This is an extract from Nigel Farage’s latest essay. Read it in full and subscribe to his Substack here.
Three years ago today, the world witnessed a monstrosity. The worst terror attack in Israeli history unfolded in snippets of panicked video and then a steady stream of reports across our screens. A pogrom led by Hamas terrorists, murdering and kidnapping people because they were Jewish.
The footage was traumatic. Each passing hour revealed fresh horrors. Hostages paraded through Gaza in front of cheering crowds. The massacre at the Nova music festival. Parents dragged from their homes with the blood of their dying children still on their clothes. I will never forget the image of Shiri Bibas clinging to her children, Ariel and Kfir, or how small they looked.
And yet while the decent majority of British people watched on in horror, a substantial minority in this nation felt something entirely different. While the slaughter was still unfolding, the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign notified the police that it intended to hold a pro-Palestine march the following weekend. It symbolised the reaction that was to follow.
We had all seen the threat posed by Islamism. We were all too aware of the number of our fellow citizens who felt nothing in common with us, and who were happy to kill women and children in cowardly terror attacks to make that known. But the aftermath of October 7th made it quite clear how deeply rooted these sentiments were. That a frightening number of those who would not themselves murder children were quite happy to cheer on those who would. And we saw, also, how so-called polite society would go to any lengths to diminish and justify this behaviour.
With the benefit of hindsight, the warning signs were there well in advance. We could pick any number of starting points, but my personal jolt of realisation was on the 18th June 2002. Less than a year had passed since the horror of 9/11, and British soldiers were on the ground in Afghanistan. We were, by then, painfully aware of the horrors of political Islam.
That morning, a Hamas suicide bomber had attacked a bus full of children and commuters in Jerusalem. A few hours later, Cherie Blair appeared at a charity appeal for Palestine, and said “as long as young people feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up you are never going to make progress”.
That, for me, was the moment of realisation. It was a sort of attempt at “understanding” that people would never have dreamed of extending to terrorists of the IRA or the far-right. But it was somehow made possible by the identity of the attackers and their victims. The oldest hatred, long absent from Britain, had come back in a form which rendered otherwise intelligent people unable to recognise it.
In the months and years that followed, we have travelled further down a very dark path. We have seen anti-Semitism become routine in the NHS. We have seen the BBC publish, repeatedly, lies and slanders about the Jewish state which serve to fuel the hatred of anti-Semitism in Britain. And we have seen a craven, sinister strand in our politics which panders to this sentiment.
There were so many comparable incidents. Individually, they were horrendous. Together, they formed a distinct pattern: something sinister and fundamentally un-British was corrupting our institutions and politics.
When World War One broke out, the exhortation in the Jewish Chronicle was clear: “England has been all she could be to the Jews, Jews will be all they can be to England”. A century on, Britain’s Jewish community has kept its half of the deal while we have broken ours. We must fix this.
Three years ago today, the world witnessed a monstrosity. The worst terror attack in Israeli history unfolded in snippets of panicked video and then a steady stream of reports across our screens. A pogrom led by Hamas terrorists, murdering and kidnapping people because they were Jewish.
The footage was traumatic. Each passing hour revealed fresh horrors. Hostages paraded through Gaza in front of cheering crowds. The massacre at the Nova music festival. Parents dragged from their homes with the blood of their dying children still on their clothes. I will never forget the image of Shiri Bibas clinging to her children, Ariel and Kfir, or how small they looked.
And yet while the decent majority of British people watched on in horror, a substantial minority in this nation felt something entirely different. While the slaughter was still unfolding, the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign notified the police that it intended to hold a pro-Palestine march the following weekend. It symbolised the reaction that was to follow.
We had all seen the threat posed by Islamism. We were all too aware of the number of our fellow citizens who felt nothing in common with us, and who were happy to kill women and children in cowardly terror attacks to make that known. But the aftermath of October 7th made it quite clear how deeply rooted these sentiments were. That a frightening number of those who would not themselves murder children were quite happy to cheer on those who would. And we saw, also, how so-called polite society would go to any lengths to diminish and justify this behaviour.
With the benefit of hindsight, the warning signs were there well in advance. We could pick any number of starting points, but my personal jolt of realisation was on the 18th June 2002. Less than a year had passed since the horror of 9/11, and British soldiers were on the ground in Afghanistan. We were, by then, painfully aware of the horrors of political Islam.
That morning, a Hamas suicide bomber had attacked a bus full of children and commuters in Jerusalem. A few hours later, Cherie Blair appeared at a charity appeal for Palestine, and said “as long as young people feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up you are never going to make progress”.
That, for me, was the moment of realisation. It was a sort of attempt at “understanding” that people would never have dreamed of extending to terrorists of the IRA or the far-right. But it was somehow made possible by the identity of the attackers and their victims. The oldest hatred, long absent from Britain, had come back in a form which rendered otherwise intelligent people unable to recognise it.
In the months and years that followed, we have travelled further down a very dark path. We have seen anti-Semitism become routine in the NHS. We have seen the BBC publish, repeatedly, lies and slanders about the Jewish state which serve to fuel the hatred of anti-Semitism in Britain. And we have seen a craven, sinister strand in our politics which panders to this sentiment.
There were so many comparable incidents. Individually, they were horrendous. Together, they formed a distinct pattern: something sinister and fundamentally un-British was corrupting our institutions and politics.
When World War One broke out, the exhortation in the Jewish Chronicle was clear: “England has been all she could be to the Jews, Jews will be all they can be to England”. A century on, Britain’s Jewish community has kept its half of the deal while we have broken ours. We must fix this.
Photo by Yousef Salhamoud.
