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The Myth of British Exceptionalism
Britain’s former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn reacts after the general election results of the Islington North constituency were announced at a counting center in Islington, London, Dec. 13, 2019. Photo: Reuters / Hannah McKay.
JNS.org – That old image of the Jewish family with a packed suitcase at the ready in case they are compelled to suddenly leave their home has returned with a vengeance across Europe.
In France and Germany, home to sizable Jewish communities, the “Should we leave?” debate is raging in earnest. Both of these countries experienced record levels of antisemitic incidents in 2023, most of them occurring after the Hamas pogrom of Oct. 7 in southern Israel. Similar conversations are also being held in the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Belgium and Spain—countries with tiny Jewish communities that are nevertheless enduring a painful rise in antisemitism.
What about Britain, though? It’s a pertinent question insofar as there has always been a “British exceptionalism” with regard to the continent. During World War II, the Nazis failed in their quest to conquer the British Isles, in contrast to the rest of Europe. After the defeat of Hitler, the British supported efforts to transform Europe into an economic and political community that eventually became the European Union, even joining it. Yet Britain was never fully at peace with its identity as a European state, and as is well known, the “Brexit” referendum of 2016 resulted in the country’s full-fledged withdrawal from the European Union.
When it comes to antisemitism, however, Britain is very much part of the European rule, not the exception. Again, that’s important because while the British don’t deny that antisemitism is present in their politics and culture, they don’t believe that it’s as venomous as its German or French variations. “It is generally admitted that antisemitism is on the increase, that it has been greatly exacerbated by the war, and that humane and enlightened people are not immune to it. It does not take violent forms (English people are almost invariably gentle and law-abiding),” wrote George Orwell in an essay, “Antisemitism in Britain,” penned towards the war’s close in April 1945.
At the same time, Orwell conceded that British antisemitism was “ill-natured enough, and in favorable circumstances, it could have political results.” To illustrate this point, he offered a selection of the antisemitic barbs that he had encountered over the previous year. “No, I’ve got no matches for you. I should try the lady down the street. She’s always got matches. One of the Chosen Race, you see,” a grumpy tobacconist informed him. “Well, no one could call me antisemitic, but I do think the way these Jews behave is too absolutely stinking. The way they push their way to the head of queues, and so on. They’re so abominably selfish. I think they’re responsible for a lot of what happens to them,” a “middle-class” woman said. Another woman, described by Orwell as an “intellectual,” refused to look at a book detailing the persecution of Jews in Germany on the grounds that “it will only make me hate them even more,” while a young man—a “near-Communist” in Orwell’s description—confessed that he had never made a secret of his loathing of Jews. “Mind you, I’m not antisemitic, of course,” he added.
I’d wager that were Orwell to tackle the same subject today, he would write a similar essay. The rhetoric he quotes echoes eerily in what we are hearing almost 80 years later, particularly the denial that recycling antisemitic tropes makes one an antisemite, as well as the digs against chosenness—because antisemites have never understood (or don’t want to understand) that Jewish “chosenness” is not about racial or ethnic superiority, but a duty to carry out a specific set of Divine commandments.
Last week, the Community Security Trust (CST), a voluntary security organization serving British Jews, issued its annual report on the state of antisemitism in Britain. The CST has been faithfully issuing these reports since 1984, and over the last few years, it has regularly registered new records for the number of offenses reported. 2023 was the worst year of all; there were a stomach-churning 4,103 incidents reported—an increase of 81% on the previous annual record in 2021, when 2,261 incidents were reported (largely due to that year’s conflict between Israel and Hamas for 11 days in May).
Instructively, the worst month in 2023 was October, in the days immediately following the rapes and other atrocities committed by Hamas terrorists on that black day. Oct. 11 was, in fact, the worst day, with 80 incidents reported. As the CST pointed out, “[T]he speed at which antisemites mobilized in the U.K. on and immediately after Oct. 7 suggests that, initially at least, this increase in anti-Jewish hate was a celebration of the Hamas attack on Israel, rather than anger at Israel’s military response in Gaza.”
