By Lianne Kolirin
Campaigners are calling on the government to take firm action on antisemitism, after footage emerged of a visibly Jewish man being abused twice within an hour on London Transport.
The young man, identified only as Yosef, was first targeted while on a bus in London’s Oxford Street late on Saturday before being subjected to further taunts on an escalator at Oxford Circus tube station.
According to the victim’s brother, Shlomie Liberow, who tweeted footage of the incident, a fellow passenger hurled abuse at him and threatened to “slit his throat” and shouted “free Palestine” as he disembarked.
Police are investigating both incidents but there have been no arrests so far. The Metropolitan police said: “Behaviour of this kind and abuse against any individual or group has no place in our city. We will not tolerate it and will act quickly and robustly in response to all reported crimes of this nature.”
Marie van der Zyl, president of the Board of Deputies, described the episode as ”absolutely intolerable” and said: “Those responsible should be must be tracked down and prosecuted.”
In a report earlier this year, the Campaign Against Antisemitism revealed that three in five British Jews believe the authorities were not doing enough to address antisemitism. In 2016 almost half — 46 per cent — felt confident that antisemitic crimes would be prosecuted but by this year that had dropped to 31 per cent.
Rabbi Herschel Gluck, president of Shomrim, an Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood watch scheme that works closely with the police and is manned by volunteers, told the Religion Media Centre that Yosef contacted Shomrim’s hotline after the incidents.
“He was very, very traumatised as you can imagine. We contacted the police and I must give British Transport Police a tremendous call-out for their professionalism, for their devotion to duty and for the way they dealt with this matter, which has really been fantastic. There were senior police officers off duty who came on duty in order to deal with this case.”
That said, Rabbi Gluck believed the government was not taking antisemitism seriously enough. “The attitude that people can get away with making such comments in public is deeply disturbing and shows the utter bankruptcy of the government protestations that they care about antisemitism,” he said.
Rabbi Gluck described a recent experience to the RMC. “Not long ago I was on the Holloway Road on a match day and there were hundreds of Arsenal fans in various drinking holes all wearing the Arsenal shirts and scarves,” he said. “The amount of antisemitism I heard going past them was something else. It wasn’t just one guy making a wise crack. It was intense, consistent, nonstop abuse. They didn’t know me from Adam.
“This incident was not a one-off. It’s symptomatic of something much larger, much deeper that we have seen for some time. This case with the football fans is nothing to do with Palestine or the Middle East. This is a problem with attitudes that we have in the UK. It’s become acceptable. You didn’t see any one of them intervene or demonstrate that they felt uncomfortable with the antisemitic behaviour. All these young men just felt it’s a sport — Jew-baiting. Society needs to wake up and change the direction of travel.”
Retweeting the video of the Underground footage, Rob Rinder, a barrister and TV personality, wrote: “If you watch this and aren’t moved. If you hear this and ignore it. If you think fighting anti-Jewish racism isn’t YOUR responsibility. YOU ARE THE PROBLEM … HATE THRIVES WHEN YOU LET IT.”
In its most recent report, the Community Security Trust (CST), a charity that sets out to protect Britain’s Jewish community, revealed that 1,668 antisemitic incidents were recorded in the UK last year — the third-highest total recorded in a single calendar year. But while that represented a drop on the previous year, the fall was at least in part attributed to the lockdowns.
While figures are not yet available for this year, an update on the charity’s site in May revealed “a sharp rise in antisemitic incidents in the UK, linked to the conflict in Israel and Gaza”.
The most noteworthy of these included a rabbi allegedly struck over the head with a brick outside his Essex synagogue. That same day, footage was taken of antisemitic abuse shouted from a convoy of cars bearing Palestinian flags in north London.
In the month from 8 May, 460 incidents were reported to the charity — the highest monthly total since records began in 1984. Of those, 144 occurred online. The situation has quietened since the violence in the Middle East subsided, but the threat has not disappeared.
A CST spokesman said: “The recent rise in anti-Jewish hate in this country is appalling and has caused huge concern and anxiety across the Jewish community. It is vital that all antisemitic hate crimes are investigated and prosecuted wherever possible, and that general anti-racist solidarity and support is shown to the Jewish community from wider society.”
While politicians have previously condemned the abuse — with home secretary Priti Patel saying she was “sickened” by the hate crimes and communities secretary Robert Jenrick describing them as “deeply disturbing”, critics believe more must be done.
Rabbi Gluck believes neither the authorities nor the public “take antisemitism seriously enough”.
“We have to go back to the drawing board,” he said. “It isn’t enough to throw money at it and make nice statements. There has to be a crisis meeting, treating it like a security threat. People need to sit down and say ‘what’s the situation and how do we deal with it effectively?’ I think people don’t take antisemitism seriously enough.”
