We see what you’re doing, Sadiq Khan - The Jewish Chronicle

He obviously thought he’d get away with it. In his video message to mark the end of Ramadan, the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, couldn’t help but slip in a bit of the old Israelophobia, sprinkled with the thin camouflage of concern for Sudan. This was a little bit like one of those cartoons showing a very large elephant hiding behind a very thin tree.

On the whole, the clip was quite sweet. It showed Muslims at prayer, eating together and giving to charity in an effort to “spread the light” at the end of their holy month. But no celebration of “diversity” is complete without sticking it to the Jews. So it wasn’t long before the mayor brought up everybody’s favourite political cause.

“This year, for many, the usual happiness we feel during Eid will be tempered by the appalling suffering and killing that continues in Sudan and Palestine,” he said. “More than 50,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza as a result of Israel’s ongoing military campaign, including more than 15,000 children.” He then tossed in a couple of perfunctory lines about the civil war in Sudan before concluding: “I’m proud that while the international community has chosen to avert its gaze, Londoners have not.”

It was all so transparent. For one thing, every Ramadan coincides with some horrific violence somewhere in the Muslim world. The civil war in Sudan is now entering its third year. How come it didn’t bother the mayor last year, or the one before? How come his Eid message made no mention of the catastrophe in Yemen – the world’s worst humanitarian crisis – and his previous ones never included a lament for the victims of the Syrian civil war? Was “the usual happiness we feel during Eid” not affected by these appalling conflicts which have nothing to do with Jews?

Clearly, somebody pointed out that singling Israel out for criticism, when there was so much other blood being merrily shed elsewhere in the world, would feel a bit rum, so the team groped around for a tree for the elephant to hide behind. Sudan? That’ll do. But we see the elephant, Mr Khan. We see you.

The offence was compounded when the mayor informed us that he was proud that Londoners had not “averted their gaze” from Gaza. By which he presumably meant the wonderful rallies that continue to disfigure our capital city while normal people are trying to get on with their lives. This was his idea of “diversity”? What about London’s Jews? Or does “inclusivity” stop at the sight of a Star-of-David (unless it is worn by a hard-left crank marching against his own people)?

I would’t object so much – not at all, in fact – if the activists had been protesting against the jihadis of Hamas, who continue to hold Israeli hostages, crush Palestinian dissent under their jackboots and started this war in the first place. But instead, the marchers tend to be unequivocal in their support for the “resistance”, which according to their slogans is “justified”.

OK. Only last week, those very “resistance” fighters kidnapped 22-year-old activist Odai Nasser Saadi Al-Rubai, one of the leaders of the ongoing uprising against Hamas in Gaza, and subjected him to four hours of torture before dumping him on his family’s doorstep to die of his wounds. Was that “justified” too?

You got to hand it to these people. While a young man in Gaza is murdered for resisting jihadism, people of his own age are marching happily through the streets of London to express their support for his murderers, applauded by the mayor himself. Chutzpah level: God.

This morning, I spoke to to my friend in Gaza on the phone. He has been a committed participant in the rallies against Hamas, which he described as significant but not yet at any kind of tipping point.

We spoke about Sadiq Khan’s beloved Palestine marches in London, in every way the mirror image of the ones my friend supports. He was unimpressed. “The keffiyeh people in London, if they like Hamas so much, they can come to replace me,” he remarked, ruefully. “They can stay here for a few weeks, or even one day will be enough.

“I want to see how they will manage to go to the bathroom, for example, or take a shower. I want to see that, I want to see how they deal with it.

“It takes me five hours to have a shower. I have to get the water, heat it with a fire, get cold water to make a mix, close my privacy. They can come and live like that in a tent for a week and see how they feel then. Anyway, they need a transgender bathroom.”

I found myself wishing that I could connect the call to the mayor’s office and have the two of them duke it out. But it wasn’t even the support for these useful idiots and their antisemitic activist leaders that was most egregious in Khan’s message. It was the way he shamelessly appropriated the suffering of the Sudanese as a cover for his true agenda.

You deny it? Answer me this. In what way precisely have Londoners not “averted their gaze” from the war in Sudan? It strikes me that the overwhelming majority have never heard of it in the first place. Mr Khan: forget the tree. Just admit that you’re an elephant.

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Israel