After an angry, inevitably, celebrity-studded rally in Trafalgar Square, groups of Jews descended on Brick Lane to assault anyone visibly identified as a Muslim. Some burst into a curry house and attacked the diners, tugging at their beards while shouting Oi Vey. A rabbi is rumoured to have tried to strangle a waiter with a rolled up prayer shawl. Outside one of the many mosques in the area, the Jews chanted ‘Death to the Earabs’ (in emulation of the Palestinian supporter’s ‘Death to the Juices’ (sic) placard I saw last week).
Elsewhere, irate Jews rioted outside the Iranian and Syrian embassies, blaming them for the rocket attacks in Gaza, while mysterious Jewish websites published lists of prominent Muslims who they threatened to kill. In Bradford an imam was dragged from his car and beaten up by two men on a day trip from Stamford Hill.
Meanwhile, a group of well-known Jews published a letter in the newspapers warning the British government that if it didn’t adjust its pro-Arab foreign policy, there would be a corresponding radicalisation of the British Jewish community who might resume terrorist attacks on public transport.
Faced with such concerted manifestations of hysterical anger, the police decided to arrest any Muslims provocatively sporting a Palestinian keffiyah. Tantalised by Jewish violence, the BBC sent several admiring reporters to tell their story to a wider public, giving a new spin to the saw ‘Jews means News’. My God how they must have suffered to be this angry, threatening Muslims with something ominously called a ‘Holocaust’. Grovelling interviews were conducted with Israeli spokesmen because of their remote connection with these wild-eyed Anglo-Jews. The IDF became heroes over night…..
All of which is only as incredible as what we are witnessing now here in London
Michael Burleigh Imagine
This asymmetric character of the global crisis â?? the fact that the shocks were even bigger on the periphery than at the epicentre… the troubles of the rest of the world meant that in relative terms the US gained, politically as well as economically. Many commentators had warned in 2008 that the financial crisis would be the final nail in the coffin of American credibility around the world. First, neo-conservatism had been discredited in Iraq. Now the â??Washington consensusâ?? on free markets had collapsed. Yet this was to overlook two things. The first was that most other economic systems fared even worse than Americaâ??s when the crisis struck: the far larger economic problems in the rest of the world had given Obama a unique opportunity to reassert American leadership, particularly in Asia and the Middle East. The â??unipolar momentâ?? was over, no question. But power is a relative concept, as the president pointed out in his last press conference of the year: â??They warned us that America was doomed to decline. And we certainly all got poorer this year. But they forgot that if everyone else declined even further, then America would still be out in front…
Niall Ferguson An imaginary retrospective of 2009
