The canaries in the cultural mine

As antisemitism continues to roar out of control, the west barely registers it

By Melanie Phillips

On New York’s Upper West Side last week, six Jewish boys aged 12 to 16 were the target of antisemitic intimidation by three other teenagers who were armed with a knife, sword and crowbar.

The three said they wanted to “get” the Jewish boys because they were Jews, and followed the group home before running away.

Police are also searching for a group of teenage suspects in an assault against a Hasidic man in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighbourhood. The man was pushed and kicked without provocation. A 16-year-old boy has now been charged with gang assault and assault as a hate crime.

Last month, a Jewish teenager was punched in the face in Brooklyn on the Jewish Sabbath — one of several attacks on Jews for the second consecutive week, including an attack on a Jewish school bus with children inside after a driver got out of his vehicle and smashed the bus windshield.

A police crossing guard on Manhattan’s Upper West Side was fired earlier that month for making antisemitic comments against Jewish parents and children. “Push your Jewish kids into the street and get hit by a bus,” she told one parent, as reported in The New York Post.

According to New York Police Department statistics, antisemitic crimes in New York City surged last month, more than quadrupling in February compared to the same month last year.

In Britain, the Campaign against Antisemitism reports that last month in Stamford Hill, north London, a man woke up his Jewish neighbours at 4 am on the Jewish Sabbath by knocking on their door and yelling: “I will kill you all, Hitler should come back”. It was also alleged that the same man subsequently told a six-year-old girl: “Get inside, I will kill you” before threatening to burn her house down.

In the same area of London, vandals have also reportedly thrown stones from garage roofs at Jewish homes and at Jewish children playing in gardens.

Over two weekends last month, Jewish people in Edgware, north London were reportedly pelted with eggs in public.

The Campaign Against Antisemitism’s analysis of Home Office statistics shows that an average of more than three hate crimes are directed at Jews every day in England and Wales, with Jews more than four times likelier to be targets of hate crimes than any other faith group.

In France, relatives of Jeremy Cohen, a 31-year-old French Jew who died two months ago after being hit by a tram in the town of Bobigny, near Paris, have said that his death was not an accident but the result of an antisemitic attack.

Initially, his death was reported as a traffic accident. However, video footage released by Cohen’s family showed Cohen being attacked by several members of a large group before running away from the crowd and being hit by an incoming tram.

The video surfaced on the anniversary of the high-profile murder of another French Jew, Sarah Halimi, and Cohen’s death is now being appropriated by candidates in France’s impending presidential election.

The claim that the antisemitic nature of the attack on Cohen was hushed up by the authorities carries baleful echoes of the earlier case. Although Halimi, an elderly Jewish woman, was beaten and thrown out of her apartment window by a man screaming “Allahu akhbar” and who had previously subjected her to antisemitic abuse, the killer, Kobili Traore, wasn’t tried for her death because French judges accepted he had suffered a psychotic episode due to his consumption of marijuana.

According to a January report by a French watchdog group, antisemitic incidents in France increased by 75 per cent last year.

In America and Europe, attacks on Jews simply because they are Jews have reached horrifying proportions. Does anyone imagine that if, say, black people or Muslims were being attacked by white people in anything like these proportions the media wouldn’t be absolutely packed with outraged and anguished commentaries drawing attention to a terrifying cultural breakdown? Yet these attacks on Jews in Britain and America receive hardly any mainstream coverage — and in France they are often actively denied as antisemitic attacks.

Why is this? Why are these attacks on Jews happening in such disproportionately large numbers? And what does this tell us about the state of western society?

Protocols: Exposing Modern Antisemitism is a book written by Elder of Ziyon, the ironically named, pseudonymous and eponymous writer of an excellent website about Jewish issues and who explores this issue.

Elder notes that a string of attacks on Jews in America have been downplayed or fallen off the radar altogether. These include the 2019 Jersey city grocery stores shootings; the murder of a rabbi at a 2019 Chanukah party in Monsey; a “pogrom” in Crown Heights in 1991; a fatal shooting at a van of Hasidic men on Brooklyn Bridge in 1994; a 2011 Manhattan synagogue bomb plot; a 2016 attack on an Ohio restaurant with an Israeli flag; a 2016 pot to blow up a synagogue in Aventura, Florida; a 2009 plot to blow up two New York synagogues; and a foiled 2005 attempt to bomb synagogues in Los Angeles.

Pointing out that many of these attacks have been perpetrated by Muslims or African-Americans, Elder points the finger at the anti-Zionist left for downplaying or excusing them — while justifying attacks on Jews by Palestinian Arabs and pretending that Palestinian antisemitism is anti-Zionism. Elder writes:

Just like most of the physical attacks on Jews, the rhetorical attacks on Zionist Jews — the vast majority of the community — are also antisemitic. They can and do result in murderous attacks on Jews around the world. They must also be rooted out as unacceptable in any society.

For that to happen, modern antisemitism must be called out for what it is — hate. The same hate that animates the physical attacks on Jews lies behind the NGO reports and demonstrations that paint the Jewish state as uniquely evil. We must expose and stop that hate before that hate manifests as violence.

Too true; but just to state this reveals the scale of the challenge. For in the west, these Israel-bashing NGOs are regarded — heaven help us — as the voice of conscience. Far from being excoriated as disgusting bigots, they are actually held up as the arbiters of morality. And anti-Zionism — at the heart of which lies the willed destruction of Israel, the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people who are thus singled out for murderous demonisation and delegitimisation inflicted on no other people — is the cause of causes in progressive circles.

In similar vein, not only is the profound antisemitism of radicalised black groups such as Nation of Islam or Black Lives Matter ignored and sanitised, but anyone who points it out is promptly damned instead as a racist. Likewise, anyone who draws attention to the overwhelming antisemitism in the Islamic world is tarred and feathered as an “Islamophobe” — while the Jew-hatred coursing through that culture, which drives terrorism and mass murder around the world, is ignored or even laundered as anti-Zionism and justified.

Only white supremacist attacks on Jews draw much attention and censure. That’s because the concern is not with the fate of those Jewish victims so much as the desire to censure the white supremacists and exaggerate their influence. And that’s in turn in order to divert attention from the cultural groups principally responsible for attacks on Jews — groups consisting of black people and Muslims, who are given absolute immunity by western liberals for their misdeeds.

For too many in the west, the victimisation of Jews just doesn’t figure. The reasons for this are many and various, none of them good.

But what the west doesn’t realise is that the Jews are always the canaries in the cultural mine. When antisemitism roars out of control, as it is doing now, this always signifies a culture that’s in deep existential trouble. As with the Jews, so it will be with the rest of the west, too.