Oldest hatred rears ugly head again

In medieval times Jews were hated and persecuted for religious reasons as “Christ killers”.

In the last century, Jews were persecuted for racial reasons due to their apparently “subhuman” phenotype, leading directly to the Holocaust.

The oldest and most persistent hatred in the world, antisemitism, never goes away but just mutates into a new form. The current manifestation is the hatred of Israel and anything it does by holding Israel

to standards that no other country is held to.

Hamas attacked Israel on October the 7th and murdered around 1,200 people, and took a large number of hostages.

Having seen some film clips taken by Hamas operatives on that day to boast about their killing of “Yahud” (Jews), I can honestly say that I have never seen such barbarity and evil in my life.

In response, Israel has attacked Hamas in Gaza leading, as in most wars, to a large loss of civilian life.

Whilst not defending this loss of life, the way in which Hamas operates means that civilians will die. It is likely that those Gazans would be alive today if Hamas had not attacked on October 7th.

In response we have regular protests and marches in Bath, and the Chronicle letters page has become something of a “Free Palestine” letters page. I would contend that many of the protesters are primarily driven not by the desire for peace or support for Palestinians, but by a hatred of Israel, currently a fusion of fashionable left-wing politics and radical Islam.

Otherwise how can one reconcile the fact that no protests or calls for a ceasefire have been organised to protest against the killing of at least 500,000 muslims (including 30,000 children) at the hands of Assad and others in the Syrian civil war over the past dozen years?

Or the lack of protests about the more than 327,000 Afghan muslim refugees forcibly ejected by Pakistan in recent weeks? Or the shameful persecution of the 11 million largely muslim Uyghars in China? No, in all of this we see the double standards and the repeated singling out of Israel.

Reasoned criticism is acceptable, but on the fringes of the protests the dark underbelly of antisemitism lurks - the latest manifestation of the oldest hatred rearing its ugly head yet again.

We must be careful that Jews in this country do not now become the target for such hatred, but I fear we are already too late.