Of course, the present situation in the United Kingdom differs from Orwell’s time for two main reasons. Firstly, in 1945, there was no Jewish state, and antisemitism revolved around cruder tropes invoking supposed Jewish rudeness, clannishness, financial power and so forth. (Even so, Britain was also one of the first Western countries to experience antisemitic rioting linked to the Zionist movement and Israel; in 1947, after two British officers in Mandatory Palestine were executed by the Irgun, or “Etzel,” resistance organization, violence targeting Jewish communities broke out across the United Kingdom, thereby establishing the principle that all Jews, everywhere, are to blame for the alleged evils of Zionism.)
Secondly, in 1945 Britain was still largely a white, Christian society. In the interim, it has become far more diverse and is now home to nearly 4 million Muslims who constitute 6.5 percent of the population. Since the late 1980s—when the Iranian regime issued a fatwa calling for the death of the Anglo-Indian author Salman Rushdie, alleged to have slandered Islam in his novel The Satanic Verses—what was once a relatively docile population has become politically animated, with the Palestinian cause pushed front and center.
In the four months that have passed since the Hamas atrocities, with weekly demonstrations in support of Hamas in London and other cities, Muslim voices have been disproportionately loud in the opprobrium being piled not just on Israel, but on those Britons—the country’s Jewish community—most closely associated with the Jewish state. Of course, this doesn’t apply to every Muslim, and many of the worst offenders are non-Muslims on the left. Indeed, the Oct. 7 massacres have enabled the return to politics of a particularly odious individual whom I had forlornly believed had been banished to the garbage can of history; George Galloway, an ally of Hamas and one-time acolyte of the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, who is standing in the forthcoming parliamentary election in the northern English constituency of Rochdale for an outfit called the “Workers Party of Britain,” whose manifesto combines nationalism and socialism, but which would probably balk at the description “national socialist” in much the same way that some antisemites balk at the description “antisemitic.”
British Jews have weathered a great deal in recent years, especially the five years when the Labour Party, the main opposition, was led by the far-left Parliament member Jeremy Corbyn, who has since been turfed out of the party by his successor Sir Keir Starmer. Having survived that, the belief has spread that they can survive anything. But there’s another question to be asked: Is the effort worth it? Increasingly, and worryingly, growing numbers of British Jews are now answering “no.”
The post The Myth of British Exceptionalism first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Palestinian Official Blames Israel for All Deaths in the October 7 Massacre
The bodies of people, some of them elderly, lie on a street after they were killed during a mass-infiltration by Hamas gunmen from the Gaza Strip, in Sderot, southern Israel, Oct. 7, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad
The Palestinian Authority (PA) alternates between justifying Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 massacre and atrocities, and blaming Israel for them.
The latest to blame Israel is Fatah leader Jibril Rajoub who, speaking in English in South Africa, said:
The Israeli government is the only one responsible for what’s going on, for the suffering, whether for the Palestinians or some Israeli civilians who were killed on Oct. 7.
[Fatah Central Committee Secretary Jibril Rajoub, Facebook page, Aug. 2, 2025]
His solution is for Israel to release all 15,000 Palestinian terrorist prisoners in exchange for the Israeli hostages kidnapped on Oct. 7.
Rajoub adds the horrific lie that the Palestinian prisoner “hostages,” who include many mass murderers, were “arrested by the Israelis without doing anything.”
He then adds one more horrific lie:
We don’t support killing kids, women, or kidnapping. For sure that this is not part of our policy or our doctrine.
As Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) has documented, the PA “policy and doctrine” is in fact to murder women and children, to kidnap, and to glorify the killers.
The PA rewards all terrorists in prison, even mass murderers like Abdallah Barghouti — who is serving 67 life sentences for being involved in the murder of 68 men, women and children. The PA has named five schools after mass murderer Dalal Mughrabi, who led the murder of 12 children and 25 adults after kidnapping them by hijacking a bus.
The PA glorifies all suicide bombers who murdered women and children as “Martyrs,” meaning that they died for Allah. The PA fundamentally supports murdering women and children, and this is their policy.
Regarding kidnapping, Rajoub himself praised the Oct. 7 murders and rapes of women and children and the kidnapping of hundreds of hostages as “epic” and “heroic”:
Rajoub: “What happened on October 7 was an earthquake, an unprecedented incident, and a war of defense full of epics and acts of heroism that the Palestinian people has been waging for 75 years.” [emphasis added]
[Al-Anba, Kuwaiti news website, Nov. 26, 2023]
As PMW repeatedly stresses, the Palestinian Authority is a terrorist entity in every way – except international designation.
