How DEI unleashed the monster of anti-Semitism

‘Anti-Semitism is a very light sleeper’, said Conor Cruise O’Brien. Indeed it is, and it has been stirred from its thin slumber these past two years. Since Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October 2023 we have witnessed the violent rebirth of English anti-Semitism. And this is one breed of fanatical prejudice that cannot be libellously pinned on the ‘gammon’, on those lower orders who are so often written off as bigots. No, it is in polite society, among the hoarders of virtue, that the revived Jew hate is most prominent and most vicious.

A new report has found that anti-Semitism has been ‘normalised in middle-class Britain’. Wariness of the Jew is rife in the very institutions of bourgeois society that pride themselves on their anti-racist credentials. At universities, in the arts and in the NHS, the report found, anti-Semitism has become ‘pervasive’. The same lanyard classes that organise training sessions on ‘white privilege’ or ‘heteronormativity’ to enlighten the oiks on their inner bigot have created a climate in which Jews feel ‘marginalised’ and ‘tolerated rather than respected’.

The report was commissioned by the Board of Deputies of British Jews. It was written by Lord John Mann of the Labour Party, who advises the government on anti-Semitism, and Dame Penny Mordaunt of the Conservative Party, who was defence secretary under Theresa May. They describe themselves as ‘two non-Jews from opposite sides of the political spectrum’ who were ‘stunned into silence’ by what they heard from Britain’s Jews. We’re ‘hard-nosed politicians’, they write, but still they were shaken by reports of surging anti-Jewish violence, censorship of Jewish artists and even the belittling of Jewish patients in the NHS.

Their report is a difficult read. It reminds us that Britain suffered a historic spike in Jew-hating crimes in the aftermath of 7 October. No sooner had that neo-fascist militia visited its violence on the Jews of southern Israel than its sick mimickers in the UK were visiting abuse on the Jews of Britain. There was a ‘vertiginous growth in anti-Semitism’, the report says. There were a record 4,103 anti-Semitic incidents in the UK in 2023, most of them occurring after 7 October. The fascistic menace persisted into 2024, when there were 3,528 incidents of Jew hate – the second-highest annual total.

Synagogues were desecrated, Jewish kids were roughed up, posters featuring Hamas’s kidnap victims were rabidly ripped down or daubed with Jewphobic graffiti. One especially grim symptom of the post-7 October mania was when pupils at the Jewish Free School in north London were given permission to remove their blazers on their way to and from school. Literal children encouraged to hide outward signs of their Jewishness lest some Hamasnik should target them for violence – we forget at our peril the darkness that befell Britain in the weeks after the slaughter of the Jews in Israel.

The most valuable thing about the report is that it shows how institutionalised anti-Semitism has become. Every recent conflict involving Israel has been accompanied by a rise in Jew hatred, the report says. The minute Israel takes action against the armies of anti-Semites that surround it, a digital ‘sewer of hate and disinformation’ will wash over our societies. But it’s been ‘different this time around’. Post-7 October, anti-Semitism has ‘crept into civil society’, including ‘the workplace, cultural spaces and even the NHS’. The chilling result is that Jews have ‘almost nowhere they can turn… where anti-Semitism does not seem present’.

The report paints a grim picture of how suffocating the cult of Israelophobia has become. It tells of Jewish musicians elbowed out by venues that once hosted them. And Jewish students seeing their disabilities liaison officers, the people they trust with their health records, screaming for an ‘intifada’. And Jews waiting years for the professional bodies they work for to investigate incidents of anti-Semitism. And Jewish academics watching as studies into anti-Semitism were ‘heavily edited’ to avoid offending other minority groups. Sidelined, censored and gaslit – that’s been the experience of our Jewish compatriots since the October pogrom.

And much of the animus has come from that section of society that fancies itself as being on ‘the right side of history’. The preening grad classes who say ‘Black Lives Matter’ and ‘transwomen are women’ are the ones marginalising Jews. Israelophobia and its less guarded cousin – anti-Semitism – have become the dinner-party prejudices of our age. That was clear in the sick spectacle of middle-class youths at Glastonbury chanting for the death of the Jewish nation’s soldiers. Educated elites who for years posed as anti-racist now gleefully partake in mob orgies of Israelophobia that often cross a line into something even darker.

It seems to me that the latent anti-Semitism of England’s middle classes has found a fresh outlet in Israelophobia. Under the faux-political cover of hating the Jewish nation, some are giving vent to that old, regressive loathing of Jews. And this is where the report falls down – with its solutions. It calls for the boosting of DEI – Diversity, Equality and Inclusion. Educational institutions and public bodies must ensure, it says, that DEI includes ‘education on anti-Semitism’. This strikes me as a staggering moral contradiction – because it is precisely DEI that helped to birth the new Jew hate.

It is not a coincidence that it is in the very institutions that are rife with DEI that anti-Semitism is now ‘pervasive’. And not just in the UK – on campuses across the US, where DEI is a neo-religion, Jew hatred has surged. We’ve seen students at Columbia call the Jewish nation ‘the pigs of the Earth’ and openly dream of death for their Jewish colleagues. At Penn University, Jewish students have been told to go back to ‘fucking Berlin where you came from’. There’s even been the daubing of ‘swastikas and hateful graffiti’ on campus. In America as well as Britain, the creep of the fascist imagination seems most pronounced in those zones where wokeness rules and diversity is sacralised.

DEI is Dr Frankenstein to the monster of the new Jew hatred. It is the very racial conspiracism of this bourgeois cult that has made life hard for Jews. For this hyper-racialist ideology ruthlessly sorts all ethnic groups into boxes marked ‘oppressed’ (meaning good) or ‘privileged’ (meaning bad). And it views Jews as the most privileged, the people with the most to atone for. It hangs a target sign round their necks, marking them out for the righteous opprobrium of self-styled defenders of ‘the oppressed’. An ideology that damns Jews as unjustly advantaged, and the Jewish State as uniquely barbarous, is an ideology that sooner or later will let the world’s oldest racism off its weak leash. And that has happened.

Anti-Semitism is not only a light sleeper – it’s a shape-shifter, too. There’s been religious anti-Semitism, racial anti-Semitism, and now woke anti-Semitism: a swirling bigotry fuelled by the blind righteousness of a half-mad activist class that genuinely thinks history is on the side of its hatreds. We don’t need more DEI. We need Jews and their allies to prep for the fight ahead. Because while history doesn’t ‘take sides’, it does contain lessons, and none as important as this one: Jew hatred must always be strangled at birth.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy