Brendan O’Neill is Spiked's chief politics writer. His new book, After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation, is out now.
It is undeniable now: war has been declared on British Jews. A fascistic crusade is being waged against our Jewish compatriots. The anti-Semitic atrocity in Golders Green today is further brutish proof of this unsettling fact. We’ve had firebombings at synagogues, the murder of Jews in Manchester on Yom Kippur, and now this frenzied knifing
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In her Reith lecture on freedom in 2022, the great Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warned of the ‘unconscionable barbarism’ of cancel culture. She herself had felt its flames lick at her feet when she refused to bow to that truthless credo, ‘trans women are women’. ‘It was like being accused of blasphemy in a
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Hey, Jews – have you ever considered the possibility that you’re making a fuss over nothing? That a few petrol bombs through the windows of your synagogues is not really a big deal? That your feelings of fear after two Jews were slain in Manchester on Yom Kippur and Jewish property was incinerated in Golders
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Explain this to me. Why is it that a gathering of mostly white working-class men protesting about a rape is met by a line of menacing riot cops, and yet a gathering of primarily non-white youths running riot on a high street is given the kid-glove treatment? Following the events in Epsom last night, this
Imagine there was a virulently Francophobic militia on the doorstep of the French Republic. Imagine it had fired nearly a hundred thousand missiles into France these past three years. Imagine if the France-loathing maniacs had caused the deaths of hundreds of French people and forced almost half a million to flee their towns in terror.
And there you have it. Britain is a country where a musician who says ‘Heil Hitler’ gets to headline festivals while a musician who plays with a Jew from Israel gets cancelled. Threaten to go ‘death con 3 on Jewish people’ and you’ll be grand. Jam with a Jewish person and you’re toast. Selling T-shirts
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This week, in Spain, a rape victim was killed by the state. A young woman in pain and despair was offered not love or justice but death. The government’s solution to her suffering was not to wrap its arms of care around her but to give her lethal drugs so that she would die. It
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At first I thought it was a scene from one of the battlefronts in the Middle East. The hellish glow of an out-of-control fire. A thunderous explosion. And innocents fleeing in terror. Only this was no warzone. It was Golders Green. It was that peaceful Jewish enclave in north-west London. And last night it was
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Would you rather live in a society where a man is free to criticise religious practices or one where such a man might be dragged to the public square to be damned and shamed as a blasphemer? For me it’s a no-brainer. It’s the former. I want the freedom to object, as scurrilously as I
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Maybe it’s because I’m getting on in years, but I remember when being “progressive” meant supporting women’s rights, believing in gay liberation and opposing the persecution of ethnic groups. Yet now “progressives” are giddily cosying up with the fanboys of a foreign regime that ruthlessly represses women, hangs gays by the neck and funds proxy
I’ve been thinking a lot about the phrase ‘unprovoked war’. It’s been rolling off leftist tongues since the explosion of hostilities in Iran. This week, Jeremy Corbyn, Zarah Sultana and scores of hoary peaceniks wrote a letter to the Guardian insisting Britain should have nothing to do with America and Israel’s ‘unprovoked war’ in Iran.
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There is not one drop of English blood in my body. I know this because, like many others, I succumbed to the DNA testing fad. I spat into a test tube and forked out 79 quid only to be told what I already knew: I’m a Mick. Ninety-three per cent of my DNA is from
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For the first time, I am grateful to Zack Polanski. For, in branding Keir Starmer ‘Islamophobic’ simply for criticising Mothin Ali, he has shown just how slippery and despotic that word is. He has confirmed what most decent folk have long suspected – that accusations of ‘Islamophobia’ are a cynical ruse to shut down entirely
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Two big pop events took place on Saturday. In Manchester, there was the Brit Awards. One by one the bourgeois brats who swell the ranks of popular culture blubbed like babies over the rise of Reform. ‘I’m genuinely terrified’, said someone called Self Esteem. Britain is becoming a ‘fascist state’, wailed Irish singer CMAT. ‘The
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Imagine if Matt Goodwin had given an interview to a media outlet that regularly platforms far-right agitators like Nick Griffin. Imagine if he’d been pictured dancing next to a man who once called a Jewish rabbi a ‘kind of animal’. Imagine if he had made a campaign video trying to tap into the animus that
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The Home Affairs Committee report on the Maccabi Tel Aviv scandal has finally landed. And it is damning indeed. It confirms what many of us suspected: that West Midlands Police allowed themselves to become the militant wing of Israelophobia. They did the bidding of the mob, dutifully banning Israeli Jews in order to appease local
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The first thing the mob kills is its own humanity. Long before they sink their collective claws into the target of their flapping ire, they lay waste to their own decency. We see this in the digital hounding of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. Behold the ugly gloating over a man’s downfall. Witness the peddling of false accusations.
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We need to talk about Ahmed Mohammed. He’s a Sudanese asylum seeker in the UK, and this week he was spared jail after being convicted of threatening a person with an offensive weapon in a public place. The public place was Speakers’ Corner in London, and the victim was a Christian preacher. In May last year
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Imagine getting angrier over a word than a rape. This will go down in history as the week when there was more digital fury over one man’s criticism of mass immigration than there was over the dire impact those untrammelled flows of people are having on Britain’s women and girls. Millions of decent Brits are
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Are Jews not allowed even one day of commemoration? Can’t they have just one sombre moment where they might remember their dead without mobs of wild-eyed Israelophobes frothing at the mouth for yet more ‘intifada’? Judging by the obscene events here in Sydney last night, the answer to that question is a firm No. It