The following is a longer excerpt of the statement cited above:
Fatah Central Committee Secretary Jibril Rajoub: “What happened on Oct. 7, [2023] was a reaction to the systematic Israeli crimes. Now, sure that we don’t support killing kids, women, kidnapping. For sure that this is not part of our policy or our doctrine. But he who is responsible for that is he who tried to sustain the occupation [i.e., Israel], he who continues his crimes and atrocities against the Palestinian people, and the Israeli government is the only responsible for what’s going on, for the suffering, whether for the Palestinians or some Israeli civilians who were killed on Oct. 7 …
I think that we have 15,000 hostages [sic., terrorist prisoners] arrested by the Israelis without doing anything …
The issue of the prisoners, whether it’s those who are in Hamas or in Israel, should be closed by releasing everybody for everybody.”
[Fatah Central Committee Secretary Jibril Rajoub, Facebook page, Aug. 2, 2025]
The author is the founder and director of Palestinian Media Watch, where a version of this article first appeared.
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The Torah Works Because It’s Perfectly Balanced
A Torah scroll. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
If you’ve ever had the urge to buy something new — a trinket, a bauble, a book, or any kind of decorative object — you’ve probably found yourself channeling the mantra of Japanese “organizing consultant” Marie Kondo: hold each item in your hand and ask if it “sparks joy.” If it doesn’t, the modern rule is simple — don’t buy it, and if you’ve got it: don’t keep it.
As the 21st century rolls on, this form of minimalism has become more than a trend – it’s become a movement. Entire YouTube channels are devoted to “decluttering,” and there’s a peculiar satisfaction in watching people toss out 27 coffee mugs they never use or transform a chaotic closet into a Zen-like display of perfectly folded shirts.
But this obsession with minimalism isn’t new. History is full of people who discovered that less is more. Take the Shakers — an eccentric 18th-century religious sect founded by “Mother” Ann Lee and her followers in England — so austere that they even broke away from the Quakers for being too worldly. They built an entire society based around radical simplicity.
To them, unnecessary ornamentation wasn’t just bad taste, it was spiritually hazardous. Their furniture was stripped-down and functional to the point of purity — elegant straight lines, no frills, nothing but purpose. Remarkably, more than two centuries later, Shaker chairs and tables still look modern, the kind of furniture pieces that wouldn’t look out of place in a sleek New York City loft.
There’s a story told about a Shaker community in New Hampshire: an uninitiated visitor was admiring the bare wooden meeting house and asked why it was so plain. The Shaker elder, almost incredulous, replied, “Because if God wanted it fancy, He’d have made it fancy.”
And it wasn’t just about buildings or furniture. The Shakers’ daily lives were a kind of spiritual decluttering. No decorative clothing. No frivolous conversation. One Shaker diary even records a “brother” being gently corrected for carving an extra flourish into a chair spindle. “Beauty,” the elder told him, “is obedience.” In other words, remove what is unnecessary, and holiness will emerge.
Fast forward to today, and that same principle has found its way to Hollywood — albeit, stripped of any religious context. Professional organizer Janelle Cohen, who has decluttered the homes of celebrities like Jordyn Woods and Jay Shetty, insists that true order isn’t about squeezing more in, but rather it’s about editing it all down until only the essentials remain.
She even has her A-list clients go through every single item seasonally, “editing” their closets so that what’s left is only what they actually use and love. “When Jordyn opens her closet,” Cohen says, “it excites her. It feels manageable.”
One of Cohen’s golden rules is what she calls “prime real estate.” The items you use and cherish most should always be within reach; everything else should either be pushed to the margins — or removed entirely. It’s not about austerity for its own sake. It’s about creating a space where what truly matters is visible, accessible, and central.
Contrast that with the opposite impulse: the baroque churches of 17th-century Europe, gilded to the point of sensory overload. Or Victorian drawing rooms so jammed with doilies and in-your-face taxidermy that you could barely find the furniture. Or today’s “feature-rich” software apps, so overloaded with functions that you practically need a tutorial just to locate the “save” button.
