not simply attempt to ameliorate the symptoms.
