David Britten

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 It would not be published.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.

Wrote entire books about how people who believe fairies live in gardens are idiots only to fall in love with a calculator that calls him smart

Aberdeen (Scotland) "pro-Palestinian" activists are demanding a Jewish actress - who they portray as the devil - not be allowed to perform in a local theater production This is gutter-level stuff

An ethnostate is not simply just “a state that happens to mostly contain one ethnicity”. Lebanon is not an ethnostate. Neither is Iraq, Jordan, or Egypt. An ethnostate, for Israel specifically a “herrenvolk democracy”, is a state that builds its politics on representing one group

כשאני רואה את עוגת יום ההולדת שקיבל השר בן גביר אני פשוט חושב על זה שחברה שחוגגת מוות של אחרים, היא חברה שגוזרת מוות על עצמה. די לפולחן המוות, די לאוכלי המוות. מגיע לנו כל כך הרבה יותר טוב מהחרא הזה.

By sheer coincidence, it was my turn to do Thought For The Day at TTA this morning, so I chose to talk about the horrific attack in Golders Green yesterday, and what it means to be a Jew in 2026 Britain. Please give it a few minutes of your time if you can.

THREAD: A thread of screenshots highlighting just some of the IMPACT-SE Investigation in Gazan, West Bank, East Jerusalem & UNRWA Palestinian schools. If you want peace, look to the to roots of the conflict. The radicalisation of Palestinian youth in these schools needs to stop. A demonstration of the Terror Education and showing more UNRWA complicity. 1. Jew Hatred