@hearnimator Wow. What a way to police. I bet if they ask criminals to think twice…maybe they won’t commit crimes? But they have to ask nicely right. 🤦🏻♀️
There is a history lesson that the British Museum might usefully teach, were it still in the business of teaching history rather than surrendering it to the heckler’s veto.
It goes like this: when a society can no longer protect its Jews in the public square, cannot guarantee that a talk about ancient archaeology will not be shut down by a mob, it has already lost something foundational. The Jews are not the only ones who should be alarmed. They are simply the first.
Yesterday the British Museum, founded in 1753, repository of civilisation's deepest memory, cancelled a Jewish Culture Month event on the kingdoms of Ancient Israel and Judah. Not because the content was controversial. Not because the speaker, Dr Paul Collins, was provocative. But because a "significant number" of registered attendees had pre-planned to disrupt it. The bullies, in other words, didn't even need to show up. The threat alone was sufficient. The institution folded. A talk about archaeology, about pottery and inscriptions from a civilisation nearly three thousand years old, was considered too dangerous to host.
Let that sink in. This is Britain in 2026.
The museum's statement was a masterpiece of institutional euphemism. It spoke of its “responsibility to ensure that events hosted within the Museum can proceed safely.” It noted, with some delicacy, its commitment to "freedom of expression in a democratic society." What it did not say - what it could not quite bring itself to say - is that a group of activists committed to the erasure of any Jewish connection to the land of Israel decided that even academic archaeology was an affront, and that rather than face them down, Britain's foremost cultural institution chose to stand aside.
This is not a security decision. It is a political one. And it carries a clear message: that organised intimidation works.
Worse still, it is not even an isolated incident. Last year, the Russell-Cotes Museum in Bournemouth postponed an exhibition on Jewish life in the town, citing “security concerns” and what it called a “sensitive time.” The exhibition, funded by the National Heritage Lottery Fund, celebrating a century and a half of Jewish community life, was quietly shelved. It came after a Jewish man had been shot with an air rifle in Bournemouth's East Cliff neighbourhood and swastika graffiti had been painted on a local rabbi's home.
Then there was Edinburgh. Last summer, two Jewish comedians had their shows cancelled from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe after staff members raised "safety concerns". One of them, Philip Simon, said afterwards: "I am still processing the concept that in 2025 I can be cancelled just for being Jewish."
This is a story that Jews in this country have grown sickeningly familiar with. The language changes slightly each time - "security concerns," "sensitive period," "logistical challenges" - but the outcome is always the same: Jewish culture retreats and the mob advances.
And now the British Museum. The pattern is not coincidental. It is the incremental, bureaucratically managed exclusion of Jews from British public life - achieved not through legislation, not through violence, but through the quiet, cowardly calculation that accommodating the mob is less trouble than standing with the minority it targets.
"London is for everyone" - except, it appears, for Jewish Londoners who wish to attend a talk about ancient history without requiring a security cordon and police guard. "Antisemitism has no place here" - except, it seems, at public galleries, comedy and theatre venues, university campuses across London, and now the British Museum. When a city's most celebrated cultural institution cannot guarantee the safety of a lecture on ancient pottery, the mayor's solemn pledges ring not as reassurance but as insult.
The British Museum's statement said the decision was taken "to protect the event, not to diminish it." This is precisely the kind of sentence that tells you everything while appearing to say nothing. What the museum was actually protecting was not the event - which it cancelled - but itself: its staff, its management, its desire not to be in the newspapers for the wrong reasons. The result, of course, is that it is in the newspapers for the worst possible reason. The protesters won without stepping through the door. And the institution that holds the Rosetta Stone and the Elgin Marbles, that has survived the Blitz and two world wars and three centuries of global upheaval, has demonstrated that it cannot survive a vocal mob with bad intentions.
Public money flows generously to these institutions. If they cannot maintain a basic standard of intellectual courage in exchange for it - if they will cancel Jewish history at the first whiff of organised hostility - then serious questions about that compact are not only legitimate but urgent.
What is needed is not sympathy but spine. The British Museum should have taken the measures necessary - whatever they were - to allow the event to go ahead on the planned date. If it lacked the resources, it should have asked for them. If it lacked the legal tools, the Government should long since have provided them. The Director should have stood at the door, personally if necessary, and said: this institution does not negotiate with intimidation. Instead, it issued a statement of regret, rescheduled to a date yet to be confirmed and hoped the story would blow over.
