Remember those social experiments highlighting the problem of antisemitism in Europe?
Like the time Irish journalist Patrick Reilly donned a kippah for a day in Malmo, Sweden.
And the time Swedish journalist Petter Ljunggren did the same thing.
And Israeli journalist Zvika Klein’s recent walk through neighborhoods of France.
Well, there’s a new such experiment, this time by the Daily Mail’s Jonathan Kalmus. The results are the same.
You Jew’ was the anti-Semitic scream which came from a passing car. My shaken wife tried to explain it away to my seven-year-old daughter as a very large sneeze. They were simply playing in a local park in Manchester a few weeks ago when the incident ripped through what should have been a peaceful and wholesome time for any mother and child.
‘Fight the Jewish scum’ and ‘Jew, Jew, Jew… Run’, were the more vicious threats hurled at me in the past few days, however, when I decided to secretly film and find out whether ‘Jew-hatred’ really is alive and kicking on British streets.
The answer to that question is a resounding and heart-sinking yes.
I took the inspiration from the viral videos of Israeli journalist Zvika Klein, who filmed himself being threatened on the streets of Paris, and Muslim Hamdy Mahisen, who filmed himself getting abuse in Milan.
Zvika walked in Paris for 10 hours, Hamdy in Milan for five. It took me just one minute. One minute of walking one single, busy major street in Manchester before abuse was flung at me.
In 25 minutes on that one single street in Longsight, I was spat at by one man and called ‘a Jew’ multiple times by passers by, even by a young boy walking with his father.
I was just walking in the street testing the effect of being clearly identifiable as a Jew by wearing a small traditional Jewish head covering called a kippah.In Bradford the situation was more shameful. It took 13 minutes, during which I was stalked by a man who repeatedly took pictures of me. He followed me on foot for five minutes and thirty seconds according to my footage.
There was a shout of ‘you Jew’ at me as I crossed the road to Bradford City Park. Minutes later a man turned his head and yelled ‘fight the Jewish scum’ just behind my back.
Some time later three youths shouted at me across a street repeatedly, ‘You’re a Jew, not a Muslim…Jew, Jew, Jew run!’I was prepared to walk for hours and expected to get nothing on camera. On Manchester’s curry mile, a haven of mixed cultures and skin colour, it took two-and-half-minutes for a young lad on a bike to ride up to me and shout, ‘You’re a Jew’ in my face. I was left speechless that anti-Semitism is so obvious.
In total, between the two cities I suffered a series of anti-Semitic hate incidents, two more than those in Zvika Klein’s video and achieved in one-tenth of the time here in Britain. What a horrible reality.
Why did I pick Bradford? For a simple reason. Last summer during the height of another Gaza conflict between Israel and Palestinians, 5,000 people, predominantly young Muslim men, gathered for a mass rally in Bradford City Park. The city’s MP, George Galloway, spoke while flanked by two butch men wearing T-shirts emblazoned ‘Palestine’s army you are not alone’.
Jonathan also preemptively deals with those – like anti-Israel scumball Richard Silverstein – who will claim he was “provoking”:
No one could accuse me of targeting Muslim neighbourhoods to provoke a reaction. This was the centre of an ordinary English city and I was minding my own business.
No one could accuse me of wearing something provocative or political. A Jewish person or any peaceful person walking in a British street anywhere, let alone a city centre, should be welcome.
Read the entire thing. If you can stomach it.
