Jews are now being repeatedly targeted on airplanes. America can put a stop to this abhorrent discrimination - Sir Michael Ellis

They were then tweeted about by a Spanish minister as unruly “Israeli brats”, despite being French citizens.

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Yes, you guessed it - they were, of course, Jewish children. The age old trope that Jewish people are not true citizens of the country where they live has persisted through the ages - but today we live in a world where even a Spanish government minister felt confident enough to tweet such a thing- well, confident enough until he deleted it of course.

What other minority would be treated the same way?

Then on a Spanish Iberia flight a few days ago Jewish passengers are reported to have found written on their kosher food boxes the slogan "Free Palestine" or "FP".

Would you want to eat the food inside a box that had been interfered with in that way? After all, a zealot who feels the need to write slogans on the food boxes of innocent passengers because of their religion could also have done anything to the food prepared within them.

And then last week an air traffic controller in France was so fixated with this topic that at a highly sensitive take off moment of a busy passenger flight, when the pilot needs to be concentrating intensely on their aircraft, the air controller blurted out "Free Palestine" over the airwaves to the flight crew of the Israeli El Al airline.

What is next? Perhaps a surgeon will shout out "Free Palestine" during a hospital operation? Perhaps a newsreader on the BBC will shout it out during a bulletin (actually that seems distinctly possible when it comes to the BBC!)

The Spanish authorities are said to be investigating the incident with the children in Valencia. But that’s not good enough. When it comes to Jews Spain simply cannot be trusted.

After all, Jews were officially forbidden to open a synagogue in Spain until as late as 1968 (for a comparison of civilisations- in England the first synagogue opened in 1701).

Spanish Jews were not even formally recognised as a community in Spain until as late as 1982!

In a poll in 2008 Spain was the only country in Europe where views about Jews were more negative than positive; only 37 per cent of Spaniards had a positive view of Jews. (For another comparison of which British people can be proud, the same poll found Brits 73 per cent positive about Jews and only 9 per cent negative.)

Today unsurprisingly the Spanish government, although now far-left rather than far-right, is still unremittingly hostile to Israel. (Hatred of Jews is of course one of the few things the far left and far right have in common.)

But when it comes to aviation we are all at risk from extremists. The potential for total devastation caused by someone with radical views is very clear from recent history. And we can have no faith in the European authorities to investigate these incidents properly.

Civilisation must look to America to defend it. European leaders are too weak and their institutions can clearly not be relied upon. Airlines are such enormous multi billion dollar conglomerates that very little worries them.

But there is one organisation that can make a difference- the US’s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). I have written to the American Transportation Secretary to ask him to order the FAA to investigate these incidents.

Last year the American authorities fined another airline $4million for an incident in 2022 where Jewish passengers were ejected- last year the Americans decided that those 128 Jewish passengers could share $2million in compensation.

A sanction from the FAA really means business. In fact what it could actually mean is a real loss of business!

Any airline declared by the FAA to be unsafe for travel would for example be seriously at risk of soon going bust.

We need American leadership in this matter. Everywhere we look we see worrying increases in Jew-hate.

Let’s not wait for more examples of discrimination in the air- the next incident could be deadly.”