Rach

Thanks @BarackObama for showing off the goodness of so many wonderful Americans! Hearing their stories was so uplifting.

This is not an answer. We don’t want to live behind higher walls. We want you to end the permissive atmosphere which has allowed the epidemic of antisemitism to flourish.

Our @JewishNewsUK front page this week:

Essential, but deeply shaming, column from @HadleyFreeman today. The normalisation of Jew-hatred has consequences and it is disgraceful that so many politicians either excuse the hatred or choose to ignore it in the hope it may go away. thetimes.com/comment/column…

"It is being told a horror story all your life, and then watching it actually happen" - life for Jews in Britain right now. Sobering and important from @camillalong thetimes.com/comment/column…

Major League Baseball is aired in the morning for Japan. So technically they eat breakfast with it being on television. Here’s their #openingday commercial. No hyperbole, when I say this, it might be greater than any US MLB commercial I’ve seen. Well done and worth the watch for any baseball fan.

@Adela_Suliman @washingtonpost Sorry to see this! Wishing you much luck

They got me too. “Them’s the breaks…” it’s been a dream 💔 #washpost @washingtonpost #London #journojobs

I opened a bookshop. It was the best, worst thing I’ve ever done. One of the most beautiful pieces you’ll read all year, or any year. Free access for all. ⁦@FT⁩ ft.com/content/cc77c2…

The @chiefrabbi - "We have to crack down on hate speech in a far more forceful and emphatic way than we previously have been doing. "Let's take, for example, cries such as 'from the river to the sea' or 'globalise the Intifada'. What does globalise the Intifada mean? It means what happened in Manchester on Yom Kipper. It means what happened in Bondi Beach. The time has come once and for all not to allow such rhetoric to poison the minds of people"

Powerful Thought for the Day by @chiefrabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis on @BBCr4today: "The rights of Jewish communities to gather freely, safely and publicly is not a Jewish issue alone. It is the test of the moral health of any society that claims to value freedom, difference and human dignity. Jews have lived with security concerns for as long as I can remember. But the fact that today every public Jewish gathering must be weighed for risk is a sign of something deeply wrong. A society in which a minority must calculate whether it is safe to be seen together in public is a society that is failing all of its citizens. "

When I write about Israelis or Jews, people accuse me of lacking empathy for Palestinians and Muslims. When I write about Muslims or Palestinians, people accuse me of lacking empathy for Israelis and Jews. I've spent a lot of time wondering why this is, and I think I've come to an answer. A lot of people think that empathy is a limited resource. For me, there is no conflict in calling out Israelis who attack Palestinians in the West Bank and also Hamas. When civilians are being hurt, that's a problem that needs to be called out. But some people do see it as a conflict of interest. I see this a lot in the West. Like having the slightest empathy for the Israelis murdered on October 7th means you can't also believe in the Palestinians' right to self-determination. It has to be one or the other. We see this on the other side, too. People who think mentioning any of the suffering this war has brought to Gaza and its people means you don't care about anyone killed by Hamas. I think it's really unfortunate that this black and white thinking has become so widespread.

The Prime Minister keeps repeating that he’ll “do whatever it takes” to protect the Jewish community. But since two innocent Jews were murdered in cold blood on our streets, he hasn’t actually done anything - other than announce more money for @CST_UK. That might sound reassuring, but it’s really an admission of failure: we can’t stop the people who want to kill you, and we’re not politically strong enough to try - so here’s some money to build higher fences and thicker doors before the next Islamist attack by those we’ve allowed to call for an intifada against you for two years. In fact, it’s only getting worse. Today, Jewish and Israeli football fans have been banned from travelling to Birmingham - because the police say they can’t guarantee their safety. And we have a Birmingham MP openly celebrating that fact. Our country has lost control of its streets to the mob. And the police are now openly saying: “If you are Jewish, we can’t protect you.” This is the acid test for the Government. Are Jews going to be protected on the streets of Britain - or are they not? No more platitudes. No more empty words in tweets. It’s time for Keir Starmer to act - before more Jewish blood is spilled on our streets.

I am told it is the police/local authority which has said they cannot keep the away fans safe, not the club. Whatever the ins and outs, it does lend credence to the fear that Jewish people in the UK have that they simply cannot be kept safe in public places

Funding is great but we can’t keep building bigger walls. There needs to be a change in the environment so that we don’t need that funding.

