At last, the left has found something to get angry about following the anti-Semitic attack in Golders Green in London this week. No, not the actual burning of four Jewish ambulances, don’t be silly. It’s the sight of angry Jews that has pissed them off. The frothing Israelophobes of the digital left have shown more fury over the behaviour of London’s exasperated Jews than they did over the savage act of arson that caused them such exasperation.
Over the past 48 hours, ‘Golders Green’ has finally trended in the digital hovels of the keffiyeh classes. But it’s not the setting alight of those four Hatzola ambulances in the early hours of Monday morning that has got them chatting and seething. It’s the fact that local Jews responded angrily to the presence of Al Jazeera reporters and basically told them to fuck off. Burning Jewish charity ambulances? Meh. Being rude to Al Jazeera hacks? How dare you.
It was in the daylight of Monday morning, as the wreckage of the ambulances still smouldered, that Jews in Golders Green bristled at the sight of Al Jazeera. They gathered around its reporters. They told them to leave. They made an impromptu chant: ‘Al Jazeera off our streets!’ No fists were thrown, which is more than can be said for Islamist gatherings, where ‘disagreeable’ journalists are frequently threatened and forced out. It was just an angry protest by a community that only hours earlier had been invaded by anti-Semitic arsonists.
One man in particular has got leftists spluttering into their iced coffees. His name is David Soffer. Video footage appears to show him speaking in Arabic to the Al Jazeera reporters, calling them ‘dogs’ and ‘donkeys’ and telling them to ‘go back to Qatar’ (where Al Jazeera is based). It has since been revealed that he is a volunteer officer in the Metropolitan Police. There’s now a wild digital clamour for him to get the boot. The Met has referred him to its department of professional standards.
I can’t be the only person who finds it sickening that the activist class has expended more energy on naming and shaming an angry Jew than they did condemning the fascistic act that made him angry. We seriously need some perspective on the behaviour of Mr Soffer and the other people in Golders Green. This was not ‘a mob’ hell-bent on shutting down foreign journalists. They were just worried Jews who weren’t best pleased to see a media outlet that has been accused of anti-Semitism covering an anti-Semitic attack in their neighbourhood.
Some are calling the angry Jews a ‘racist mob’. Grow up. ‘Donkey’ is an incredibly common insult in the Arabic language. And funnily enough in Irish culture, too. My brother called me a donkey on WhatsApp just last week. Perhaps I should report him for racial hatred. It is shameless Orwellianism and grotesque victim-shaming to damn as ‘racist’ a community that had just suffered a racist assault. It wasn’t enough that Jewish Golders Green was violently attacked – it had to be libelled, too. The salt of defamation rubbed into the wound of racist violence.
The true narrative of Golders Green – which is that Britain’s Jews have suffered a bloody wave of racism since Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October 2023 – has been utterly turned on its head by the ghouls of the Islamo-left. The British Muslim website 5Pillars put out a video titled ‘Golders Green attack and [harass] Arab journalists’. And so, courtesy of the twisted morality of that unholy alliance of foolish socialists and nutty Islamic hardliners, the story of Golders Green is no longer one of Jewish pain but of Jewish menace. The victims of racism reimagined as racists – the final grim accomplishment of the Jew-baiters in our midst.
What we are witnessing is the theft from the Jews of their moral status. Under the regime of identitarianism, the Jews can never be victims. They’re too ‘white’ for that. So their every claim to victimisation must be dismantled. Almost instinctively – but no less brutishly for that – the Islamo-left swarms on any story about Jewish suffering and seeks to disprove or dampen it. They must, in order to maintain their hierarchy of oppression in which Jews are hyper-privileged and suspect, and Muslims are oppressed and noble. Hence the events in Golders Green are twisted from a story of Jews being beleaguered by anti-Semites to Arabs being beleaguered by Jews.
This digital mobbing of concerned Jews is in keeping with the regime of moral inversion we have been living under since 7 October 2023. Time and again, the Jews are cast as perpetrators, even where they are the victims. Hamas subjects Israelis to genocidal violence and yet it’s Israel that is called genocidal. British Jews suffer an unprecedented spike in anti-Semitic incidents and yet they’re damned as ‘privileged’. Golders Green is subjected to the fires of racial hatred and yet it is Golders Green that gets called racist and hateful. This is the violent gutting of the truth in the service of keeping Jews in their place – that is, as symbols of ‘whiteness’ and ‘privilege’ that leftists and Islamists might righteously hate.
Someone needs to say it: it is perfectly logical that Jews waking up to news of anti-Semitic terror would be annoyed to see Al Jazeera skulking around. This is the media empire that is described by some as the mouthpiece of Hamas. Its digital channel, AJ+, has called into question the Holocaust. It has hawked conspiracy theories about the Jews controlling the porn industry and hating Jesus Christ. I’m not Jewish but if I had been in Golders Green that morning, with the smoke of Jew hatred getting in my eyes, I might also have invited the Al Jazeera guys to sling their hook.
There is nothing the left and its Islamist allies hate more than an angry Jew. They don’t mind them when they’re meek, when they just shut up and put up with anti-Semitism. But when they push back, when they hit the streets, when they shout, when they ‘weaponise’ their experiences of racism, as the left loves to accuse them of doing – that’s unacceptable. Listen, if Jewish anger grosses you out more than anti-Jewish violence, then you are further down the road of fascism than you might think.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.
