Jew hate is now normal in UK – and this latest wave started with Jeremy Corbyn.T

My grandfather used to receive hate mail for fighting racists. Today I get it on social media. The volume is higher – it’s easier after all to share a tweet worldwide than write a letter – but over the weekend that hatred came off the screen and into an art gallery in Kent. It was a frenzied scrawl of hate pasted onto the walls of an exhibition space in Margate.

This morning we woke up to discover four ambulances belonging to a Jewish community charity in Golders Green, north London, had been torched by masked arsonists. While not directly linked, as far as we know, there can be no doubting the correlation between the abuse of Jews in culture, art, social media and on the streets, and direct attacks like this.

The normalising of ‘Jew hate’ in public life, starting under Jeremy Corbyn’s stewardship of the Labour Party and being super-boosted after the horrifying events of October 7, 2023, has boldened the racists and antisemites who would seek to divide us by attacking the Jewish community, one of the best-integrated, most hardworking and hitherto patriotic in the UK.

First the exhibition – promoted by Thanet District Council on its official tourism website – and depicting Jews as blood-soaked demonic creatures. The Jewish owner of Sotheby’s, Patrick Drahi, was shown “eating a baby alive”. British politicians were portrayed as puppets of the Jewish state.

Figures representing the Community Security Trust, which protects UK Jewish communities, were depicted as manipulating the media. Stars of David and swastikas were plastered around figures representing “the lobby”. It was Nazi propaganda dressed up as political art. The artist behind it was suspended as a Labour parliamentary candidate in 2019 after calling the late Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks a “hate-filled racist”. Yet the Labour-run council apparently saw no problem promoting his work on its official tourism website.

Attendees wore “Globalise the Intifada” T-shirts – a slogan that is now an arrestable offence when chanted because it is understood as a call to violence against Jews. Footage shows someone saying it directly to a Jewish visitor at the entrance. Journalist Zoë Strimpel visited on a day trip to the seaside and wandered in. “I am shaking,” she wrote afterwards, having been hounded out when she objected.

Historian Simon Schama, actor Tracy Ann-Oberman – who received an MBE for combating antisemitism – Jewish community groups and others voicing their objections: all wrong, say Kent police.When I complained, their written response said they believed the artist’s assurance that the work was not “abusive or insulting toward Jewish people” – despite one piece reading, I kid you not: “Anti-semitic art exhibition this way”.

Jews, apparently, are uniquely unqualified to recognise racism directed at ourselves.

Kent Police are not alone. Cambridgeshire Police ruled that sending an image of the Star of David intertwined with a Nazi swastika to Jews was not grossly offensive.

Academia is no better. Professor François Balloux, director of UCL’s Genetics Institute, told David Hirsh – one of the world’s foremost experts on contemporary antisemitism – that he was one of the “Jewish intellectuals” who knew “little” about antisemitism. He deleted the post the following day – the same day four Hatzola ambulances belonging to the Jewish volunteer emergency services were firebombed in a racist attack.

Jews are continually told their distress isn’t real. Meanwhile, hate crimes against British Jews are at record levels. Excuses are made and normal rules are suspended. And eventually, things are burned down. First ambulances. Then people.

When will Britain wake up to this horrific, growing threat to one of its communities?