My great-grandmother, Lily Ebert, survived Auschwitz. She spent the remainder of her long life trying to understand how a continent of supposedly civilised nations - with their museums, their universities, their cultural institutions - had permitted the systematic exclusion, humiliation, and ultimately murder of its Jews: one bureaucratic decision at a time, each supposedly reasonable in isolation, each contributing to a logic that ended in catastrophe. She did not ask future generations to simply remember. She asked them to act.
The British Museum will, no doubt, host the talk eventually. It will be rescheduled for a quieter moment, with more security, with fewer registered protestors, with a smaller Jewish audience too. It will be, in all the ways that matter, a diminished thing. And the people who believe that Jewish culture has no place in British public life will note that their tactics worked. And they will use them again.
Hate marches. I’ve seen it myself. It’s awful. They need to be stopped. The police aren’t able to police properly. And it breeds hate like you can’t imagine.
This photo was taken from behind at Royal Holloway Freshers’ Fair.
I stood with the British flag and Star of David - welcoming Jewish students into an atmosphere already filled with “End Israeli apartheid”, “Genocide supporters”, “Boycott Israel”.
What you don’t see: from late September to January, two students subjected me and my Jewish friend to almost daily harassment - sometimes 10+ no-caller-ID calls in an hour. Vile antisemitic, homophobic and sexualised abuse: “you love Israeli dck”, “obsessed with Jewish dck”, “I’ll be antisemitic with my full chest”.
We reported it. We have evidence - voice recordings etc. We know who they are.
University: “We can only act when the police do something.”
Police were told in November. I signed a statement in February. They said they were looking at arrests. Promised me a call on 5 April. Still nothing - it’s now 11th April.
Contrast that with my one light-hearted “tea towel” reply to a keffiyeh.
I was suspended the next day. Missed 7 weeks of my degree. Now facing potential hate crime charges with the file at the CPS.
Next slide 👉 a keffiyeh.
Two photos. Two completely different stories.
Two tiers of justice.
@SurreyPolice please act on the reports I made. This has gone on long enough. Everyone is watching.
Free speech and equal protection can’t be optional in Britain.
I will NOT be silenced. 🇬🇧🇮🇱
#TwoTierJustice #FreeSpeech #RoyalHolloway #twotierpolice
Following Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, the EU swiftly expelled 490 Russian diplomats.
Yet after Iran’s regime slaughtered 45,000 people and attacked Europe for years, not one Iranian terrorist diplomat has been expelled.
Enough. Boot them out immediately.
https://t.co/wLBDcwJ73K
Legendary filmmaker Pierre Rehov triggered absolute hysteria among Muslims, Woke anarchists and other Nazis by releasing his powerful documentary “Pogrom(s)” online.
The mainstream media and industry censored and rejected it because it shows the raw, savage atrocities, rape, torture, beheadings and massacre, committed by Arab-Muslims against Jews on October 7.
Instead of suppressing the truth, Rehov made it freely available for the world to see the horrors that Hamas and its supporters openly celebrate.
This is the truth they cannot handle.
Please share before you start watching it, so others will get to see it by the time you finish. Bookmark if you can’t watch now, and follow the brave filmmaker @rehoov
Breaking: Three charged over antisemitic ambulance arson.
Hamza Iqbal, 20, Rehan Khan, 19, and a 17-year-old dual British and Pakistani national.. all from East London, travelled to North London to carry out the attack.
Now call it what it is - an Islamic terrorist attack.
'I'm afraid these comments belong in the beer halls of 1930s Munich.'
Director of Investigations and Enforcement at the Campaign Against Antisemitism, Stephen Silverman, hits out at the Greens over leaked antisemitic texts branding Jewish people 'an abomination to this planet'.
Iran just fired missiles at Diego Garcia - 2,361 miles from Tehran.
They were not supposed to have this range.
Surprise, surprise, Iran lied!
Tehran to London 2750 miles
Tehran to Paris 2610 miles
Tehran to Berlin 2200 miles
So yeah, tell me again how Iran is not a threat
Britain has become a dystopia in which criminal extremists rule the roost.
In this once-great country, known for its tolerance and respect for the rule of law, you can establish an organisation that publishes a manual for its members to operate in cells, using burner phones, with their faces covered, and how to cause maximum criminal damage.