Human history, when you boil it down, is really a tug-of-war between the impulse to add and the discipline to take away. Which is why it’s striking that in Parashat Va’etchanan, Moshe delivers what might be the ultimate minimalist manifesto (Deut. 4:2): “Do not add to this thing, and do not subtract from it.”
We can understand why subtracting from the core aspects of Torah is a bad thing, but why would adding to it be wrong? Rashi offers a sharp answer: adding to the Torah doesn’t elevate it, he says, it distorts it. He gives the example of the Arba Minim on Sukkot.
If you decide that four species are good, so five must be better, you’ve not “enhanced” the mitzvah — you’ve corrupted it. What begins as extra piety becomes a counterfeit commandment.
The Ramban takes it further. He warns that human additions blur the boundaries of what God actually commanded. When people can no longer tell the difference between divine law and human invention, the authenticity of the Torah itself is weakened. In other words, spiritual “clutter” is just as dangerous as spiritual neglect.
Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch explains it beautifully. He says that “adding” is a kind of hidden arrogance: it implies that God’s blueprint is incomplete, that our personal tweaks are needed to perfect it. But, as Rav Hirsch reminds us, the Torah isn’t a rough draft — it’s a finished masterpiece.
Our job isn’t to rewrite the Torah, it’s to live it. Which is why Moshe warns against both subtraction and addition. One hollows out the Torah, the other smothers it under layers of well-meaning excess. Both, in the end, take us further away from the elegant, balanced simplicity of God’s design.
In the tech world, there’s a term called “feature creep.” It’s what happened to the web browser Netscape Navigator in the 1990s. Once the undisputed leader, Netscape kept piling on new features — “just one more” toolbar, “just one more” plug‑in — until it became too slow, too clunky, and practically unusable. Users abandoned Netscape in droves, competitors took over, and the once dominant browser was pushed to the margins… and eventually, into oblivion.
In the restaurant world, chefs dread what’s known as “menu bloat.” Gordon Ramsay has made a career out of exposing it on Kitchen Nightmares. Time and again, he walks into failing restaurants where the menu reads like a novel — dozens of dishes spanning every cuisine imaginable. “You can’t possibly cook all of this food well,” he tells them.
And he’s right. When one struggling Italian restaurant in New York slashed its sprawling menu down to a handful of core dishes, something remarkable happened: the food got better, the kitchen ran smoothly, and the customers came back. As Ramsay put it, “Stop trying to be everything — just be excellent at what matters.”
Moshe is making the same point in this week’s parsha. “Do not add to this thing” isn’t solely a legal warning — it’s also a spiritual safeguard. When we start piling on “extras,” we risk smothering the beauty and dulling the clarity of the Torah beneath well‑intentioned but distracting clutter.
Like Ramsay’s pared‑down menu, the Torah works because it’s perfectly balanced. Nothing is missing, and nothing needs “just one more” ingredient. Our job is not to improve the Torah, but to serve it up the way it was given — simple, precise, and flawless. Because ultimately, minimalism doesn’t mean less — it means no more and no less than what’s right.
The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.
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Maimed & Fingerless: The Associated Press Publishes a Sickening Shrine to Hezbollah
A man gestures the victory sign as he holds a Hezbollah flag, on the second day of the ceasefire between Israel and Iran-backed group Hezbollah, in Tyre, southern Lebanon, Nov. 28, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Aziz Taher
There are moments in media criticism when the usual words — bias, omission, misleading framing — feel inadequate. Because this isn’t just about bias. It’s about a line crossed. It’s about a piece of so-called journalism so grotesque, so inverted in its moral compass, that it demands a different kind of response.
The Associated Press has published a photo essay titled “Portraits of survivors of Israel’s pager attack on Hezbollah last year.” It features carefully staged portraits and sorrowful quotes — not just from Hezbollah operatives themselves, but also from a few of their relatives.
Let’s not forget this is a US- and EU-designated terror organization, and the men were injured in a precision Israeli strike that neutralized dozens of Hezbollah fighters who were using encrypted pagers to coordinate attacks on Israeli civilians.
But the AP doesn’t frame them as terrorists. It casts them as victims. As tragic figures. As men whose disfigured hands deserve your sympathy.
It is repulsive propaganda. Nothing more, nothing less.
