In the early hours of Monday, March 23rd, in the predominantly Jewish Golders Green area of North London, four ambulances belonging to Hatzolah – a charity emergency service run on contributions from the Jewish community, but serving everybody in the area who needs it, Jewish or not – were set, deliberately, on fire. The next morning, when the story broke, the inevitable bullshit reaction from the “Just Saying” crowd began. Here are a few of the comments I saw, all responding to the same BBC News article posted on Facebook the day after this crime was committed. They’re all genuine; you can go and find them yourself, if you’ve got the stamina and/or inclination.
“Perhaps if they were not bombing the hell out of Gaza Lebanon and Iran it wouldn’t of happened”
“Maybe if Judaism were a less violent religion, there would be less violence against it.”
“ “Jewish charity ambulance ” (vomit emoji) Special treatment in every aspect. And they are the victim (tears-of-laughter emoji)”
“Weird that the police don’t react like this when churches get burnt down isn’t it (h’mmm emoji)”
“Inside job”
“We all know its Mossad”
“Allah willed it.”
To the above sneering morons I say: fuck off, the lot of you – you disgust me. You knew fuck-all about what had really happened when you made these remarks, and you were reacting purely out of prejudice and resentment. Besides, the group behind this crime (and several other recent such crimes committed across Europe) has since come to light, and – well, golly gosh – it’s the expected coterie of rage-addled losers with exactly the sort of long, pretentious look-at-us-we’re-hard name you’d expect of such an outfit – which as usual chiefly reminds me, in fact, of the World Domination League from “Beyond the Fringe” (members: E. L. Wisty and Spotty Muldoon.) I’m not going to dignify these nithings by naming them; you can Google them yourself if you’re interested. But no. It wasn’t an inside job. Not that any of the goons who farted out the comments reproduced above will accept it. They’re too invested in their prejudices for that.
I’m not going to relate this event to what’s going on in the Middle East; when it comes to that subject, far cleverer and better informed men than I have said all that needs to be said, and many stupider and more pompous ones have said quite a lot that doesn’t. Burning a few ambulances will do nothing to sway the results of the endless conflict one way or the other; it can’t. All it can do, and what it was intended to do, is frighten Jews. Not Jews in military service, fighting in campaigns the perpetrators disagree with; just Jews in general, who are already living in fear, given the way that the frequency of attacks on both Jewish individuals and businesses has gone through the roof in this country of late, to the point that they’ve had to station security guards outside synagogues and Jewish schools now as a matter of routine. It fits perfectly the definition of terrorism, and it was a crime inspired by hatred, committed by three individuals who believed that acting on that hatred was more important than the work of a potentially life-saving public service. I can’t look on such people with anything but contempt.
Please don’t be silly enough to try and put words in my mouth here. I’m not talking about nice Mr and Mrs Al-Eidi from down the street, or daft-as-a-brush Nadeem who keeps the office laughing doing funny voices. I’m talking about the sort of tosser who’s seen too many of those YouTube videos in which some puffed-up idiot preacher orders worldwide conquest and genocide while doing that absurd pointy-pointy finger thing (which, to be frank, always reminds me of that irritating little squirt in junior school who thinks he’s got the right answer to a question and really, really wants Mrs Beasley to call on him so he can show off to everybody) and then thinks, “Yeah, that’s exactly what I want to do with my life. I’ll go and buy some petrol.” That sort of tosser.
I don’t know what more I can say. I have no answers or bright thoughts to impart, so why am I writing this? I’m sure very few people ever read this blog – and however many there are, I know three of them, which I’m guessing is fifty per cent of my readers at best – but I’m not posting my thoughts on Facebook because there are sure to be the usual tiresome prigs who would consider them “problematic”, and I genuinely can’t be arsed to argue the toss with these people. Besides, I’m not interested in virtue signalling to all and sundry, which is how saying these things could be interpreted; I leave that sort of caper to those who think their anti-Semitism is somehow “enlightened”, or to use a word I detest, “woke”. But I need to put these words down in some form rather than keeping them inside, because frankly I feel sick when I think that this shit is happening in my country. Why has it hit me so hard? Because I’m an ordinary, decent human being, and that’s all it should take. And let’s not kid ourselves. I’m a gay polytheist – two characteristics that these scumbags have told us time and time again are capital offences in their fucked-up ideology. It’s the Jews they’re focusing on now, but I’m under no illusions that they wouldn’t also come for me, and others like me whom I care about, when they decided it was time.
Yup – I’m a Germanic heathen, speaking in support of Jews. And if that surprises anyone reading this because it flies in the face of the kind of lazy propaganda all too often gladly disseminated by the enemies of my religious tradition, then too bad. Get over it.
L’chaïm, and wes þu hal.