Anti-semitism moral panics

In the aftermath of global condemnation of Israel’s 2014 bombing of Gaza’s civilians, including hundreds of children, the UK media and that of the broader Western world became swept up in a moral panic suggesting that the world’s ‘real’ victims were in fact affluent, middle-class, white ethnic Western Jews. Apparently anti-Semitism was to be the ‘real’ prioritised problem, and it was claimed to be rife. However, in the UK, even in the face of media underreporting, the extent of racism experienced by Black Britons and Muslims is evident, because we know the names of those who experience crippling attack, and who die at the hands of racists and disproportionately at the hands of the police: Dr Sarandev Bhambra, Mohammad Saleem Chaudry, Mark Duggan and Jermaine Baker have been some of the many victims of these various experiences. We even know the places of Muslim worship subjected to arson, such as the Finsbury Park and Bishopbriggs mosques. By comparison, where were the equivalent white ethnic Jewish victims of anti-Semitism? Even in the case of the muchtrumpeted fist fight that occurred at Stamford Hill synagogue – which got considerable, disproportionate media coverage – the local rabbi, Maurice Davis, excluded anti- Semitism as a cause. Finally, filling a gap in the dominant ideological narrative, there was one incident that the media could invoke by reference to a real name, which therefore was privileged with elevated coverage, despite obvious undermining contradictions in the reportage.