The targeting of Jewish teenagers on Oxford Street is a wake-up call
When a friend shared a video of drama on Oxford Street on Monday night, I knew it would go viral. The clip showed a gang of men harassing a group of Jews on a bus, spitting, cursing, making obscene gestures, and even appearing to perform a Nazi salute.
This was a group of Jewish teenagers being taken by their rabbi to see the Chanukah lights at Trafalgar Square. They had stopped on Oxford Street and, in their exuberance, left the vehicle to do a Jewish dance on the pavement. That was when it happened.
Let’s start with the good news. I knew this story would attract attention because such naked demonstrations of hate are, thankfully, widely pilloried in modern Britain. We saw it when the Israeli ambassador was hounded at the LSE; we saw it when a lone aggressor walked around Stamford Hill hitting random Jews; we saw it when convoys of men abused London Jews during the Gaza conflict. On each occasion, the vast majority was appalled.
But it’s bad news from here on in. The reality that Jewish people live with every day will come as a surprise to many. Every synagogue in the country has long been patrolled by security officers, and the prominent ones are watched by police.
Every Jewish school is equipped with advanced security systems and guards, and there are at least two charities specifically dedicated to keeping the community safe.
Sadly, with good reason. The everyday threat that British Jews encounter spans the spectrum from antisemitic graffiti at one end to full-on terror attacks at the other.
Moments after this video, these teens were racially abused with Nazi salutes and spat on simply for being Jewish.
— GnasherJew®????? (@GnasherJew) December 2, 2021
These kids are celebrating Hanukkah and causing no harm to anyone.
The very idea that Jews in 2021 were treated with Nazi-level abuse in London is horrifying. pic.twitter.com/2FYsPKuwGQ
uncomfortable feeling to Have to hide the fact that you are Jewish. I’m a proud Jew. This incident made me decide to take self defence classes to improve my ability to defend myself”.
— Elad Simchayoff (@Elad_Si) December 1, 2021
Luckily, no one was hurt. Raphael says police came by and said they can’t do anything. >
Thirty years after the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia instils grave concern
Several years ago, Putin gave a passionate address to celebrate the founding of the intelligence services in the USSR. He read out a rollcall of legendary Soviet agents. The first name on the list was Yakov Isakovich Serebryansky, an agent who infiltrated the early Zionist immigration to Palestine and lived there for several years. In 1926, he moved to Paris where he led a secret group of Communist sympathisers which carried out assassinations and kidnappings.
“Uncle Yasha’s group” possessed its own laboratory and utilised chemical weapons in its struggle against the anti-Soviet opposition in Europe. Many Jews then believed passionately in the Soviet future and thereby justified throwing morality to the wind.
As with the Soviet predilection for poisons, Putin has followed his predecessors in the USSR for spreading disinformation — “fake news” — to create division in democracies. In 1959, General Ivan Agayants, who headed the KGB’s disinformation department, initiated an antisemitic graffiti campaign in West Germany to discredit Konrad Adenauer’s rule and implicitly compare it to the blemish-free Communist East Germany.
Under KGB supervision, swastikas were painted on headstones in Jewish cemeteries, antisemitic slogans written on synagogue walls and Jewish-owned shops, hate mail sent to rabbis and threatening telephone calls made to Jewish leaders. The unspoken suggestion was that not too much had changed in West Germany since 1945.
Today there have been repeated Russian attempts to stir the fires of populism and racism in an outreach to the European far Right — to figures in the British National Party, the Hungarian Jobbik and the French Front National.
And then there is the manufactured crisis of hapless refugees sandwiched between Belarus and Poland. For Jews, it brings to mind the time in 1938 when stateless Polish Jews, expelled from Nazi Germany, were located in the limbo of Zbąszyń on the Polish-German border. Close to 10,000 Jews were marooned in deteriorating, insanitary conditions while both Poles and Germans refused to budge.