Orchard Cottage Finds

A few thoughts the morning after the fast. I awake like many Jews all over the world with a strangely sorry feeling. Why is this Day of Atonement not like others? Then I remember. This, Yom Kippur, is not one that the Jews of Britain will ever forget. As we were fasting on the most solemn day in the Jewish year, the terrible news arrived. I remember as a child the start of the Yom Kippur War when Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on this day 1973 – but that was a battle of states and armies. This was the coldblooded murder of ordinary British people, Melvin Cravitz and the brave security guard Adrian Daulby who gave his life to save many others and this could have been my synagogue. I want to pay tribute to the courageous security guard, the brave rabbi and to the Manchester chief constable and his armed police who acted so fast. I hope the Met would have been as quick ( I saw no police anywhere near my synagogue before the attack.) I just wanted to thank the many friends who have written to me and other Jews last night and today. Your messages are so appreciated in this unsettling time. It is also entirely fitting that my Muslim friends, here and across the world, have been the kindest, my UK media acquaintances the most silent. You might have noticed how angry Jewish people are. Usually mostly quiet. But what happened in Manchester was much predicted and entirely predictable and probably preventable. We warned it would end this way but we were ignored or shamed or gaslit. It could have been worse too. Our great security services have foiled many such plots. But let us hope this atrocity is a moment to reset our ways… This was the inevitable result of two wild years of anti-Jewish racism and radicalism, dehumanizing antiJewish slogans and images, blood libels, calls for killing, support for terror, ‘globalizing intifada’ and ‘decolonize Israel now’, unleashed on the streets and media, barely policed either by actual policeman who have stood by nor by politicians who have swung between crowdpleasing Manichaean hyperbole and sensible, balanced reassurance; nor by the TV media anchors who have disgraced the noble vocation of journalism by rabid hostility, irresponsible exaggerations and actual mistakes that are never corrected; nor by the NHS doctors openly keening to kill Jews who are still working in hospitals despite the comments of Wes Streeting; and I don’t even need to mention the keyboard missionaries whose propagation of factual lies and vicious amplifications now include telling the suffering Gazans not to accept a peace deal that is on the table and will - we pray - bring peace and save many lives. Today it is not a pretty sight seeing those same politicians, same anchors on Sky / BBC, same twitter missionaries pumping out self serving messages of sympathy, adopting their well-practised multicultural-community-in-danger faces - days after propagating easily-disprovable disinformation and wild Manichaean hyperbole. Of course they are not guilty of killing those people in Manchester; only the murderer and his accomplices are actually guilty. But that is the point: the inciters congratulate themselves on being good people but take and show no responsibility for promoting bloodcurlding Manichaean credo of good and evil imposed on a faraway real war in which there is guilt and innocence on both sides. Here they have helped incite a whirlpool of hatred and they have contributed to an atmosphere that has of course proved lethal. It is other ordinary people whether here or there who play the price for their exciting transcendent parades of costfree, easy piety. If one of them had said one thing that recognized that maybe their misuse of a thesaurus of emotive, hyperbolic Manicheanism had contributed to this vortex, I would respect them. But it is one of the distasteful characteristics of our time: many are rigidly convinced of their ironclad virtue, indeed sated and swollen with sanctimony – as they rush out their pro forma denunciations of antisemitism: the very definition of hypocrisy. That is why on X you might notice Jewish people saying ‘not now, thanks’ to the worst humbugs. The protests started immediately and revealingly on October 7 and the line between acceptable criticism of the Israeli government and Israeli war (and yes there is much to criticise) immediately morphed into bloodcurdling calls for terror and a frenzy of anti-Jewish racism. The government, mayors and police were overwhelmed by a Manichean delirium or terrified of the aggression of these activists (or their electoral power in vulnerable constituencies) before sometimes making reassuring sensible comments. The result has been to say the least mixed messages. Yesterday the intifada was indeed globalized and Britishized and Mancunianised. Words and bulletins have effects on real people in the street next door and far away too. They bleed, they die. Last night, demonstrators celebrated the killing of British people in bloodthirsty fiestas in London and Manchester. It was heartening to see the PM, Foreign Secretary and Chancellor in synagogue last night: thank you. To her credit Home Secretary Mahmood called these ghoulish celebrations “fundamentally unBritish” and recognized the problem ordering the celebrating demonstrators: “show some humanity”. Thank you Home Secretary. Such comments are two years overdue and it has taken murders to get British politicians to save those two phrases. The pro-Palestine demonstrations always contained decent people making just points but their tone was brazenly set by racists bigots and terrorist sympathizers who were indeed fundamentally unBritish in their calls for violence. The Home Secretary also said “I take my lead from the police” but that is the entire problem. You give the orders to the police. Thanks to confused guidance that has created a hierarchy of grievances, the fuddled police especially the Met have lost the ability to make moral decisions on law and order, terror and protest. Hence pro Palestinian demonstrators are permitted extra space to promote killing and antiJudaism that would never be permitted to any other cause and Jews exposed as no other ethnic minority would be. Time to redress that balance. The government now needs to give explicit orders to the police to enforce laws against terror and hate in the streets that they have ceded to vicious activists. If that means police enforcing control of the streets,– as Italian and Germany police do every day. Everyone has the right to criticise Israeli government and its many faults as I do myself - just as they have the right to criticise Hamas and terrorism but these murders are the sign for responsible people, politicians and media to “dial down the rhetoric” as Conservative leader Badenoch said last night, that created “a climate of fear and aggression” for British Jews. “Get a grip,” demands Chief Rabbi. Britain is a ship tossed helplessly on a storm partly of its own making, its own captain and crew (i dont just mean politicians but police and media too) often unsure and confused, its course, its British values is being tested. Now we have a chance: steady the ship before more lives are lost.