ALMOST as soon as the news emerged in the early hours of Monday March 23 that four ambulances belonging to a London Jewish charity had been set on fire, people started reaching into the dustbin to retrieve threadbare scraps of information, well-worn conspiracy theories and age-old stereotypes to explain, justify or deny what was clearly an anti-semitic attack.

It was no surprise that far-right anti-semites were poised to target the victims. Jayda Fransen got in early. She is part of the fascist wing that still hates all Jews (unlike Tommy Robinson who has an affection for the Israeli flag while sharing the anti-semitic Great Replacement Theory). Fransen attacked the victims for having “their own ambulances” and “their own police force” and running “parallel services for their own people.” Chris Parry, Reform UK’s recently suspended mayoral candidate for Hampshire, responded to the arson attack by comparing the Jewish neighbourhood watch group, Shomrim, to “Islamists on horseback.”

The accusation that Jews look after themselves at the expense of everyone else is a consistent element in far-right rhetoric. If they bothered with the facts, they would have noticed that it’s normal for minority communities to run some of their own services, such as care homes, nurseries, women’s refuges and mental health centres that meet their cultural, linguistic and communal needs.

What has been alarming this week, though, is that otherwise progressive individuals have picked up this accusation and run with it.

“Why do they have their own ambulance service — jumping the queue,” complained one. Another compared Hatzola unfavourably with St John Ambulance, saying: “St John’s Ambulance is nationwide and not under a religious name.”

Such ignorance would be laughable if it wasn’t part of Palestine’s long, tragic history. Just for the record, this charity originates in the Crusader Order of St John, established after the Christian conquest of Jerusalem in 1099.

They were finally chucked out in the 13th century and went on to colonise numerous other territories.

The litany of victim-blaming started for me soon after I heard news of the attack: a comrade in a socialist WhatsApp group shared an old story about five of the charity’s volunteers having gone to Israel for training with Magen David Adom (Israel’s incarnation of the Red Cross), the IDF and others. People in the WhatsApp group didn’t know what to make of this conundrum. How could they condemn the attack when the victims had done something so bad?

Understandably, feelings are running high — including, incidentally, among many Jews — about the relentless destruction being wreaked by Israel on Palestine and across the region. But who would take it into their heads to set fire to ambulances parked near a synagogue, in a residential area with a high Jewish population, in response to some of the charity’s volunteers having trained in Israel seven years ago? It would be a strange target to choose — unless you’re a violent anti-semite.

From among the ocean of mavens on social media, many commentators have claimed, giving no sources or evidence whatsoever, that it was a “false flag” operation — carried out by the community themselves or their allies to generate sympathy or stir up division or both.

A typical such assertion, laced with sarcasm, from someone firmly rooted in the left (and this is one of the milder examples), was: “Most of these events turn out to be false flag attacks to stir up support for the poor unfortunate genocidal sociopaths.”

Here are a few more examples — all from left-wing sources. There’s the usual know-all, insisting that this attack couldn’t be anti-semitic because “There is no such thing as anti-semitism. The ONLY semites are Palestinians. Jews are not semites.” And the assertion, repeatedly shared on the basis of no evidence at all but drawing on the deep-rooted stereotype of money-grubbing Jews: “I saw a post saying it was an insurance scam. The ambulances were being replaced so sitting [sic] fire to them would see a [sic] insurance payout.”

There are jokey posts: “Maybe they cant [sic] be in a vehicle that may have contained a bacon sandwich… the crime here is the exposure of something that was a nice little secret I wonder how many other tax avoidance charity schemes get run from this building…”

And more hardcore, like this description of angry residents turning on an Al Jazeera reporter after the attack (one of the residents turned out to be a police officer, thus, apparently, confirming that the community deserved to have their ambulances firebombed): “… one is saying get them ‘off our streets’. I need to correct him, it’s the UK streets not your streets. Now I understand why the Jews have been displaced over and over again. If this is what they do when they settle down anywhere then surely the locals will want them to leave.”

This is fascistic stuff, claiming that Jews will always be unwanted, don’t belong, and are only here on sufferance, and are therefore a valid target for “locals” to attack.

The right to live safely, and not under a pall of fear, is universal. It applies to everyone. You don’t have to earn it by good behaviour. Bad people — including thieves, murderers, fraudsters, corrupt politicians, even fascists — all have rights in law. This precious principle, that every human being has inalienable rights, is not revolutionary but it is part of the moral and political landscape of the left, and it’s in imminent danger of being swept away by rampant right-wing political leaders and governments. So it’s worse than alarming to find socialists and anti-racists trying to slide out of condemning a clear and violent anti-semitic act, using conspiracy theories and stereotypes of Jews that normally emanate from fascists, to “prove” that the victims deserved what they got.

Excusing this attack on the basis of what we believe to be the behaviour of the victims is to advocate vigilantism — taking the law into our own hands in revenge for some perceived crime. Such mob rule is a hallmark of the far right, as we have seen, week after week, when baying Reform UK supporters gather outside hotels accommodating asylum-seekers to threaten the inhabitants.

So what is in the minds of anti-racists and anti-fascists, whose first instinct is not to show compassion for the targeted community or to call for solidarity and support, but instead to abandon them, to deny that they are the subjects of a racist attack, and to imply that they deserved what they got?

If we march and argue and get arrested for insisting that it is wrong and against international law for Israel to attack medical facilities, how can we even contemplate excusing it in other circumstances? The ambulances that were set on fire belong to a Jewish organisation called Hatzola, which means help or aid.

That’s what they do: save lives by providing transport to hospital for whoever needs it, Jewish or non-Jewish. Attacking ambulances is wrong, whoever does it and whoever it is done to. That’s both a moral principle and a political principle: breaking it sabotages our fight for peace and justice by passing judgement on the victims instead of the perpetrators.