Brendan O’Neill

So ‘Sophie of Dundee’ has been vindicated. The Scots girl who was so sickeningly defamed by the digital left stands exonerated. ‘Liars!’, cried creeps across the internet when the girl and her friends said they had no choice but to defend themselves from a foul-mouthed, abusive migrant male. Yet now we know they were telling the truth. Others insulted the girls. Armies of haters said it was ‘Sophie’ who was the brute. They called her a chav The image of this girl that went viral really was extraordinary. The events took place on a street in Dundee in August 2025. A grainy still from smartphone footage showed one of the girls holding up a knife and an axe. Her face is etched with terror. This was clearly a child in distress.

How would you describe a culture where women are flogged in public for ‘inappropriate dress’? A culture where one woman suffered 40 lashes from a leather whip for the crime of wearing trousers and a T-shirt? A culture where a man who lies with a man risks being whipped a hundred times before being put in a dank cell for five years? A culture where apostasy is considered such an abominable sin that even a heavily pregnant woman could be sentenced to death for supposedly committing it? The good people of Belfast are well within their rights to ask whether men from such a culture should be living on their streets Personally, I would call such a culture ‘alien’.

I see that the people who took the knee and tore down statues after a man was killed 4,000 miles away from Britain are now yelping ‘Don’t politicise Henry Nowak’s death’. The same leftists who poured onto the streets to rage over the death of George Floyd are barking at the rest of us not to rage over the death of young Henry. Got that? Fury over Floyd – good. Rage over Nowak – don’t even think about it ‘Don’t stir up tensions’, says an activist class which in that heady summer of 2020 happily hurled missiles at British cops and danced like Taliban-lite loons on a monument to a slave trader they’d just toppled. What a festival of cant we have endured since the conviction of Vickrum Digwa for his savage slaying of Nowak.

Zack Polanski is fuming over the Home Secretary’s decision to ban two internet-famous Israel haters from the UK. It’s ‘really grim’, he says of the exclusion from our shores of the leftist blowhards Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur. It will drag us further down the ‘dangerous road’ of tyranny, he cries. Hold on. Is this the same Zack Polanski who supported the arrest of Graham Linehan by literal armed cops for the crime of cracking a joke? The left paved the way for the exclusion of Piker and Uygur by so egregiously failing to defend the right to speak Why, yes it is. Polanski’s love of the liberty to utter was nowhere to be seen in September. Back then he was waving his pom poms over the cornering of a funnyman by five armed officers at Heathrow Airport.

At first glance, the youth wings of Restore Britain and the Green party would appear to have little in common. The former are angry, undersexed videogamers who only take a break from playing Rome: Total War to type ‘DEPORT’ under viral clips of black kids fighting. The latter are tree-huggers turned ‘Queers for Palestine’ who never leave the house without a culturally appropriated keffiyeh round their necks and the latest Sally Rooney in their Daunt Books tote bag.  Restore Britain – the edgelord party led by bitter ex-Reformer, Rupert Lowe – is in the news over some of the iffy views in its ranks Yet there’s something that binds these clashing tribes together – a hyper-suspicion of the Jewish state and in some cases the Jewish people.

If you heard that a man was thinking about selling his seven-year-old daughter into marriage or domestic servitude, who would you feel sorry for? The dad or the girl? The man treating his own child as property to be traded for cash, or his daughter, the innocent made into chattel for gross creeps to barter over so that they might secure themselves a child bride? All normal people would say the daughter. Of course we would. Not the BBC, though. Our public broadcaster has told precisely this horror story, only it paints the men selling their daughters as the victims, not the girls who are being sold.

