Strolling While Jewish
by Mark Steyn
Steyn on Britain
Programming note: Please join me tomorrow, Wednesday, for another midweek Clubland Q&A, when I'll be taking questions from Mark Steyn Club members live around the planet - but do note that, for various logistical reasons, we'll be kicking off an hour earlier than usual: that's 2pm North American Eastern - which is 7pm British Summer Time/8pm Central European.
~Happy Passover, the holiday when American Jews attempt to pass over an Ivy League campusand British Jews attempt to pass over a Central London thoroughfare. Surveying the scene at Columbia, Powerline's Scott Johnson posts a picture of Nazis preventing Jews from entering the University of Vienna in 1938.
We are enjoined not to go full Godwin's this early in the column, but the photograph prompted this thought: A century ago, the Jews of Germany were the most assimilated in Europe. They had prospered under the Kaiser, and seemed set to do even better in the Weimar Republic. They were industrialists, intellectuals, scientists, artists... A quarter of the thousand richest men in Prussia were Jews. As we heard on a pertinent Tale for Our Time, if you were an ambitious Jew born in the Bukovina or points east, you dreamed of Berlin and Vienna.
And then...
What Germany was to the Jews of a century ago, America is today. New York is the world's most Jewish city, and Brooklyn is famously the most Jewish place on earth, with more Jews than either Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. As in Germany, Jews are the businessmen, brain surgeons, physicists, film producers. I take it as read that the day is fast-approaching when London, Paris, Toronto, Copenhagen will be Jew-free. But New York?
Well, it depends whether you think Jewish students being advised for their personal safety to leave Columbia University and take cover elsewhere is just an unfortunate one-off ...or whether America is in the midst of a sea-change in its general attitude to Jews. As I wrote fifteen years ago:
The Islamicization of Europe entails certain consequences, and it might be worth exploring what these might be. There are already many points of cultural friction—from British banks' abolition of children's "piggy banks" to the enjoining of public doughnut consumption by Brussels police during Ramadan.
And yet on one issue there is remarkable comity between the aging ethnic Europeans and their young surging Muslim populations: A famous poll a couple of years back found that 59 per cent of Europeans regard Israel as the greatest threat to world peace.
Fifty-nine percent? What the hell's wrong with the rest of you? Hey, relax: In Germany, it was 65 per cent; Austria, 69 per cent; the Netherlands, 74 per cent. For purposes of comparison, in a recent poll of Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—i.e., the "moderate" Arab world—79 per cent of respondents regard Israel as the greatest threat to world peace. As far as I know, in the last year or two, they haven't re-tested that question in Europe, possibly in case Israel now scores as a higher threat level in the Netherlands than in Yemen.
Me in 2009. Back then, I assumed that America would continue to be a lone exception to the single-issue "remarkable comity" between the west's native peoples and their culturally confident Muslim incomers. Now? At Columbia, a pasty blonde trustiefundie stood with a sign reading "Al-Qasam's Next Target" with an arrow pointing to the small group of Jews holding a Jewish counter-demonstration:
The al-Qassam Brigades are the fellows who pulled off October 7th. Me again, from almost two decades ago - March 2006:
If I were a Palestinian, I'd occasionally wonder what I had to do to get a bad press.
Well, now we know that murder and rape and kidnapping and torture and kiddie-burning ain't gonna cut it, not with your Ivy League co-eds. As Julie Burchill says in The Spectator, "'anti-Semitism' doesn't cover what's going on right now". That's true: there are people who find Jews all a bit Jewy and don't want them in the country club ...and there are people who cheer on the gang-rape of the Jewesses and the torching of their infants. A term that embraces the lot doesn't seem terribly useful when the children of white upscale American liberals have moved en masse to the hardcore end of the spectrum - and pointing out Hamas atrocities doesn't resonate with them because that's what they like about it.
Meanwhile, across the pond:
Q: Why did the Jew cross the road?
