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After Manchester, There Can Be No Doubt - Anti-Zionism Is Antisemitism

(Spiked-UK) Brendan O'Neill - There were two horrifying events in England on Thursday. The first was the murder of two Jews at a synagogue in Manchester. The second were the anti-Israel protests that swept big cities before the bodies of our two Jewish countrymen were even cold. "From the river to the sea!," the Israelophobic mob hollered in the deathly wake of the barbarous assault at Heaton Park. These people desire the violent erasure of the entire Jewish nation. We need to grapple with just how sick it was, how heartless, for mobs in London, Edinburgh and Manchester itself to rain hatred on the Jewish state mere hours after two Jews were murdered. On 4 October 1936, the radical left rallied to the defense of London's Jews from the menace of fascism. They stood with Jewish EastEnders against the threat of Oswald Mosley and his blackshirts. Fast forward 89 years and now the left responds to violent Jew hatred not by siding with Jewish people but by raging against the Jewish nation. They are now on the other side. The orgy of Israelophobia that followed the slaughter at the synagogue made it crystal clear: hatred for the Jewish state is a close cousin of hatred for Jewish people - two frothing ideologies that exist in tandem in modern Britain. Israelophobia is the rotten soil in which Jew hatred festers and grows. And it's time more of us said so. I've never bought into the idea that you can neatly separate the activist class's myopic dread of the Jewish state from the bubbling up in our society of bigotry against the Jewish people. After Manchester I accept it even less. If you spend every hour of every day obsessing over the unconscionable wickedness of the Jewish nation, if you ceaselessly damn Zionism as the cruelest ideology on Earth, then you have no right to come over all coy and shocked when Jews are targeted with violence. Anti-Zionism is antisemitism. After Manchester, I, for one, am devoted to the complete defeat of anti-Zionism.
2025-10-05 00:00:00
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