Judging by my social media last weekend, the world is full of Nazis, neo-nazis, white supremacists and associated antisemites. Scores of them have tweeted me caricatures of hook-nosed Jews, cartoons supportive of Hitler, a picture of a domestic gas oven and dozens of less artistic references about how Jews are responsible for bringing into the West Muslims, Africans, refugees and others who in some way supposedly threaten their way of life.
It came about like this. On Friday morning I bumped into a woman I know who is Jewish. She looked worried, as many Jews do these days. She’s a pretty tough person but as we talked she was on the verge of tears. She seemed to want reassurance but her daughter, at a large university, had some direct experience in the last weeks of anti-Jewish sentiment being expressed by a few fellow students. It was becoming a “Can we live here?” conversation.
On the back of it I tweeted that Jews needed friendship and it would be great if people — whatever their view on Gaza — attended Sunday’s rally in solidarity with the Jewish community. Nearly 4,000 people “liked” this tweet.
But a comedian who seems to appear on GB News a lot decided to counterpose this tweet with the headline from a column I wrote six years ago, which was an argument against the idea of “white” interests here in Britain. “How it started”, this comedian wrote over the column; “how it’s going”, he wrote over the tweet.
