At the end of my road in London there’s a squat, grey building. It is surrounded by a 10ft wall and spikes. The windows are blacked out; there are perhaps six security cameras. There aren’t any signs. So what is it? My guess was a Ministry of Defence black site. My boyfriend said “it looks like an ICE [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement] centre”. I looked it up: it is a Jewish primary school.
Every day nearly 300 little children are effectively smuggled in and out of this dingy fortress, while children at every other school in the area happily run in, freely, in full, leafy view.
Walk around here at drop-off time and you will mostly see lots of little girls, some as young as five, in hijabs, being delivered by their mothers, often in burqas.
The burqas are for another column.
All I’ll say now is that every single one of these women, even in their restrictive, misogynistic shrouds, are freer than those Jewish children.
There is a word for this. It is antisemitism.
Who is actually tackling it? Sir Keir Starmer tells us “antisemitism” will not be tolerated, but doesn’t seem to know how (or want) to make it happen. In a constituency in Birmingham, where it’s 45 per cent Muslim (it’s only 26 per cent here), police have said they will ban Jewish fans at a game at Villa Park next month. Starmer’s first — and so far sole — response? “This is the wrong decision.” It reads like any old average tweet. Why hasn’t he said more?
It’s true that the local MP, Ayoub Khan, speaking on Newsnight on Thursday, told the prime minister to butt out. “He is clearly wrong,” he sniffed. He seemed to agree that Maccabi Tel Aviv fans are, in the words of another independent MP, Iqbal Mohamed, “terrorists” who made “vile chants of racism and hatred” at a fixture in Amsterdam in November last year.
Iqbal Mohamed, the MP for Dewsbury and Batley
THOMAS KRYCH/ANADOLU/GETTY IMAGES
My view is: what fans don’t? If you were to ban all supporters who chanted slightly the wrong things at matches, there wouldn’t be any matches at all. Surely the police can handle some rude words? Haven’t they, after all, had a bit of practice over the past few years, what with the streets flooded with thousands of people calling for the violent maiming and slaughter of the Jews? In Birmingham they swept through the Bullring shopping centre, home to Hotel Chocolat, shouting: “Death, death to the IDF!” Why can’t the coppers cope now?
As it happens, Maccabi Tel Aviv fans are about a five out of ten. A friend says “they’re no Beitar Jerusalem”. They aren’t Millwall fans, who seem to think every football match is the re-enactment of a 1290 crusade. They aren’t the Italian Ultras, whose “weapon of choice is a belt”. They aren’t the Turkish fans of Galatasaray, four of whom stabbed two Leeds supporters to death in Istanbul in 2000; the team still plays in the UK.
Sure, in Amsterdam they tore down Palestinian flags and “ignored a minute of silence for the flood victims in Spain”. But for this they were rewarded with an actual pogrom; 900 thugs, describing themselves as “Jew-hunters”, poured into the city, attacking them. Four were jailed.
So what, exactly, is it the police fear? Is it “violence” from a paltry 1,000 Jewish fans, or violence from other people? It’s the latter, of course. It’s extraordinary: I can’t recall another football match where it was the fans who had to be protected from the public.
Maccabi Tel Aviv fans at match in Cyprus in July
XENOPHON KARAKALOS/ALTO PRESS/AVALON
This, then, is the latest round of victim-blaming. Jews can’t enjoy football because they attract too much trouble. Never mind that it’s trouble from other people; Jews must pay the price, must be curtailed, shut away, made small.
It is the purest form of antisemitism: blaming Jews for their own downfall. Yet no one stops it. The BBC, councils, even the police — they all jump on the bandwagon, telling us exactly how difficult Jews are.
The BBC runs articles on how “common” it is now to be banned from matches, as if to say: what’s their problem? MPs, meanwhile, barely conceal their desire to punish Jews for their “genocide”, to sideline them, to expel them from mainstream life, while positioning themselves as being morally above them, claiming they are “inclusive” and pure. It is horrible.
In Khan and his fellow independent, Mohamed, Starmer has a nightmare. For a start, Mohamed is happy to openly attack “Zionist propaganda” and spew antisemitic tropes from a former Labour seat. “Why does Israel get to compete in Europe and Palestinian teams can’t compete anywhere?” he mooed last Thursday. Well, for a start, Palestine isn’t a country. And the fact that people are summarily executing other people for disagreeing with them in Palestine right now might make sports federations a tad nervous.
Perhaps Mohamed is worried — most of his election campaign was spent calling for a ceasefire. Now it’s happened he must be thinking of standing down. Khan, too. I’m joking of course. They’re not going to stand down any more than they’ll stop hating on Jews.
Why are these men allowed to behave like they’re MPs for Palestine, rather than anything to do with this country? Turning their constituencies into isolated hate-filled mini-caliphates? Two weeks ago, Robert Jenrick claimed that nearby Handsworth was one of the “worst integrated places” he’d seen. The mayor of the West Midlands, Richard Parker (not the tiger from Life of Pi), called him “racist”. Who’s racist now?
The police, councils, mayors, oversight committees — no one is stopping them. Why? Because many of them agree with the racist MPs and it goes as far, perhaps, as No 10. If you want to know how little Starmer cares about all this, look at who he sent to deal with it. Not the home secretary, who is a Muslim, and from Birmingham, but, hilariously, the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy. Yes, the one who does fashion shows and TV.
Meanwhile, there’s a sign outside the Jewish primary school advertising a football camp. The game, it says, is “fun first” and “inclusive”.
Who’s going to tell them?