We can no longer stay blind to the hatred towards Britain’s Jews, writes Shelagh Fogarty

I don’t always stick with it though. If I’m on holiday or it’s someone else’s moment I’m good at looking away and getting on with whatever I have in hand.

When I awoke to the October 7th attacks in 2023 and began absorbing what that murderous series of events amounted to I knew in my bones the world had arrived at one of those hinge points we’ve seen before in history. Pearl Harbour, The German invasion of Poland, Dresden, Hiroshima, 9/11. All different.

All defining. All consuming at the time.

I won’t labour every detail and opinion since that awful morning in 2023. You’ll have seen it and heard it. You’ll have your view on it and what followed on from it. You’ll have suffered the never ending aftershocks.

The latest aftershock is the stabbing of two Jewish men in the streets of Golders Green in North West London on Wednesday morning. A man armed with a knife and carrying a rucksack on his back attacked a man in his 30s and another in his 70s.

Thankfully both survived and are being treated in hospital. It’s the latest in a never ending litany of threat and assault on the lives of British Jews. Unacceptable and taken far too lightly until, I hope, this week.

I want to address my words here mostly to Britain’s non Jewish community.

Sir Keir Starmer, what did you say in your Downing Street statement on Thursday that you couldn’t have said last week, last month, last year? Nothing. What took you so long? Was the political need to recognise a Palestinian State where no such leadership or framework exists really more important than the lives and safety of British Jews?

I don’t think you are a bad man but you are a too cautious man. Sometimes right screams at you. Let it in and act. Not everything needs to be weighed against something else.

To the pro Palestinian protestors, among whom I count friends and, sadly now, some former friends who couldn’t bear dissent - did you really not see the placards bearing vicious blood libel ‘cartoons’ of bleeding babies thrown in a waste bin along with a star of David? Are you really not aware of Hizbut Tahir and pro Iranian agitators? Are you so historically illiterate you still claim Jews have no place in the Middle East? Not just since 1948 but for long centuries leading up to it. Did you not see you were becoming cheerleaders for those who would stab a Jewish pensioner in the face and neck the second he placed a kippah on his head at a bus stop? For shame.

Being a broadcaster saying these things has sometimes been a lonely place. Abuse online and off. Verbal attack in the street. What I thought was obvious was not. What gives me absolute certainty it must be said is what I learned as a child about Jew hate.

The vandalised Jewish cemetery next to my Catholic parish church, books like Judith Kerr’s ‘When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit’, Connie Ten Boom’s ‘The Hiding Place’, ITV’s series ‘Holocaust’, films, documentaries, the Holocaust Survivor who spoke to my class in 1976 when I was ten years old and the excruciating documentary by Claude Lannsman ‘Shoah’….the list is endless.

I’m going to Poland for the first time in September with a friend who grew up alongside me in in Liverpool, educated on all of the above. We’ll visit Auschwitz. When we do I’ll have in my mind the woman from the town who told Claude Lannsman she knew what was happening but hey, what could she do? The Jews got on people’s nerves.

Don’t be that woman.

Be a friend to your Jewish neighbours and when ugly voices tell you the Jews get on their nerves, get on THEIR nerves.

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Listen to LBC's Shelagh Fogarty from 1-4pm Monday to Friday on the LBC app.

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