MONDAY’S anti-semitic attack on ambulances run by the Hatzola Jewish community organisation has highlighted the hatreds dividing society after two-and-a-half years of continuous war in the Middle East.

Whoever turns out to be responsible for the crime it sits within the context of escalating anti-semitism in Britain and elsewhere since the October 2023 attack by Hamas on Israel, and the genocidal response in Gaza by the Netanyahu government.

Anti-semitism is not the only indicator of rising racism in British society. Islamophobia grows more rampant by the week.

To be clear – if one opposes either of these evils, it is necessary to oppose both. This is not and never should be a matter of “either/or,” something too many forget. 

The socialist message of equality and social justice is meaningless if it is not universal.

Anti-Muslim hatred is now practiced without political cost. The boundaries of the acceptable are being drawn in places unthinkable just a few years ago.

The Gorton and Denton by-election result was accompanied by denunciations of the constituency’s large Muslim electorate for, in effect, declining to back the Labour candidate.

The charge was led by rancid Reform candidate Matthew Goodwin, who complained that too many voters did not speak English, and then that the victorious Greens had been “sectarian” for producing a leaflet in Urdu, notwithstanding that election literature in minority languages has been normal practice across parties for many years.

The Reform message was that Muslims voting was somehow illegitimate and measures are threatened to make it harder for them to do so.

Then there was shadow justice secretary Nick Timothy’s broadside against Muslims worshipping publicly in Trafalgar Square, a practice which began unremarked several years ago.

He was clear that his objection was to Islamic doctrine, which he claimed aimed to “dominate” because of its insistence on the worship of Allah.

In fact all monotheistic faiths make analogous claims. Indeed, the first of the Ten Commandments enjoins the worship of no deity other than the Judeo-Christian one.

Timothy’s purpose is to drive devout Muslims from the public square, just as the Reform gang wants to exclude, or at least minimise, their presence in the voting booths.

Elsewhere, politicians have proposed making it harder to get approval for the opening of mosques, and have championed mass deportation schemes, rebranded as “remigration” which would fall particularly heavily on Muslims lawfully resident here.

All this on top of escalating street-level violence. There were more than 30 arson or other attacks on mosques in the first nine months of last year and over 6,000 Islamophobic incidents overall in 2024.

The whole package would, in the event of some Reform-Tory alliance trying to enact them, place Muslims in Britain in a position not so very different from Jews in Germany in the first, 1933-34 phase of the Third Reich, when exclusion from the public space and general harassment were the Nazi priorities.

And here is the difference between anti-semitism and Islamophobia today. It does not lie in one being less objectionable than the other, nor in the growing threat of violence which emanates from both.

Each is becoming normalised in particular circles, and both need to be confronted wherever we see them expressed.

But there is no major political party advocating measures which would infringe on the rights or public standing of Jews in Britain.

With regard to Muslims, it is open season, a discrepancy some of the right openly embrace with rhetoric about only Muslims being “terrorists” and “hating the West.”

All people of decency must raise their voices more loudly and consistently on this issue. The Together demonstration in London this weekend is a chance to unite across different parties, communities and traditions in asserting anti-racism as a consistent and universal principle.