The police handle crimes against Jews strangely leniently

The news that the Metropolitan Police has decided to take no further action against an Imam at an east London mosque who led a prayer for the destruction of Jewish homes does not come as a surprise.

But it’s ironic that it should follow so quickly on the heels of Essex Police’s investigation into Allison Pearson for a year-old tweet in which she accused the Met of double standards, saying that officers refused to pose with a British Friends of Israel banner but happily did so with some South Asian men holding up a green and red flag whom she described as “Jew haters”.

In fact, the men in the image were not pro-Hamas protesters celebrating the October 7 massacre but delegates from Pakistan’s Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), Imran Khan’s political party, and were posing a year earlier with the Greater Manchester Police, not the Met. But she had a point: why were police officers allowing themselves to be photographed next to men holding up a PTI flag, given the party’s history of tolerating antisemitism? In 2020, PTI’s vice-chairman, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, then Pakistan’s foreign minister, described Jews as having “deep pockets” and said they “control the media”.

In spite of the fact that Pearson deleted the tweet the following day, Essex Police are still investigating her more than a year later. Indeed, it’s been escalated to Gold Command status by the Chief Constable, a category usually reserved for the most serious crimes such as terror attacks. It seems that criticising the police – or accusing the PTI of harbouring antisemites, it isn’t clear which – is a far graver matter in their eyes than calling for the destruction of Jewish homes.

According to the Guardian, the claim that Britain suffers from two-tier policing is a “myth” put about by the “far right”. But as several people pointed out when the newspaper made this charge, the Guardian has published numerous articles accusing the authorities of two-tier policing when it comes to race and sexuality. In other words, it’s a truth universally acknowledged that the police are racist and sexist, but to accuse them of being more relaxed about antisemitism than Islamophobia is a conspiracy theory. Sounds like two-tier reporting.

The fact that you’re less likely to be prosecuted for antisemitism than you are for stirring up other forms of racial hatred is hard to dispute. At the Free Speech Union, the advocacy group I run, we’re currently defending a man who is due to stand trial in February for posting an allegedly Islamophobic video on Facebook. We are also appealing the sentences of two people who received serious jail time for saying supposedly inflammatory things in the wake of the Southport attack.

Contrast their fate with that of the men arrested in 2021 for allegedly being part of a convoy driving through East Finchley and nearby areas in cars draped with Palestinian flags, from which people were heard calling for the rape and murder of Jews. Four were initially charged with using “threatening, abusive or insulting words” that were likely to stir up racial hatred, but the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) decided there was no realistic prospect of a conviction.

Even when people are prosecuted for racially aggravated or terrorism-related offences, some forms of hatred seem to carry heavier sentences than others. For instance, three women who attached images of paragliders to their backs during a pro-Palestinian protest a week after October 7 were found guilty of supporting Hamas, a proscribed terrorist organisation, but were let off with 12-month conditional discharges. Lucy Connolly, by contrast, was sent to prison for two-and-a-half years for a tweet in the aftermath of the Southport killings calling for mass deportations of Muslims and urging people to burn down asylum hotels. Connolly is one of the people whom the Free Speech Union is helping. We don’t condone what she said, obviously, but she is clearly a victim of two-tier sentencing.

The rationale for imprisoning people guilty of stirring up racial hatred is that if you allow “out groups” to be smeared and demonised, it can lead to racially motivated violence and, ultimately, ethnic cleansing. This was set out by Gavin Stephens, chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC). “Hate left unaddressed, whether that’s propagated online or in person, has real world consequences,” he told the Telegraph at the recent NPCC summit. “One of the things that we’re really, really clear on is that we do not want to miss precursors to violence, because we know that if we miss those precursors to violence, then the consequences can be severe.” This theory – that “precursors to violence”, if left unpunished, can lead to ever more serious hate crimes culminating in genocide – was first set out by Gordon Allport, an American social psychologist, in his 1954 book The Nature of Prejudice. He came up with an escalating five-point scale, with racist comments at one end and "extermination” at the other.

But his conclusions were based on interviews with European Jews who had lived through the Holocaust. Why, then, do the police and the Crown Prosecution Service apply Allport’s model – colloquially referred to as the “Pyramid of Hate” – to Islamophobia but not to antisemitism? It seems perverse to think the former needs to be punished severely in case it leads to violent attacks on Muslims but the latter doesn’t need to be taken as seriously, even though, according to Allport, it led to the deaths of six million Jews.

We all know the answer, of course. According to the high priests of our new public morality – radical progressive academics, for the most part – only black and brown people can be the victims of racism, with all Jews, including Jews of Middle Eastern and North African descent, being considered “white”. This means that in the “pyramid of hate”, antisemitism is ranked far below anti-black and anti-Muslim prejudice.

This is the thinking behind describing Zionism as adjacent to “white supremacy”. It explains the outpouring of sympathy on university campuses across the West for the Palestinian victims of “settler colonialism”. It also accounts for the cognitive dissonance that has led to the emergence of groups such as Queers for Palestine. According to votaries of the woke cult, all “oppressed” peoples need to stand in solidarity with each other, even if one of those “marginalised” groups wants to throw the other off high buildings. They share a common enemy and the people with “deep pockets” who “control the media” are among the “oppressors”.

This thinking has long been entrenched in academia and the mainstream media but the fact that it has now infected the police and CPS is an alarming new development brought into sharp relief in the aftermath of October 7. The police are supposed to act “without fear or favour” and justice is supposed to be blind. We urgently need to restore those principles before we descend into a “two-tier society” in which some minorities enjoy the full protection of the law while others are considered fair game.

Toby Young is a director of the British Friends of Israel and the general secretary of the Free Speech Union