So I found myself on LBC today, discussing the news that some of Britain’s largest police forces have reported sharp increases in religious hatred in the past 18 months. At least, that’s what we were supposed to be discussing. Call me naïve, but I hadn’t expected demands for “Jewish figures” for casualties of the Gaza war, to be confronted with odd claims about the “Israeli secret service” or to encounter a fixation with Jews killing children. Welcome to my world, I guess.
To be fair, if I had done more thorough research, I would have unearthed this clip from April in which the presenter, Matthew Wright, had stated that “Jewish people have been killing Palestinians for years”. That would have given me a bit of a heads-up.
You can’t move for irony at the moment. Here was an impeccably liberal radio presenter on an impeccably liberal channel, interviewing a Jewish newspaperman about rising antisemitism. You’d have thought that it would be conducted with sensitivity and concern, given how much the left worries about diversity and inclusion.
Instead – entirely predictably, in hindsight – it was all a bit rum from the off. In his introduction, Wright reached for an explanation for the spread of racial hostility and quickly identified the root of it: Nigel Farage and Allison Pearson. So they were to blame! The rascals. Put this man in charge of community cohesion.
Farage, whom Wright described as “everyone’s favourite populist rabble rouser”, was fingered because he incited violence when he “questioned whether the truth was being withheld from us” after the murder of those three little girls in Southport. As for Pearson, she was blamed for being “quizzed [by police] over an allegation she stirred up racial hatred”. This was rounded up with a good bit of liberal hand-wringing. Can’t we all “dial down the emotion when feelings in the country are running high,” Wright fretted? Then he turned to me.
Now, I had been invited onto the programme to talk rising antisemitic crime, not to get involved in some culture war. Allison is a friend but I have barely met (and do not support) Farage. However, I couldn’t help but point out that the Southport attacker, whom LBC had sensationally revealed as a “Christian” in July, did turn out to be in possession of an Al Qaeda training manual, at least partly exonerating the Reform leader; and to add that the shameful police investigation into Pearson had been embarrassingly dropped.
“Some might say a leading columnist at a leading national newspaper should be more careful about what she tweets,” Wright remarked.
“Some might disagree and point the finger instead at the police,” I replied.
He seemed to be arguing that there was no smoke without fire, which is a bit of a dubious assertion at the best of times; I was arguing that the smoke itself was a figment of some diversity copper’s imagination.
But I wasn’t on air to get into a row about newspaper columnists. I tried to move on to discuss the matter at hand – which, I reminded the presenter, was antisemitic crime – but Wright, as my children would say, was determined to stretch the meme. “I think it’s at the heart of it,” he insisted. “When we’re talking about intolerance and hatred, we have to look at the role of our newspapers.” I was confused. What did poor old Allison Pearson have to do with religious hatred?
The broadcast media, however, is another matter. So I embarked upon a little homily about how for more than a year, television news has often acted as a megaphone for Hamas propaganda, aggravating antisemitism on the street. As evidence, I offered the following:
a) Only five per cent of the media mentions Israeli casualty figures, compared to the 98 per cent which cites Hamas. The jihadis do not separate the dead into civilians and combatants. By failing to mention the Israeli side of the story – that half of those killed were terrorists, a humanitarian record unequalled in any other war – the media wrongly creates the impression that the Jewish state is simply targeting the innocent.
b) The media never mentions that all footage broadcast from Gaza has been censored by Hamas. That is why it shows only dead and injured civilians, never dead and wounded terrorists, bolstering the impression that Israel is waging war on civilians. By failing to inform viewers that the film they are about to see has been censored, the media is working hand-in-glove with the jihadists.
Surprisingly, it didn’t go down well. But there was a bigger problem afoot: Four minutes had passed and nobody had mentioned dead babies! “How many children have been killed by Israeli forces then?” Wright said, apropros of nothing. “How many? I just want to know what the accurate Jewish figure is.”
The Jewish figure.
And through the looking-glass we went. After claiming that he had meant “the figure that you as a Jewish man want to put out there,” Wright doubled down on his Jews-as-baby-killers theme. My point, that Israel makes every effort to avoid harming civilians and the statistics bear this out, was drowned out by a wave of indignation.
Even more bizarrely, Wright then claimed that “the Israeli secret service” had accepted the Hamas casualty figures. What was he on about? I asked him to clarify. He huffed and grunted a bit. “I can’t because I don’t have it to hand, but I read that the Israeli secret service told, I think, the American secret service, the CIA, that they were going with the figures that Hamas had provided,” he said.
Right.
The man didn’t even seem to understand what the “secret service” was. But that was the least of my worries. Eventually, after further interruptions about dead babies – at one point, Wright rather wonderfully protested, “I don’t have any animosity towards Jewish people, I just want to know how many children have been killed” – the discussion moved onto the deeper causes of antisemitic criminality.
I argued that jihadi propaganda was tapping into a wellspring of hatred that has been present in our culture for centuries. The blood libel, for instance, in which Jews were accused of harbouring a taste for killing children, had been around since 1144 in Norwich. Clearly, it remained alive and kicking.
Anyway. I don’t want to labour the point. Perhaps Wright was having an off-day. He was working between Christmas and New Year, after all. It’s the irony of the thing that stays with me. In fact, the story itself was ironic: the media had discovered through its cunning investigations that there had been a “double spike in religious hate crime in the past 18 months”, but the Community Security Trust (CST) – a Jewish group which painstakingly monitors antisemitic crime – has already recorded this in far greater depth.
According to the latest CST data, in the first six months of 2024 alone there was a 246 per cent increase in antisemitic vandalism; a 158 per cent rise in threats against Jews; and a 41 per cent rise in assault on them. Antisemitism in schools, meanwhile, went up by 119 per cent, and in universities by a staggering 465 per cent.
But who listens to the Jews, eh?
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