One month after Hamas’s attacks, it’s Britain that is surrendering

Where is Rishi Sunak? Britain’s Jewish community is more fearful for its safety than at any time since the Second World War, according to the Chief Rabbi; lies, conspiracy theories, genocide denialism, blood libels and violent language are rampant at demonstrations and on social media; and what is the Prime Minister actually doing about it? The lack of leadership from No 10 is heartbreaking.

“Holding Scotland Yard to account” is insultingly insufficient. Senior Tories have expressed their disapproval of the marches and of the language used, but this is mere talk, and too sotto voce. There is no game-changing strategy to shift the narrative, no plan to combat disinformation, no immediate proposals to tighten legislation or ban dangerous groups, no moves to prevent train carriages, poppy sellers or branches of M&S from being targeted. 

Abominable ideas – such as the lie that Hamas didn’t kidnap any Israeli children, and that posters of hostages are fake – are spreading, and yet there is a vacuum, an abdication of responsibility in Whitehall and it is emboldening every kind of maniac and inflaming every kind of hideous tension.

None of this was meant to be possible. The modern British model is in crisis: a tiny minority is under immense pressure, and the police, the Crown Prosecution Service, the BBC, the Government, the human rights advocates and the virtue-signalling middle classes are doing the bare minimum they can get away with. 

The law is being reinterpreted in bizarre ways and thousands of anti-Semites – Islamist extremists and the far-Left principally, for now – are getting away with behaviour that wouldn’t be tolerated were it directed at any other minority. Are all still equal in front of the law?

This is not about one demonstration on Armistice Day: the crisis is far greater. It is about the total failure of all of our institutions, the implosion of an entire ideological superstructure, the ruination of a country’s very idea of itself. It is about extremists being asked to provide advice and embedding themselves within the police and military, it is about the normalisation of calls for the destruction of one country – and only one – based on a falsified narrative, it is about the gradual waning of our collective memories of the Shoah, it is about hate preachers who don’t even care if their words are caught on film, it is about the Left-wing middle class’s moral cowardice.

Don’t get me wrong: Sunak is on the right side. He is a moral man, a true believer in the modern, multi-faith British dream, and he supports Israel and passionately detests anti-Semitism. Yet what is he, in practice, doing about the explosion in Jew-hate that is shaming our great country? Going ahead with the endlessly-delayed Holocaust memorial is not enough. Ministers are acting like commentators, not leaders, and their (usually excellent) words are being drowned out. 

The Government cannot even find it in itself to ban Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps or vote against a call for a ceasefire at the UN, even though opposing such a move is its policy. It seemingly can’t tell any of the quangos what to do. It isn’t properly fighting the battle of ideas, let alone using its legislative powers.

There has been a gigantic regression since the David Cameron years. In 2015, the then prime minister delivered a powerful speech against extremism. He made it clear that his problem was with the extremists and their twisted ideology, not with mainstream British Muslims, whom he rightly embraced. Cameron understood that bad ideas had to be fought, which is why even educated lawyers or GPs or academics can harbour evil thoughts. 

Since then, the Tories have launched many reviews into extremism, largely or entirely ignoring their recommendations. Dame Louise Casey’s review into opportunity and integration argued that “too many public institutions … have gone so far to accommodate diversity and freedom of expression that they have ignored or even condoned regressive, divisive and harmful cultural and religious practices, for fear of being branded racist or Islamophobic.” There has been limited progress since then – some lessons have been learnt from the Rochdale child sex abuse ring – but few of Casey’s broader ideas have been enacted.

The next major contribution was Dame Sara Khan’s Challenging Hateful Extremism. She listed every kind of threat, from “harrowing tales of abuse levelled at Jewish MPs” to Ahmadi Muslims being persecuted at school. As she wrote, the problem emanates from the far-Right, the far-Left, Islamist and other forms of religious fundamentalism and animal rights extremism. It fell on deaf ears.

Last but not least, Sir William Shawcross’s Independent Review of Prevent revealed horrifying failures at the heart of the counterterrorism programme. Among its findings was that some taxpayer funding distributed by Prevent has been handed to groups that promote extremist views, that books by mainstream centre-Right commentators were being tarred as “cultural nationalist ideological texts”, and that Islamist extremism was being grossly under-investigated relative to the number of anti-terrorism cases.

Ominously, Shawcross noted the shocking prevalence of anti-Semitism within the cases he observed. He identified that Prevent doesn’t sufficiently understand or focus on anti-Semitism, that it must “better address the anti-Jewish component of both Islamist and extreme Right-wing ideology”, and that extremists “operating below the terrorism threshold” must be targeted. 

The Tories have also failed in another way. They turned a blind eye to the rise of Critical Race Theory, that crucial component of the woke belief system which, among many other terrible pathologies, is explosively anti-Semitic. Universities, museums, cultural institutions and corporate HR departments have succumbed to this destructive ideology and its nonsense about “colonialism”, “white privilege”, and “intersectionality”. Jews are considered part of the “oppressor” class, and thus cannot truly be the victims of racism. 

Yet it isn’t too late. Sunak could make a speech that is even more powerful than that delivered by the German vice-chancellor Robert Habeck. He could legislate to ban Hizb ut-Tahrir and other groups. He could launch a massive counter-extremism plan. I pray that he will rise to the occasion.