We’re not going to walk you through what’s wrong with this piece. It’s too obvious. The entire thing is a distortion. Every image, every quote, every omission — from the total lack of context about Hezbollah’s crimes, including the fact that these very pagers were used to orchestrate lethal attacks on Israelis, to the aesthetic choices that frame mutilated killers in dramatic, reverent lighting — is an insult.
An insult to the thousands of Israelis murdered or maimed by Hezbollah. To the innocent Lebanese civilians crushed under its rule. And to the readers themselves, because how many millions around the world have been directly or indirectly torn apart by Islamist terrorism?
The Aestheticization of Terror
The portraits are the first clue. Each fighter, or relative of a fighter, is photographed against a pitch-black background, lit just enough to highlight scars, stumps, and furrowed brows. Their eyes are cast downward or off into the middle distance. They are composed. Thoughtful. Vulnerable.
There is no blood. No chaos. No evidence of what came before. Just the frozen dignity of men, women, and teenagers supposedly broken by war.
This is not journalism. It is image-crafting. And it works.
Now contrast that with how Israeli victims of Hezbollah are typically shown in Western media, if they’re shown at all. Blurry photos from attack scenes. Names barely mentioned. Faces rarely shown.
But the AP found the time, the resources, and the artistic vision to give Hezbollah fighters a studio-style shoot and a global platform. The goal was simple: to soften their image, obscure their crimes, and make you forget who they are — so you remember only how they look now.
.@AP looked at terrorists who helped murder Israelis and thought:
“Let’s interview their mothers.”
No mention of the victims. No mention of the terror.
Just tears for Hezbollah.
This is how you sanitize evil. pic.twitter.com/t1GbrxXbCR— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) August 6, 2025
The Inversion of Victim and Aggressor
One of the men featured, Mahdi Sheri, 23, a Hezbollah member, laments that he can no longer return to his former job on the front line. “Now,” the AP reports with near admiration, “Hezbollah is helping him find a new job.”
Other captions allude to trauma and paint a picture of resilience. Even the children of terrorists, AP notes, “now fear coming near their fathers.” As if the real tragedy isn’t the terror their fathers unleashed — but the fact that their children are afraid of their monstrous parents.
Not once does the AP mention what these men were doing before they were injured: actively working to kill Israelis.
These were not bystanders caught in crossfire. These were operatives of an Iranian-backed terror group, engaged in covert operations using encrypted pagers, the same technology Hezbollah has used for decades to coordinate rocket fire and ambushes targeting civilians.
But instead of reporting that fact, the AP chose to wrap them in tragedy and give them the space to monologue about their pain.
So allow us to do the job they wouldn’t.
The Real Victims: Murdered by Hezbollah
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241 US Marines and 58 French paratroopers, serving in a multinational peacekeeping force, murdered in the Beirut barracks bombing in 1983.
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114 people killed in the Israeli Embassy bombing (1992) and the AMIA Jewish Center bombing (1994) in Buenos Aires.
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19 US Air Force personnel murdered in the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996.
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Eight Israeli soldiers murdered in a cross-border raid, with two others taken hostage and later killed — the attack that triggered the 2006 Lebanon War, during which 43 Israeli civilians and 121 IDF soldiers were killed by Hezbollah rocket fire.
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Dozens of Israeli civilians and security personnel killed in Hezbollah attacks during the 2023–2024 Israel–Hezbollah conflict, launched after the October 7 Hamas massacre. Over 60,000 Israeli residents of the north were displaced.
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In July 2024, a Hezbollah rocket struck a soccer field in Majdal Shams, killing at least 12 children.
This is not a full list.
The media finds its focus when photographing the wounded bodies of terrorists. But it falls silent when it comes to their victims.
Call It What It Is
This isn’t journalism. It’s image laundering — the glorification of terror, repackaged as human interest.
And it’s not new.
We’ve seen it before: when The New York Times ran glowing features on Hamas-linked “journalists,” when the BBC called Qassam Brigade commanders “fighters,” and when Reuters gave Islamic Jihad operatives a platform without ever asking why they fire rockets at Israeli kindergartens.
It’s the same playbook: Humanize the perpetrator. Aestheticize the violence. Erase the victims. Call it balance.
But this isn’t balance. It’s complicity.
The Associated Press didn’t just publish a photo essay. It published a shrine.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.