Anti-Semitism in London is rife – it’s time the Met stood up to it
In the days before the 2019 election, this paper published an editorial which asked – begged – its readers not to vote for Jeremy Corbyn.
Not because of his economic policies (illiterate though they were), his instincts towards business (envious as they seemed) nor for any politically partisan reason: but because a Corbyn victory would have legitimised, and amplified, the vicious strain of anti-Semitism which ran through him and his core supporters.
That virus has been defeated in the Labour Party, as Keir Starmer proved yesterday. But it is never far away. Thousands protesting outside the Israeli Embassy, seemingly with the Met’s approval, the day after Israel was attacked; the smashing up of Jewish restaurants and shops in north London, again.
A Jewish school in the capital forced to tell its pupils not to wear blazers on the way to and from the gates. Tell us that this has nothing to do with anti-Semitism, that it’s ‘just’ political.
All this after a conflict begun by power-mad terrorists who have turned Gaza into a dependent fiefdom, who have spent the weekend murdering Israeli citizens in cold blood and who, yesterday, were exposed as having committed the most heinous crimes one could imagine.
The Middle East is complicated. A game of whataboutery would go on forever; it is pointless, a cycle of violence repeating itself, with families shattered and lives lost senselessly.
It is not our job to solve this conflict, though we can say without the slightest qualm that Israel has the right to defend itself, and that the people who will suffer the most from Hamas’s attacks in the long-term are those unfortunate enough to live in Gaza.
But it is our job to care about London – to care about the people who live in it. The Met, which has failed to protect ethnic communities properly for years, and who are trusted by so few Londoners, must for once step up to the plate.