Your operatives (allegedly, as it may be subject to a retrial) can smash a police officer's spine as she lies defenceless on the floor, or ground Royal Air Force jets if they like — so long as it is done “for Palestine”. You can fundraise for this and make it your everyday work.
Your friends can go door to door, taking names of people who don't subscribe to your ideology, with the support of the local MP.
You can organise marches that turn towns and cities into “no go” zones for Jews week after week. The you-know-whos may not wear a Star of David necklace in their vicinity, or be “quite openly Jewish” (as I was) on pain of arrest, and if their supporters hold signs saying “We stand with British Jews” they most definitely will be bundled away by police in handcuffs (as my friends were).
Imams at mosques can celebrate the worst antisemitic atrocity since the Holocaust and continue to operate with charitable status.
Schools and universities can become so intolerable for Jews that a Jewish MP has to visit a local constituency school in secret to avoid a protest not by pupils but by their teachers, and the United States starts discussing the idea of granting asylum to Jews from Britain.
If you go to the supermarket, you can find the kosher food covered in stickers accusing those who eat it of killing babies. And on that subject you can shout at Jews eating at a kosher restaurant and flip food all over them, only to be allowed to walk free by a judge.
If you visit this country, when you land at a British airport, signs from the police will ask you if you have witnessed war crimes committed not anywhere in the world, but by the one Jewish state. Even dictators from practically any despotic regime are welcome to visit, but not the Prime Minister of the one Jewish state, because that's the only allied, elected leader that Britain will arrest on sight.
Some visitors are so unwelcome, such as Jewish football fans from you-know-where, that police can sometimes be spotted fabricating “intelligence” to justify banning them, while turning a blind eye to local extremist thugs arming themselves to attack the Jews lest the police allow them to turn up.
But while extremists, despots and thugs are accepted or even celebrated by those in positions of power and trust, what of Britain’s Jews? What of Britain’s wonderful, decent people whose wit, ingenuity, culture and capability used to be the envy of the world?
What kind of future are our politicians and institutions bequeathing to the rest of us?
We see it take its dystopian shape more clearly every day. Shame on them for their betrayal and cowardly choices.
Britain has become a dystopia in which criminal extremists rule the roost.
In this once-great country, known for its tolerance and respect for the rule of law, you can establish an organisation that publishes a manual for its members to operate in cells, using burner phones, with their faces covered, and how to cause maximum criminal damage.
Your operatives (allegedly, as it may be subject to a retrial) can smash a police officer's spine as she lies defenceless on the floor, or ground Royal Air Force jets if they like — so long as it is done “for Palestine”. You can fundraise for this and make it your everyday work.
Your friends can go door to door, taking names of people who don't subscribe to your ideology, with the support of the local MP.
You can organise marches that turn towns and cities into “no go” zones for Jews week after week. The you-know-whos may not wear a Star of David necklace in their vicinity, or be “quite openly Jewish” (as I was) on pain of arrest, and if their supporters hold signs saying “We stand with British Jews” they most definitely will be bundled away by police in handcuffs (as my friends were).
Imams at mosques can celebrate the worst antisemitic atrocity since the Holocaust and continue to operate with charitable status.
Schools and universities can become so intolerable for Jews that a Jewish MP has to visit a local constituency school in secret to avoid a protest not by pupils but by their teachers, and the United States starts discussing the idea of granting asylum to Jews from Britain.
If you go to the supermarket, you can find the kosher food covered in stickers accusing those who eat it of killing babies. And on that subject you can shout at Jews eating at a kosher restaurant and flip food all over them, only to be allowed to walk free by a judge.
If you visit this country, when you land at a British airport, signs from the police will ask you if you have witnessed war crimes committed not anywhere in the world, but by the one Jewish state. Even dictators from practically any despotic regime are welcome to visit, but not the Prime Minister of the one Jewish state, because that's the only allied, elected leader that Britain will arrest on sight.
Some visitors are so unwelcome, such as Jewish football fans from you-know-where, that police can sometimes be spotted fabricating “intelligence” to justify banning them, while turning a blind eye to local extremist thugs arming themselves to attack the Jews lest the police allow them to turn up.
But while extremists, despots and thugs are accepted or even celebrated by those in positions of power and trust, what of Britain’s Jews? What of Britain’s wonderful, decent people whose wit, ingenuity, culture and capability used to be the envy of the world?
What kind of future are our politicians and institutions bequeathing to the rest of us?
We see it take its dystopian shape more clearly every day. Shame on them for their betrayal and cowardly choices.