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Let's Put an End to Ingrained Jew Hate in Britain
(Telegraph-UK) Lord David Frost - I thought Jewish people were surely as safe in Britain as anyone else. Apparently the British Jewish community must now live in fear. It sees its schools and synagogues under airport-style security and watches its children drilled in responses to attacks - while the rest of the population need do none of these things. Sadly, security at Jewish institutions has been necessary since the mid-1990s in response to largely foreign-inspired Palestinian and Islamist terrorism. But what we have been seeing recently is different. Our Jewish fellow citizens fear to wear Jewish symbols in the street, to overtly identify as Jewish, and, it seems nowadays, even to go about their normal business in Jewish areas. In short, they are facing a growing campaign of intimidation and systematic incitement to violence. This has happened because we have let it happen. The political and social response to the Gaza war - caused, let us not forget, by a horrific pogrom of murder, rape, and mutilation - has created a hostile environment. The Government's recognition of "Palestine" - an action which has made precisely zero difference on the ground - has only served to legitimize all those who want to think that "Zionists" are bad people and deserve everything they get. We don't have to put up with the terrorizing of Jewish people in Britain. We are going to have to over-correct until something like normality has returned. For now, pro-Palestine marches should be prohibited. Open expressions of antisemitism in the mass media, in mosques, or on the streets need to be banned and prosecuted. We should deport foreign nationals who are guilty of this and revoke British citizenship for those who have acquired it. We need exemplary prosecutions and sentences for any kind of violence or intimidation of the Jewish community. In short, we need to get tough if we are to reset the norms of civilized behavior in a democratic liberal state. I don't particularly welcome any of this. But for now, either we ignore the problem and see it get ever worse and ever harder to tackle, or we face up to it while we still can. Do we want to be the generation that let the Jewish community be intimidated into silence or out of the country? Shame on us if we do. But I think, even nowadays, we are better than that. The writer is a British diplomat who served as a Minister of State in the Cabinet Office in 2021.