A: To get away from the Brit wanker copper threatening to arrest him for being "openly Jewish".
The following exchange between a Jewish Londoner and a Metropolitan policeman took place on Saturday, and prompted a lot of weekend commentary. It occurred not in some obscure corner of the capital, but in the heart of town - in the Aldwych, home to Australia House, India House, various West End theatres and the church of St Clement Danes, as featured in "Oranges and Lemons", which the bells play four times a day. So, it's fine for Commonwealth High Commissioners, theatregoers, and the last three Anglicans in southern England. But not Jews.
Gideon Falter had just left his synagogue and was wearing a - stand well back! - yarmulke. Talk about flaunting it:
"Openly Jewish"? Yes, indeed. By swanking about so ostentatiously Jewily, the big pushy in-your-face Jew risked provoking a breach of the peace:
Another officer says: 'There's a unit of people here now. You will be escorted out of this area so you can go about your business, go where you want freely or, if you choose to remain here, because you are causing a breach of peace with all these other people you will be arrested.'
He clarifies: 'Your presence here is antagonising a large group of people that we can't deal with all of them if they attack you... because your presence is antagonising them.'
Beneath the various columns, multiple commenters point out that Gideon Falter is not just some random Jewish pedestrian, but the very head of the Campaign Against Antisemitism and was not merely strolling around but seeking to provoke a confrontation.
That may all be true. Mr Falter is not a policeman but he is a tone-policeman: He's the fellow who decided who was and wasn't respectable enough to be welcome at the big anti-Semitism march in London a few months back, and clarified that "No one wants to march with Tommy Robinson." Indeed, the Metropolitan Police used Falter's disavowal of Robinson as the pretext for arresting the latter. The Met's Deputy Assistant Commissioner Ade Adelekan:
Having spoken to the Campaign Against Antisemitism, Tommy Robinson is not welcome at the march on Sunday.
[UPDATE! Even in the choked sewer of current Met policing policy, being "not welcome" is apparently insufficient: This very day the charges against Robinson have been dismissed on the quaint grounds that his arrest was not lawful.]
But what goes around comes around: like Mr Robinson vis-à-vis Mr Falter's march, Mr Falter was not welcome at the Hamacidal maniacs' march. So the coppers threatened to do to Falter what they'd done to Robinson. As I had cause to observe re the so-called "national conservative" conference in Brussels, tone-policing isn't going to save you.
Be that as it may, Deputy Assistant Jobsworth Matt Twist felt obliged to apologise to Mr Falter:
The use of the term 'openly Jewish' by one of our officers is hugely regrettable. It's absolutely not the basis on which we make decisions, it was a poor choice of words and while not intended, we know it will have caused offence to many. We apologise.
However, continued the Jobsworth, it's still all the Jews' fault for being quite so Jewy:
They must know that their presence is provocative, that they're inviting a response and that they're increasing the likelihood of an altercation.
Yeah, why can't you Jews just make like Anne Frank and go lie low in the attic for the duration?
This caused another social-media frenzy, so the coppers were obliged to withdraw the statement and apologise for any distress caused by their previous apology.
I am surprised that anyone was surprised by any of this: For the entirety of this century, HM Constabulary has been entirely indifferent to the industrial-scale gang-rape of twelve-year-old girls in every town up and down the spine of England. Why would perambulating Jews prompt a reconsideration of their boundless deference to Islam and its preoccupations?
Nevertheless, the Campaign Against Antisemitism is now planning a march this Saturday for "tolerance and decency".
I hate to quibble, but those two things don't necessarily go together: If you "tolerate", as Britain has done, the demographic transformation of your cities, you may find the populace has insufficient in common for common "decency". I've been writing about the metastasizing Jew-hate for a long time now - random column from a decade ago here - and in the teeth of the obsolescent obsessions of the "Official Jews", chaps like the ADL's Abe Foxman and his northern equivalent, Bernie Farber, the Islamoschmoozing bigshot who, if he's remembered at all, it will only be for his role in the de-Jewing of Canada.
