Men in cars drive round North London threatening to rape Jewish woman

1/Jews and Irish Catholics are very different things. We feature in many three men walked into a bar jokes, but our commonalities are not obvious. Tonight Jewish fathers in North London get to sleep (when and if they do) knowing men in cars have threatened to rape their daughters

2/ As a half Irish plastic paddy in my teens or 20s, I was often made answerable for the crimes of the IRA being guilty by my surname. Same is true of my Jewish brothers and sisters who are casually treated as the Israeli ambassador when casual chit chat turn to proving virtue

3/ Never mind nuance or the fact they and I might disagree with the positions or acts it was insisted we defend. No, social and now a social media urge to conduct a public inquisition makes criminals before trial of all Jews. They are answerable before their answers.I remember it

4/ The left wing in this country led by Corbyn escape all accountability. He was found to have presided over an organisation he made as an institution racist. We can call it antisemitism but that is a specific way of saying racism.

5/ Yet he appears amid a sea of lost angry people, inflatable effigies, fascist slogans, ranting hotheads like some messiah. The fact he is not expunged from British public life should tell you a great deal about how Jews might feel in this country.

6/ A man who said Jews don’t understand “British irony” implying they are separate and foreign and unwelcome to Britain. A man who shares platforms with men, but for their religion, we would all call fascists. He speaks at a rally, a day or so later cars drive round Golders Green

7/ They are making of British places and British people a foreign state. Fear and mobile rape threats are not British things. These are not human things. These are not normal things. The Jewish fathers I know should not have to worry about them. It is a sin that they are.

8/ You will not make of this country a second battle ground with my consent and you will not make of my friends proxies for you to bully or put in fear. I will stand against it and lend my voice against it. Decent Muslim men and boys I know tonight deplore this.

9/ They stand with the Palestinians but they are decent men having just celebrated Eid horrified at the way the Jewish population of North London are put in fear. I salute them as real men and women and decent human beings who are able to do what these people cannot.

10/ These decent Muslims look at decent Jews and say, how dare you put them in fear, how dare you behave in a way so obviously beyond the pale. Do not make of people’s homes and communities a place of fear.

11/ Irish. Jew. Muslim.

These things do no matter.

When men drive round your homes threatening to rape your wives and daughters things have gone far too far.

There is no debate here. Common humanity tells us this slight against our Jewish brothers and sisters must not stand