Pastries and coffee are where we seem to have got to with the normalisation of anything anti-jewish

The ironies just keep piling up.

The day after I reveal that a big majority of Tory members are in favour of the Conservative ban on social media for under 16s, I want to talk about social media for adults – at least those that pretend they are.

I’ve been criticised before – water off my back – for robustly confronting views expressed on ConservativeHome from those who choose to comment below our articles. Just a word of advice to our Reform visitors; being anti ‘bans’ is good solid libertarian stuff but the fact is you are in favour of bans on: under 16s having sex, buying tobacco, or alcohol and wearing headscarves – it is a sign you are in favour of bans – just ones that you like.

I don’t say these are bad ideas, just pointing to the problem. You may want to debate these issues but at least be consistent.

Anyway,  I went ‘viral’ this week. Not like some do, but a Tweet/X post I made got a lot of attention. Supported by the many not ‘the few”.

I, like many, including the Guardian’s editor Kath Viner, were less than comfortable with a piece by Jonathan Liew a man with quite the reputation, who tried to explain that being vile to Gail’s bakery is actually ok.

Now, I’ll be honest, I was merely hoping to point out to people that our columnist Georgia Gilholy had argued the best response to attacks on a chain of bakeries is to go out of one’s way to buy and eat their products as a good way to say ‘NO’ to keffiyeh wearing millennials whose lives are seemingly defined by Gaza.

But such was the response to Jonathan Liew’s article – which I’m not going to link to because it can be found, but doesn’t deserve the oxygen of more publicity – that I’m glad instead of my last viral ‘tweet’ about a jasmine arbour I’d created – my counter did at least get nearly a thousand likes.

Why do I care?

Not for myself I promise. I’ve been a TV presenter so the idea I need exposure is a bit weak to say the least, but because I hate the idea that this thinly veiled argument that it is ok to harass people in the UK “because  Israel, and Genocide” but couch it in a form of “but just support your independent cafés” – especially if the owner is Palestinian – is being normalised.

I loathed Greta Thunberg’s narcissists’ yachting holiday because it was never going to land, was all about them, and because I personally have done more to ensure actual aid gets to Palestinians than they have in their lifetimes. Not a point they can debate.

Here’s the problem.

Even some of the Guardian’s own people seem to think this was a crass article. The left are volubly defending it saying that Gail’s bakery chain are part of wider commercial interests that are investing in Israeli weapons and …here it comes ‘genocide’

The egregious Zara Sultana, she of the ‘Jeremy Corbyn beat you’ Your Party team argued that Greggs was better than Gail’s. How galling for her to find their parent company has the same very, very, very tenuous connections to investments in Israel, she blamed on Gail’s.

But let us leave all of this aside, even the fact that nobody with the actual, genuine, authority to do so – and politicians should never be allowed to –  has declared the war in Gaza ‘a genocide’, what bothers me is thinly veiled attacks on British Jews are becoming normalised – and some people, who should know better, seem fine with this.

I don’t want MPs who are the Member of Parliament for Gaza South. I do not believe the long standing Israel/Palestine conflict – with extreme complexities that it has – is resolved by sixth formers protesting people who serve lattes in the UK.

I went to Israel on the 11^th of October 2023 and what I saw will stay with me forever. I don’t blindly support Binyamin Netanyahu, his government or those Israeli’s for whom the only good Palestinian is a dead Palestinian. Predominantly those who suffered the atrocities on the 7th of October were those Jews most committed to living side by side in peace!

I have been shocked by the deaths of women and children in a genocidal war. The ‘genocide’ advocated by Hamas who – don’t take my word for it – say so themselves that the only good jew is a dead jew.

Yes, I know.

Apparently, those who’ve long been accused of antisemitism tell us they can’t be racists because they have a history of being anti racist. That they are only anti- Zionist, and simply ‘dislike’ anyone ‘complicit in the genocide’ they themselves determined. Silence on the Uighurs, the Rohingya, the thousands of Muslims slaughtered by ISIS, Boko Haram or sympathy for the Ukrainians – because apparently ‘they are fascists’

It was an article about a bakery.

But what it said, by ever being published, is that today, arguing the rights and wrongs of the Middle East’s problems, especially if those  rights are Palestinian and the wrongs anybody with the remotest connection to a being jewish, is apparently both virtuous and acceptable in a mainstream newspaper and our wider public discourse.

No.

We are at risk, if we haven’t already fallen to a  normalised form of debate on this that would have appalled us twenty years ago.

It’s not ok, and I’m glad the Conservatives have not given it credence.