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Melanie Phillips, Jan 14, 2026
"There’s been deep shock that a Jewish MP, Damien Egan, was barred by a school in his constituency, Bristol Brunel Academy, from visiting it last September after being invited to speak there about democracy and public service.
"The Palestine Solidarity Campaign, teachers and activists from the school and the National Education Union objected to him being given a platform on the grounds that he is vice-chair of Labour Friends of Israel.
"The union wrote gloatingly in September:
This is a clear message: politicians who openly support Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza are not welcome in our schools.
"The incident was revealed by the Communities Secretary, Steve Reed, when he told a meeting of the Jewish Labour movement that a Jewish MP had been refused permission to visit a school in his own constituency “in case his presence inflames the teachers”.
"Reed called this “an absolute outrage”. Labour’s antisemitism adviser Lord Mann described as “one of the most serious incidents of antisemitism” that has happened in Britain.
"Others have expressed their horror. What has become of us as a society, they lament, when an MP is prevented from visiting a school in his own constituency? How can this have been allowed to strike both at the core precepts of education and at the basis of parliamentary democracy?
"Clearly, such people haven’t been paying attention. They’re shocked because they haven’t realised what’s been happening in acute form ever since the Hamas-led atrocities in southern Israel on October 7 2023, and in less extreme form long before that.
"The real concern should be not just that the exclusion of Egan is an attack on education and democracy. More fundamentally, it’s the result of a set of poisonous lies to demonise and destroy the Jewish state, and represent it as such an abominable evil that every Jew who supports it (which most do) are also evil in turn. This puts a target on the back of every Jew in Britain unless they denounce Israel for daring to defend itself against genocidal attack.
"This monstrous calumny has now achieved the status of settled wisdom among the educated classes. That hasn’t just happened as a result of the “pro-Gaza” campaign that’s been roaring out of control for the past 27 months. It’s the result of a process that’s been going on for decades.
"For years, the education system (with some honorable exceptions) has been in the grip of teachers who are teaching British schoolchildren through a Marxist lens that represents all human behaviour as a struggle between the powerful and the powerless. They subscribe to the belief that the capitalist west is fundamentally oppressive and colonialist, that the Jews are behind capitalism and that the State of Israel is therefore colonialist and oppressive.
"They have taught British schoolchildren not how to think but what to think — the propaganda points to which there’s held to be no alternative. And this process has been going on for two, three, four generations. Brainwashed children have grown up and turned into brainwashed teachers.
"And so — surprise, surprise — the vast majority of teachers are on the left. A recent survey of the voting intention amongst members of the National Education Union showed that a mere six per cent of these teachers would vote Conservative and ten per cent for Reform. The remainder would vote for left-wing and far-left parties.
"The NEU is a far-left body that wants to “decolonise the curriculum” and add mandatory “Black History” lessons. Its general secretary, Daniel Kebede, who claimed when he was appointed that he opposed violence, had previously been one of those who chanted “globalise the intifada”. In 2019, he told a Socialist Workers Party’s conference that the national curriculum had been whitewashed by powerful white men and taught a “little-Englander, white-saviour narrative”.
"So most of the men and women who are moulding the minds of the next generation have primed them to hate the West, America and Israel as white skinned colonialists (even though most Israelis are brown or black-skinned). As a result, they have been all-too eager to absorb the monstrous Palestinian lies painting Israel as genocidal and Jews as devils.
"Who, then, can be surprised at polling by StandWithUs UK that found 29 per cent of British students — rising to 38 per cent among those at the most prestigious universities — view the Gazans’ October 7 pogrom as an “understandable act of resistance”. And 40 per cent thought that those publicly supporting Israel should “expect” abuse on campus.
"Last weekend, pro-Palestinian protesters gathered outside an Israeli restaurant in London. They attempted to intimidate customers and shouted for the end of Israel while dozens of police officers stood by. Footage shared on social media showed one activist proclaiming the “right to resist by any and all means necessary, for the full liberation and from the river to the sea,” to cheers from the crowd.
"The restaurant said it was the seventh time it had been targeted by “racist abuse and intimidation”. There have been numerous attacks on Jews in restaurants and on Israeli-owned restaurants in many Western cities.