So I find the calls for "tolerance and decency" not quite up to the challenge of the hour. As I keep reiterating, it's simple arithmetic now: The UK's Jewish population is old and minimally fruitful; the Muslim population is youthful and growing:
1981:
Jews: 330,000
Muslims: 553,0002021:
Jews: 277,653
Muslims: 3,868,133
So, in five years' time, there will be fewer Jews in Britain - and more Muslims. Name a country where more Muslims means better times for Jews. I'll wait.
So we're way past pleas for "tolerance and decency" here. I was struck by this point in Julie Burchill's Spectator column:
I just keep thinking of how lonely British Jews must feel, seeing the swastikas paraded about on the streets of the capital they have contributed so much to.
That's true. In the last year or so, several famous British Jews have used that same word to me: "lonely." But there's plenty of loneliness to go around: In nothing flat, the Anglo-Celtic population of "the United Kingdom"'s capital has declined to a mere third of the city's inhabitants:
When over sixty per cent of a UK city is of non-UK descent, who's available to be your constables and, in another five years, your chief inspectors? And, when the preponderance of your immigrants are from cultures where all the Jews are dead or fled, why would you expect your own society to be any different?
Demographic transformation leads to social alienation: ask the last Cockneys looking for a jellied eel on the Old Kent Road. If you're not terribly political, the easiest way to ameliorate cultural loneliness is to string along with what appears to be the winning side. A couple of months back, at my DC trial, every potential juror felt obliged to say that of course he thought "climate change" was real: Why wouldn't he? That's simply the default setting of our public discourse. Likewise, in a fast Islamising west, it requires enormous strength not simply to fall in line.
Does that go for the United States too? At the dawn of the wasted "war on terror", Israel's best friends anywhere on the planet were America's Evangelical Christians. Two decades on, their children are not quite as pro-Hamas as the Ivy League trustiefundies, but they're getting there:
Support for Israel among young Evangelicals has plummeted by over 50% in just three years, posing a potential threat to American backing for the Jewish State...
As of late 2021, only 33.6% of young Evangelicals under 30 support Israel, compared to 67.9% in 2018. At the same time, in 2021, 24.3% of young Evangelicals said they support the Palestinians, compared to only 5% three years before.
And so the daughter of Ilhan Omar, the terrorist sympathiser who committed immigration fraud to get into America, feels more at home on an Ivy League campus in the world's most Jewish city than any Jews do.
What's going to change this trajectory? A march for "tolerance and decency"? A campaign by Prevent or some other similarly useless government agency to persuade Muslims and the British cities they run to be less antipathetic to Jews? Mass deportations?
Well, that last has found an unlikely champion in the Canadian Liberal Party's estranged attack poodle, Warren Kinsella. For virtually my entire adult life, Mr Kinsella has been denouncing me as a racist for my misgivings about the virtues of "diversity" and "multiculturalism". Alas, never glad confident morning again:
Multiculturalism was naïve. It let its guard down. It persuaded us that every single newcomer would come here and treat every other culture with dignity and respect.
They didn't. They haven't. A minority, hearts of hate beating in their chests, came here to hate some more.
Well, multiculturalism was an experiment, and it was an experiment that hasn't worked out.
We are, as the saying goes, a country of immigrants. That shouldn't change.
But the ones who come here to spread hate?
It's time to kick them out.
Yeah, well, good luck with that. Maybe you could borrow all those 'planes Rishi Sunak ordered up to fly Albanian sex-traffickers to Rwanda.
Diversity is where nations go to die. Mr Kinsella and his equivalents elsewhere in the Anglosphere sought a top-to-toe transformation of their societies - and now that the old order is dead they're suddenly squeamish about what's arising before their eyes.
Oh, and Happy St George's Day - if you can still say that in the new England.
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