(((Adam Coffer))) 🎗️

We stand for peace , we stand for love, we stand for humanity. We stand against #Antisemitism @antisemitism #NeverAgainIsNow

This is an absolutely brilliant piece.

Moral clarity, determination, courage. We'd almost forgotten what leadership looks like. Very impressive. Thank you, @KemiBadenoch

Excellent response to Sir Tony Brenton ..

You may not agree with me, but you will always know where you stand with me. Today in Billericay, a heckler tried to shout me down as I spoke about the normalisation of hatred towards Jews. I did not back down, because it needs to be said. British Jews are being targeted and too many people are pretending this is the same experience of other minorities. This lady implied Muslims are being similarly targeted. This is simply not true. Let's be honest about what is happening. Certain groups (in particular but not solely Islamic Extremists) are creating a climate of fear and intimidation that is normalising Jew hatred. I will never stand for that. Governments have spent too long hand-wringing, making excuses and hoping it would go away. It is time to call this what it is: a national emergency in our attitude, our urgency and our response. I will always engage with people who disagree with me. That is politics. But there is a difference between argument and intimidation. Shouting does not make a bad case good. It's done to silence others. And it certainly does not change the truth. The truth is that British Jews have been made to feel less safe in their own country. Our country. They are being singled out, threatened and harassed in ways that should shame everyone in public life. If we do not stand up now and stop this rise in antisemitism, then why bother saying "Never Again" at Holocaust Memorial Day? Because this is how it starts. I am not prepared to play along with the pretence that this is normal, or manageable, or just another example of tension between groups. It really is not. It is targeted hatred and it is getting worse. So my message is simple. Not here. Not in Britain. And not on our watch. We need to stop the hand-wringing and start doing the right thing. That means standing with British Jews openly, unapologetically and without fear.

Go on Kemi. Speaking truths with utter conviction @KemiBadenoch

Imagine a white supremacist went on a stabbing spree targeting people of colour in London, but before that, he stabbed his white friend, then jumped on public transport for an hour to head to a multicultural area of the city.

From @WSJFreeEx via @WSJOpinion: Boy George is a man of integrity and guts. Let’s hope others in his industry will see the value in challenging the antisemitism that is taking root in Ireland and elsewhere, writes @matthennessey. on.wsj.com/4dbfufo

I love the U.K., a man can run around the streets stabbing people for being Jewish, and the issue people debate is whether the police officers trying to remove the knife from him used excessive force. Proof that we will do absolutely anything to avoid addressing antisemitism.

Utterly devastating from @robertshrimsley in FT. This should shame us all.

This @TrevorPTweets interview with @ZackPolanski needs to be shared and viewed as widely as possible. I've never before seen an interviewer give a proper focus to Polanski's dissembling and refuse to let him get away with his usual evasions. It's a masterclass in the importance of serious scrutiny, which is now so lacking in broadcast journalism (with the exception of @TrevorPTweets) youtu.be/7VkfYJgLljE?si…

When a Jewish actress is portrayed with devil horns and a pitchfork, and the demand is that she be removed from public life, we are no longer in the realm of “criticism of Israel.” This is the ancient machinery of antisemitic propaganda in modern activist costume: demonise the Jew, brand her morally repugnant, then insist she must be silenced. History has seen this script so many times before. The costumes change. The target does not.

What a powerful piece from @TrevorPTweets Strong, empathetic voices such as his mean so much to a community hurting ❤️

God, I love ⁦@HadleyFreeman⁩ - “laughter is the best pesticide” as Nabokov said, and by withering antiSemites with wit she is being both the best of Jewish and British columnists.

Predictable 👇🏻

On Carnaby Street last night, a kid on a bike cycled up, saw it was me, looked friendly at first then offered up his favourite “lyric”: “Heil Hitler.” I wasn’t sure whether to share this. I hadn’t experienced that personally before. The most striking thing: I wasn’t shocked. No threat. No anger. Not a victim. Just: what has he been taught Hatred is learned. We are not defined by it. We answer it by what we teach.

When the musical heroes of your salad days, who you simply adored for their music and dreams thy elicited, become your public figure heroes for their courage to simply speak the truth when it bucks the “fashion”. @BoyGeorge highlights the toxicity at the heart of today’s culture with such beautiful calmness and powerful simplicity that it stuns the haters:

Sir Tony Brenton, former British ambassador to Russia, has written to offer the UK Jewish community some unsolicited advice: if you want antisemitic violence to stop, try being more appalled by Israel. The argument is a masterclass in a very old move, executed with the confidence that only a certain kind of establishment figure can muster. First, you reframe the data. The surge in antisemitism after October 7 wasn’t really antisemitism, Sir Tony explains — it was “widespread popular rage” at Israeli “overreaction.” The quotation marks around “antisemitism” do important work here. They perform skepticism without having to argue for it. Then comes the throat-clearing: “This of course does not excuse the anti-Jewish outrages that have taken place since.” And then the payload: the UK Jewish community “could help to damp down the likelihood of such outrages” by making clear it is “as appalled by the brutality of Israeli policy as almost everyone else is.” Read that again slowly. A former ambassador is telling a minority community that the best way to reduce violence against them is to publicly condemn the right people, to the right degree, to satisfy the sensibilities of - whom exactly? Almost everyone else. The unnamed, self-evident majority whose rage, we have already been told, is not really antisemitism at all. This is a purity test. The intellectual structure would be immediately recognizable - and scandalous - if applied to any other minority. It would not be published. The premise, that a community bears responsibility for managing hatred directed at it by performing the correct ideological dissociation, would be identified instantly as victim-blaming of the most craven kind. With Jews, apparently, the formula remains available. There is also the matter of the evidence. Sir Tony claims the post-October 7 surge was “not, or mostly not, antisemitism at all” - just political anger at Israeli policy. Yet the Community Security Trust, recorded the first antisemitic incident at 12:55pm on October 7 itself, hours after the massacre began. 31 incidents were recorded that day. The daily total peaked on October 11 at 80 , the highest number ever recorded on a single day in British history. Israel’s ground operation began on October 27. The worst day of antisemitism in modern Britain occurred sixteen days before Israel set foot in Gaza. The perpetrators did not wait to assess the proportionality of the Israeli response. They started within hours of the massacre. Sir Tony’s framework simply cannot accommodate this fact, which is why it goes unmentioned. What his letter actually proposes is that antisemitism be treated as a problem Jews can manage through correct political performance. Pass the test, demonstrate sufficient distance from Israel, sufficient appallment ; and maybe, just maybe- the violence will subside. This is the oldest libel in European history, updated with footnotes and published in a newspaper in the same week two Jewish men were stabbed in broad daylight in Golders Green. Former British ambassador to Russia. The irony writes itself.

'To Jewish families, more than 1000 years of history is bleak evidence that they are right to fear they will once again be on their own.' @TrevorPTweets reflects on antisemitism in Britain, after a swathe of violence against the Jewish community trib.al/S3icMYg