As desperate as Israelis are for the hostages to come home, many in the Jewish state are distressed, to say the least, by the Palestinian terrorists being released in the deal. Given that it doesn’t receive as much attention as it deserves in Western media, I’ll take this moment to briefly explore some of the nearly 2,000 Palestinians being released from Israeli jails. Hilmi Abdul Karim Muhammad Hammash, who coordinated a 2004 suicide bombing on a bus in Jerusalem, killing 11 Israelis and wounding 50. Morad Bader Abdullah Adais. In 2016, he stabbed to death Dafna Meir, a 38-year-old mother to 6, in front of her teenage daughter, at the entrance to their home in Otniel. Jihad A-Karim Azziz Rom. 25 years ago today, IDF reservists Vadim Norzhich and Yosef Avrahami accidentally drove into Ramallah, and were detained by Palestinian Authority police. Once word got out that two Israeli soldiers were at the police station, a crowd gathered outside the station, before eventually breaking in, where they beat and stabbed Norzhich and Avrahami to death. Azziz Rom participated in the lynching, as well as the kidnapping and murder of 18-year-old Yuri Gushchin in 2001. Few, if any, Palestinian terror attacks are seared into the Israeli psyche as deeply as the Ramallah lynching, thanks to a TV crew capturing the moment Aziz Salha ran out to proudly show his blood-soaked hands to the Palestinian crowd outside the police station. (An IDF airstrike in Gaza late last year killed Salha.) That may be shocking enough, but for an even deeper understanding of how gruesome the murder was — and why it’s forever stained into Israelis’ memories — it’s worth reading the @Telegraph’s report following the incident. “Two soldiers, held on the first floor, were beaten and stabbed to death. Television showed one of the attackers run to the second floor window and make a victory sign and then return to the fray. In the background, several men were seen pounding on something or someone on the floor. The crowd erupted into cheers. The attackers tossed one of the men out of the window, another out the door. One of the soldiers was seen dangling upside down, apparently attached to a rope. The crowd stood below, waving fists and cheering. The body was dropped into the compound, where the mob stamped on the corpse and beat it with the broken bars of a window grille… At 10.30 the mob dragged the two bodies to Al-Manara Square, the town centre, where an impromptu victory celebration began.” And those are just 3 of the prisoners Israel is releasing in order to bring the hostages home. Tomorrow, God willing, Israeli parents, spouses and children will embrace their loved ones once again after 738 days of hell. And somewhere else, the men who tore other families apart will walk out of prison to applause. That contrast says it all.

A reminder for people who were out marching in the streets yesterday - on October 7… October 7 is not a day of “resistance.” It’s not a day of “liberation.” It’s not a day to chant or wave flags. It is the anniversary of the biggest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust. On that day, exactly two years ago, thousands of Hamas terrorists and Gazan civilians crossed into Israel with one goal - to kill Jews. Not soldiers. Not politicians. Jews. Families. Children. Grandmothers. Babies. They filmed it all, proudly, smiling as they burned homes to the ground, mutilated bodies, raped women, and dragged hostages back into Gaza. 1,200 innocent people murdered. Hundreds taken hostage. Entire communities wiped off the map in a single morning. The kind of hatred most of us thought belonged to history books - alive again in front of our eyes. Israel didn’t respond until 20 days later. On October 7, only one side acted. Only one side committed slaughter. So if you were marching yesterday - on that date - you need to understand what you were doing. You weren’t protesting for peace. You weren’t standing for justice. You were marching on the anniversary of a massacre. You were celebrating a day of blood. You were aligning yourself with the same ideology that beheaded babies, burned families alive, and posted it on Telegram to applause. You can tell yourself it’s about “freedom” or “resistance,” but deep down you know that’s not true. Because there’s no freedom in rape. There’s no resistance in shooting festivalgoers in the back. There’s no justice in torturing children in front of their parents. Those who stood in the streets yesterday and shouted “intifada” or “from the river to the sea” were not calling for peace - they were calling for the eradication of an entire people. Jews. Again. And maybe you think the world will forget. Maybe you think history will blur the details, that the slogans will fade and your posts will disappear into the noise of social media. But the internet never forgets. There are moments in history that define people. October 7 is one of them. You either stood with the victims - or with those who glorified their murderers. That’s something that will never wash away. Not in a week, not in a year, not in a lifetime.

The Jewish News hired a company to revamp its website. Then the company refused the work because the boss said it “wasn’t comfortable” working with a Jewish newspaper. Extraordinary piece by @richferrer

I’m not sure non-Jews appreciate how pissed off we have to be to get to a point where the Deputy Prime Minister is heckled. For British Jews this is about as insurrectionist as we get. Of course, our respect for law and order are precisely why the authorities have treated us so shoddily, whilst bending over backwards to appease other communities where heckling would be the least of it.

I've written about today. I'm angry. I hope you will understand and forgive me that anger.

The city-level fertility rate drops in large parts of the developing world are astounding. *Inner* London had a higher total fertility rate than the current level in Delhi until less than a decade ago.

Deeply troubling findings. The rise in antisemitism shows we have so much more to do – in education, in remembrance, and in standing up against hatred wherever it appears. Antisemitism is never just a Jewish problem – it’s a threat to all of us. @HMD_UK telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/09/0…