The good people of Makerfield have the potential to do the funniest thing. It is in their gift to unleash the most hilarious chaos. With one swipe of their pen they could wipe the smirk off the face of every centrist-dad podcaster and leave the smug scribes of the leftish media scratching their heads in mournful bewilderment. All they have to do is vote Reform in the upcoming by-election. They’re not dumb. They know the home he’s really eyeing up is Downing Street Just picture it. In swoops Andy Burnham, their supposed King of the North, hoping to be crowned King of Labour too, but then the citizens of Makerfield say: ‘Nah, you’re all right.’ They have the power to block a coronation, to send the anointed golden boy of the SW1 left packing. It would be glorious.

What’s weirder: asking if a woman can have a penis or being so flummoxed by such a simple query that you start to stutter and sweat and flat-out refuse to answer? It’s the latter, isn’t it? To most normal people out there, the loon isn’t the person who would like to know if you understand primary-school biology – it’s the person who quite clearly does not. The one word that didn’t leave her lips is the one most five-year-olds would gleefully cry if this question were put to them: ‘NO!’ Consider the mad clash between Piers Morgan and Rachel Millward, co-deputy leader of the Green Party. On Question Time last week, Morgan, on one of his delicious wind-ups, asked Millward if a woman can have a penis.

Campus lefties love shouting ‘BIGOT’ at people they disagree with. Anyone who has ever been rounded on by mobs of meat-dodging students hoarsely barking ‘hate speaker!’ because you once humbly suggested men should stay out of women’s bathrooms will know how irritating and comical such activism can be. Now, though, we have the perfect comeback for these silver-spoon irritants: ‘Wait, didn’t you vote for the Green party?’ I’m happy to take flak from all sorts of people. It comes with the territory of being an opinion writer.

It is not even a week since that horrific act of violence against Jews in Golders Green, and what is the left calling for? The right to agitate for more violence against Jews. The right to beat the streets hollering for ‘intifada’. And what is ‘intifada’ other than the infliction of harm and horror on Jews by militant outfits such as Hamas? Their wilful blindness to the toxic fallout of their rallies is maddening Even by the iffy standards of the keffiyeh left, it’s been a tawdry spectacle. The speed with which the Golders Green debate went from being about the right of Jews to live in safety to the right of the Islamo-left to yell for intifada has been mindblowing.

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 of Jews in London. There can be no more equivocating – this is a moral emergency. The most sickening thing about today’s knife pogrom is that it was entirely predictable The scenes from Golders Green are truly grim. Video clips show the suspect wielding his knife with demented fury at two visibly Jewish men. One is reportedly in his 70s, the other in his 30s – both sustained serious injuries, but are reportedly in a stable condition.

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 Green and Jews were spat at for wearing a Star of David pendant in public might be a tad overblown?  That’s what I heard when Zack Polanski wondered out loud this week if Britain’s Jews are experiencing ‘actual unsafety’ or just a ‘perception of unsafety’. It is one of the most tone-deaf, pitiless sentences I have heard a politician utter. The Jews of London were terrorised all last week. There were attempted firebombings at numerous synagogues.

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 query should be on everyone’s lips. Tooled-up riot officers formed a battleline against the angry men The scenes in Epsom, Surrey were extraordinary. In response to reports of a rape, a large crowd gathered to express their fury. A local woman reported being stalked by several men after leaving a nightclub before being subjected to a sickening assault outside Epsom Methodist Church.

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 subjected to what seems to have been an act of apocalyptic Jew hatred, a fiery pogrom designed to terrify London’s Jews. This was a blazing statement of loathing for Britain’s Jews Actually, scrap that – this was a warzone. Last night’s sickening assault was the latest vile strike in a war on the rights of Jews. Four Hatzola ambulances were set on fire. Hatzola is a non-profit organisation that provides emergency medical care to the Jewish community and others.

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 like, to every pious ritual and godly doctrine. We used to call it 'freedom of thought', and our ancestors gave their lives to gift us that most cherished of liberties. The scandal surrounding Nick Timothy has really horrified me This is why the scandal surrounding the Conservative MP Nick Timothy has really horrified me. The digital mobbing of the shadow justice secretary merely for criticising the Islamic practice of mass public praying has been profoundly chilling.