Brendan O’Neill

There’s a new movement in town: Philistines for Palestine. Not content with traipsing through the streets every other weekend to holler their hatred for Israel, now ‘pro-Palestine’ activists are taking aim at art. Witness yesterday’s fevered attack on the painting of Lord Balfour at Cambridge university – an act of petulant, self-satisfied philistinism that will do precisely nothing to help people in Gaza.  The slashing of the painting was carried out by a member of a group called Palestine Action. She walked up to the 1914 portrait and sprayed it with red paint before wielding her knife to cut it to shreds. Why target Balfour? Because he played a key role in creating the modern state of Israel. And to the manically Israelophobic left, there are few sins as grave as that.

I don’t understand right-wingers who spend most of their time on the internet. Often they’re found tut-tutting over what they view as the haughty refusal of Muslims to integrate into British society. And yet when it is proposed that we build a monument to the Muslims who fought with us in two world wars – surely the ultimate act of integration into a nation’s values – they spit out their tea in fury. They’re hopping mad when Muslims don’t integrate, and ticked off when they do. What gives? Some keyboard warriors see it differently This is the news that the government will give £1 million towards a memorial for Muslim soldiers. Jeremy Hunt announced it in his Budget speech.

‘William: Fighting in Gaza must be brought to an end’, bellows the Daily Telegraph's front page today, next to an image of a distressed-looking Prince of Wales. Call me a Cromwellian, but what century are we in? I thought the days of British royals haughtily issuing moral instructions, least of all to foreigners, were behind us. I find William’s intervention in the Gaza crisis deeply troubling. To be fair to him (briefly) he didn’t quite order the Israelis to quit their pursuit of Hamas. But he did signal his moral revulsion for the war. And that raises serious questions about the role of the royals. Do we really want our future king wading in on geopolitical matters? I don’t. What about those wars, William?

So Labour still has cranks in its ranks. The party remains a haven for conspiracy theorists. For all Keir Starmer’s claims to have rooted out the ‘anti-Zionist’ hotheads that swarmed the party in the Corbyn years, there still seem to be a fair few around. Consider the Azhar Ali affair. Mr Ali is the Labour candidate in the upcoming Rochdale by-election. This is a man who has promoted the poisonous, post-truth claim that Israel ‘deliberately’ allowed the Hamas pogrom of 7 October to go ahead. Who has said Israel permitted the slaughter of more than a thousand of its own citizens so that it would have a ‘green light’ to invade Gaza. Ali made these vile utterances at a meeting of the Lancashire Labour party shortly after the 7 October attacks.

We really have seen the worst of politics over the past 24 hours. I’m not referring to Rishi Sunak’s dig at Keir Starmer for not knowing what a woman is – a swipe made while Esther Ghey, mother of the murdered trans teenager Brianna, was in Parliament. I’m referring to the cynical milking of this Commons spat by those who are desperate to get one over on the Prime Minister. They're calling Sunak ‘crass’, but that insult suits them far better. It isn't the PM who has lost his moral bearings – it’s his noisy, fuming critics. All Sunak did during Prime Minister's Questions was mock his opposite number for his ceaseless U-turning, including on the question of what a woman is. Sir Keir is notoriously bad at giving a straight answer to that simplest of queries.

The Clapham chemical attack is ‘not really about asylum’. An actual government minister said this. Not some junior scribe for the Guardian or a right-on irritant with his pronouns and the Palestine flag in his social-media bio. No, a minister. A member of the cabinet. One of the highest officials in the land. The Tories really have lost the plot, haven’t they? It was Gillian Keegan, the education secretary. She was on Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips on Sky News. He probed her about the horrific attack in Clapham on Wednesday night when a mother and her two young daughters were doused with alkali.

Here’s my question about Abdul Ezedi, the suspect in the Clapham chemical attack: what the hell was he doing in this country? He came here from Afghanistan by illegal means. He was twice turned down for asylum. And in 2018, at Newcastle Crown Court, he was found guilty of sexual assault. And yet despite all that he was later granted asylum, after a priest vouched that he had converted to Christianity. Now this supposed Christian stands accused of repaying the witless charity of our nation by allegedly carrying out one of the grimmest crimes imaginable: dousing a mother and her two daughters with a corrosive substance. The injuries sustained by the mum and the youngest girl, who is just three, are said to be ‘life-changing’.

Sometimes a politician says something that makes you wonder if they’re living on a different planet. This week it was Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf. He said there is a dearth of political concern for the poor people of Gaza. It feels like ‘Palestinian blood is very cheap’, he said. It seems to me that it isn’t concern for Muslim life that motors the protesting classes – it’s contempt for Israel I’m sorry, what? There have been more public displays of sorrow for the people of Gaza than for any other people caught up in a war as far back as I can remember. Solidarity with Gazans is virtually mandatory at dinner parties across the land. Few wars have pricked the conscience of the middle classes as much as this one.

Where have all the anti-racists gone? You couldn’t move for anti-racists in recent years. They thundered from their newspaper pulpits about the evils of ‘white privilege’. They were in schools, universities, workplaces, re-educating the throng in racial correct-speak. They loudly wrung their hands over Brexit, and us dim gammon who voted for it, warning that leaving the EU would unleash a 1930s-style hate fest. They colonised football: every match came with a BLM knee-taking ritual and finger-wagging warnings about racial prejudice. They hit the streets, hollering ‘Stand up to racism!’ and ‘Silence is violence!’. They saw racism absolutely everywhere. In every nook of society, every innocent utterance.

Anyone who’s ever had a conversation with a Corbynista will know it’s impossible to talk to these people about anti-Semitism. The minute you mention the world’s oldest hatred their ‘buts’ come flying. ‘But what about Islamophobia?’, they say. ‘But what about other forms of racism?’, they cry. It’s like a tic, an involuntary ideological spasm that makes them mouth that intrusive ‘BUT’ before you’ve even got through all six syllables of ‘anti-Semitism’. For those of us who have tried to draw attention to rising Jew hatred in recent years, it is incredibly frustrating. I’ve been ‘butted’ in numerous TV and radio debates. You come to expect it.

I can’t decide if last night’s Labour revolt was an act of pointless narcissism or sinister appeasement. Maybe it was both. On one hand it will make not the slightest difference to world affairs that 56 Labour MPs defied their party leader and backed an ‘immediate ceasefire’ in the Israel-Hamas war. They ignored Keir Starmer’s plea for party unity on the right of Israel to defend itself against the anti-Semitic terrorists of Hamas and put their names to an SNP amendment calling for an end to the ‘collective punishment of the Palestinian people’. Will the Israelis be quaking in their boots that such political luminaries as Lloyd Russell-Moyle and Naz Shah have insisted it lay down its arms? I doubt it.

Those of us who believe in freedom of expression have felt mighty lonely this week. We have watched as, one by one, our fellow opponents of cancel culture have given into the temptations of censorship. Many on the right in particular appear to have fallen under the spell of suppression. Gone is their devotion to the ‘marketplace of ideas’ and in its stead comes a chilling cry for a literal police clampdown on speech they don’t like. The target of these overnight converts to cancel culture? Saturday’s ‘March for Palestine’ in London. For the fourth weekend running, tens of thousands of people will gather in the capital to rage against Israel. Worse, this time their orgy of Israelophobia will take place on Armistice Day. Enough is enough, many are saying. The police must act.