Brendan O’Neill
Spiked, July 15, 2025
“The most valuable thing about the report is that it shows how institutionalised anti-Semitism has become.”
‘Anti-Semitism is a very light sleeper’, said Conor Cruise O’Brien. Indeed it is, and it has been stirred from its thin slumber these past two years. Since Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October 2023 we have witnessed the violent rebirth of English anti-Semitism. And this is one breed of fanatical prejudice that cannot be libellously pinned on the ‘gammon’, on those lower orders who are so often written off as bigots. No, it is in polite society, among the hoarders of virtue, that the revived Jew hate is most prominent and most vicious.
A new report has found that anti-Semitism has been ‘normalised in middle-class Britain’. Wariness of the Jew is rife in the very institutions of bourgeois society that pride themselves on their anti-racist credentials. At universities, in the arts and in the NHS, the report found, anti-Semitism has become ‘pervasive’. The same lanyard classes that organise training sessions on ‘white privilege’ or ‘heteronormativity’ to enlighten the oiks on their inner bigot have created a climate in which Jews feel ‘marginalised’ and ‘tolerated rather than respected’.
The report was commissioned by the Board of Deputies of British Jews. It was written by Lord John Mann of the Labour Party, who advises the government on anti-Semitism, and Dame Penny Mordaunt of the Conservative Party, who was defence secretary under Theresa May. They describe themselves as ‘two non-Jews from opposite sides of the political spectrum’ who were ‘stunned into silence’ by what they heard from Britain’s Jews. We’re ‘hard-nosed politicians’, they write, but still they were shaken by reports of surging anti-Jewish violence, censorship of Jewish artists and even the belittling of Jewish patients in the NHS. ….SOURCE