"And then there’s the horror show of the football policing scandal, in which the West Midlands police recommended banning away-fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv football club from the team’s match against Aston Villa in Birmingham last November.
"The emerging details of this scandal have been deepening it by the day. The enormity of the force’s abuse of process is scarcely believable. It’s been revealed that the police had made the deeply alarming assessment that “elements of the [Muslim] community in the West Midlands [wanted] to arm themselves” against the Israeli fans if they came to Birmingham.
"This should have triggered an immediate investigation into planned violence against the Jews. Instead, the police concocted fake intelligence — some from AI, some which they attributed to the the Dutch police who have denied providing it — to blame the Israeli fans falsely for the violence in the shocking “Jew-hunt” to which they had been subjected by Arabs in Amsterdam in 2024, and to accuse the Maccabi fans falsely of being a threat to Birmingham’s Muslims from whom the Israelis were in fact themselves at risk. The police thus parroted precisely the inversion of victims and aggressors being pushed by Birmingham MP Ayoub Khan and other members of the Muslim community who campaigned to get the Maccabi fans — and team — barred.
"The police subsequently lied to a Commons committee that members of the city’s Jewish community had supported banning the Maccabi fans. And it turns out that the police had consulted about the ban with at least eight local Muslim groups, including a mosque which had displayed an ISIS flag and another from which the government had removed £2.2 million of funding removed over concerns about hate speech.
"Three of these mosques had hosted preachers who promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories or called for the death of Jews. And one of these radical mosques had even been involved in the selection of the force’s chief constable, Craig Guildford.
"The Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, said today she had no confidence in Guildford. But even if he is eventually fired or resigns, this won’t address the real and most urgent issue. This is that the police force in England’s second largest city along with the city council are in thrall to Islamists, whose bidding they did in demonising Israelis through false “intelligence” and denying the threat to both the Israelis and the city’s Jews.
"This appalling state of affairs is all of a piece with the hate-marches on the streets and on campus in which the police have stood by as mobs have chanted for the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews.
"Birmingham, Bristol, the Israeli restaurant, the hate-marches, all are an attempt to drive the Jews out of public space. Truth and justice, law and decency are being driven out of Britain by an infernal alliance between Islamists and the left, joined at the hip by their hatred of Jews and Israel, Britain and the West.
"The haters claim they aren’t acting against Jews but against Israel. The distinction is utterly specious. The very attempt to divide the Jewish homeland from the Jews is an attack on Judaism itself. It also singles out Israel for treatment afforded to no other people or cause in the world by the deployment of serial lies that ludicrously transform the Middle East’s only democracy into the world’s most evil regime. It’s a narrative comprising the identical characteristics of historic antisemitism that make it unique. No coincidence.
"The falsity of this distinction was robustly nailed this week by Jonathan Hall, the UK’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation. Clearly deeply alarmed not just by the tsunami of antisemitism but the fact that it is being largely ignored by an establishment choosing to look the other way, Hall told a meeting at the Policy Exchange think-tank:
Hatred expressed to Zionists invites hostility to every Israeli and to Jews worldwide. Contrary to all good practice, Zionist is a term that invites stigma and othering. Even if the term is ambiguous, as its defenders might say, I have seen no caution expressed about this term by those who use it, or fears that Jews are becoming, in the jargon, a suspect community. Those who use this term resort to technicalities – look, there are some Jews who are not Zionists – and overlook the rest. The silence from swathes of academia, and from rapporteurs, about the risk of stigmatizing Israelis and Jews is deafening.
"Moreover, the law to deal with this already exists — but isn’t being used. The Public Order Act 1986 prohibits stirring up racial hatred, which it defines as “hatred against a group of persons defined by reference to colour, race, nationality (including citizenship) or ethnic or national origins”.
"As Hall observed:
Hatred of nationality fits onto hatred of race like a glove…the demonisation of Israelis matters because it is a vehicle for hatred of Jews. My perception is that if you don’t deal with anti-Israeli hatred, you leave wiggle room for those who indulge in antisemitism but formally disavow it. Once hatred to Israelis is tolerated then it is carried around like a flame.
"A deadly combination of Islamist intimidation and indigenous cultural collapse has caused that flame to grow into a conflagration that is roaring out of control. It is Britain’s cultural emergency.'
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