Why couldn’t London light up for the Bibas family?

New York did it. Paris did it. Even Berlin and Rio de Janeiro did it. But London? London didn’t do it, and its abstention provided a statement of its own.

I’m talking, of course, about the lighting up of landmarks across the world to honour Shiri Bibas and her two little boys, Kfir and Ariel, whose funeral took place yesterday. The Empire State Building, the Eiffel Tower, the Brandenburg Gate and the statue of Christ the Redeemer were all bathed in a sombre and dignified orange. But as criticism began to mount, silence from Sadiq Khan.

It showed a certain tone deafness for the mayor to ignore the global movement to show solidarity with the Bibas family.

This impression was reinforced by the fact that 48 hours earlier, Khan’s X account had marked the third anniversary of Putin’s invasion, showing a poster saying “London stands with Ukraine” and pictures of City Hall illuminated in blue and yellow. I’m not saying it was wrong to express solidarity with Kyiv. It just made the snub of the Bibas campaign all the more glaring.

Let’s give Khan the benefit of the doubt: London’s failure to get involved and his badly-timed posts on X could both be best explained by Hanlon’s famous razor, “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”. Who are we to judge? It just seems a shame that while other cities took the time to demonstrate their sympathies for the poor family that were so cruelly kidnapped and murdered, the little boys strangled and their bodies mutilated, London ended up sitting on the fence.

This all knitted together with a general sense that under Labour, Great Britain has rather lost its greatness when it comes to making clear decisions on moral questions of international affairs and standing firmly by them.

Consider the baffling Chagos giveaway, which increasingly appears to be a stitch-up between three leftie Jewish (or Jewish-adjacent) amigos, the Prime Minister, international lawyer Philipe Sands and the Attorney General, all of whom are old lawyer colleagues.

These three men are united by a bizarrely over-enthusiastic interpretation of a non-binding international ruling that would see Britain needlessly giving away the important strategic asset of the Chagos Islands and paying billions for the privilege. Starmer – who enjoyed a five-star trip to Mauritius in 2013, where he delivered a lecture – is leading the negotiations, advised by Hermer, who in the past has described controlling our borders as “demonising” and almost every aspect of the British Empire as “deeply racist”. On the Mauritian side, meanwhile, the negotiating team is headed by none other than the remaining amigo, Sands, who in 2022 illegally entered Chagos and planted a Mauritian flag on British soil. What a bandito.

So far, so tangential to specifically Jewish concerns. But what else has been produced by this worldview, forged in the fraternal crucible of metropolitan Jewish progressivism and blindly applied to international law? Well, one of Labour’s early acts in government was to withdraw Britain’s objection to the prosecution of Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant at the International Criminal Court. When the arrest warrants were duly issued, Hermer — who once co-authored an essay on “corporate complicity in Israel’s occupation” to be submitted to a self-styled “tribunal” including the now-notorious Pink Floyd guitarist Roger Waters — made clear that Britain would “comply” with its legal obligations on the matter, appearing to imply that an official visit by the Israeli prime minister to London may end in arrest.

Labour also suspended a number of arms export licences to Israel last September, “following a review of Israel’s compliance with international humanitarian law” and voted against Israel at the United Nations.

Given this anti-Israel culture at the top of government, is it any surprise that Labour’s London suffered something of a blind spot when it came to the anguish of the Bibas family?