Let me tell you my favourite Jewish joke. There are these two Jews in front of a firing squad and they're offered blindfolds.
Whereupon one of the Jews starts swearing, effing and blinding, telling them to shove their blindfold where the sun doesn't shine and the other Jewish guy turns to him and says, "shh, you don't want to make trouble".
Now, I always thought that British Jews were a bit like that. Don't make trouble. Don't create a fuss. Get on with life. Work. Contribute. Be grateful.
And for the last few hundred years, we've certainly had a lot to be grateful for. Living freely and safely, lucky to have found ourselves entwined and welcomed within the social fabric of Britain.
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As Britain has become entwined within the social fabric of who we are. Every week in synagogue, we say a prayer for the leaders of our country, for its lawmakers and welfare.
Knowing our fate are the same and for the most part, we were safe until last Thursday, until Yom Kippur.
How many of us knew then, as we were reciting the community prayers, that our lawmakers had already let us down, that there would be two men who were no longer sealed in the book of life.
Which is why this week you saw some British Jews become the other guy in the joke. You saw it when the deputy Prime Minister was heckled at the vigil on Friday, because we find ourselves in a firing line regardless, and politeness hasn't protected us.
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Josh Howie said the 'time for politeness and fear has passed'
|GB NEWS
So let me be impolite. Muslims are racist towards Jews. Yes, it's not all Muslims, and I've been lucky to meet many who fight this racism at great personal cost.
But unfortunately there are many more who tolerate this hatred, many who indulge in it. And as we saw this week, there are those who act upon it.
Now you can label those people jihadists or extremists or its radical Islam or Islamists.
But let us not pretend that they are not Muslims, that they don't follow the ideology of Islam, an ideology that is just a little bit obsessed with Jews. We are mentioned over 80 times in the Quran there's even a hadith about killing Jews and going to heaven.
Josh Howie made reference to an attack at a Manchester synagogue last week which left two men dead
|PA
And surprise, surprise, this week a British Muslim man killed some British Jewish men thinking he'd go to heaven. Queue response of accusations of Islamophobia, of racism.
"Josh, you're actually the real racist for accusing them of being racist" - look, you don't get British Jews murdering British Muslims.
You don't get British Jews trying to stab Muslims in halal supermarkets. You don't get British Jews driving a convoy of cars through Bradford, shouting through loudspeakers that we're going to rape Muslim wives and daughters.
At most, and I'm letting you behind the veil here into the secret Jewish world order, occasionally, we'll tentatively look around the room and then lean in and whisper to one another: "You know, a lot of Muslims really seem to hate Jews".
The thing is, Islam has nothing at all to do with our founding mythology. Islam and Muslims are mentioned in the Torah. A grand total of zero times.
"Aha!" I hear you cry, "but what about Gaza?" Well, what about Gaza? This war. Not genocide, but war. That the Jewish state didn't start, that it has no choice but to fight after being invaded, and its citizens raped and slaughtered and dragged away to be tortured in camp tunnels.
What about Gaza? That Jews, thousands of miles away in a different country, are to be somehow held responsible for? Yes, there is obviously innocent death in Gaza and like all innocent deaths, especially children, it is a tragedy.
But we've had two years of lies. Was the BBC dealing in facts when it broadcast that 14,000 babies would die because of Israel in the following 48 hours?
Did the BBC challenge that at the time, did it ever apologise? Apart from a tiny correction? No, it just invited the same liar back on to say more lies unchallenged. Two years of lies and omissions to present the world's only Jewish state as uniquely evil, to dehumanise all Jews.
Did the Daily Mirror apologise for its front page headline? Stop starving Gaza's kids with a photo of an emaciated child, who was later revealed instead suffered from a genetic disorder.
And so the blood libel continues after millennia - no one ever asking if there is really a genocide and a famine.
Well, why do they have to use fake photos and fake videos? Why has the population grown? And so the incitement spreads to the streets where, even yesterday, Islamists chanted, along with their far left, useful, bigoted idiots, that the murder of Jews was justified, that the murder of Jews should be globalised.
This potent fusion of racist incitement, meeting a racist ideology is what leads to murder.And meanwhile, the politicians and the institutions that are meant to protect us cower in fear. Many mosques and imams preached hate and called for the murder of Jews after October 7 and with all that video evidence, how many mosques were subsequently closed or charges brought by the police and the CPS, or even loss of charity status? None. But just as important, why did those men expressing their hate feel so emboldened and safe in those spaces to spread it? How many agreed with them? How many moderate Muslims in the room spoke out challenging that hate.
"Don't divide us" doesn't work when a man tries to murder as many Jews as he can, whilst crowds on the street chant daily for more of the same.
"Don't make any trouble" - that also doesn't work, at least for this Jew. No blindfold for me.
No more being shamed into shutting up and taking it. The time for politeness and fear has passed. A free speech nation only matters if you use it.
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