“Sir, you look too Jewish”

Acting Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Stephen House, has launched the national Police Race Action Plan with these rousing words: “The Met is committed to becoming an actively anti-racist organisation that can be trusted by everyone in London.”

Except, evidently, by the Jews.

One Jewish Briton found that out the hard way when he tried to cross the street in Aldwych, an area a few hundred yards from the Mother of All Parliaments. What unfolded then made a mockery of that proximity.

You see, a pro-Palestinian march was under way, and the marchers’ brittle sensibilities could be offended by the sight of a Jew. That’s what a police officer guarding the crowd’s right to parade its grievances explained to the man provocatively wearing a kippah:

“I don’t want anybody antagonising anybody,” said the cop, “… and at the moment, sir, you are quite openly Jewish. This is a pro-Palestinian march. I am not accusing you of anything but I am worried about the reaction to your presence.”

Being openly Jewish is thus antagonising (though mercifully still short of incurring criminal charges), whereas being openly pro-terrorist isn’t. I get it, but the pest in question didn’t, not straight away at any rate. Some people just don’t understand it when you try to be nice to them.

That’s why another officer had to explain the lie of the land in no uncertain terms: “You will be escorted out of this area so you can go about your business, go where you want freely. Or if you choose to remain here, because you are causing a breach of peace, with all these other people, you will be arrested.”

Lest he may be accused of blatant anti-Semitism, the policeman explained he was only threatening arrest to protect the interloper’s safety: “Your presence here is antagonising a large group of people that we can’t deal with all of them if they attack you… because your presence is antagonising them.”

‘Antagonising’ seems to be the current buzzword of the Met. The word seems to be peculiarly defined. The police are displaying epic forbearance at the sight of a mob chanting frenzied anti-Semitic invective and waving placards of the swastika superimposed on the Star of David. It’s only the presence of an “openly Jewish” man that’s antagonising.

Since we have the rule of law in Britain, we can’t rely on arbitrary judgement to decide who is transgressing against the new directive and who isn’t. Hence it’s necessary to formalise the antagonising features.

All Met officers should then be issued instructions defining openly Jewish appearance in detail. After all, not every Jew makes life easy for the police by wearing religious garments.

That done, every bobby on the beat should be equipped with a portable phrenology kit, making it easy to perform cranial and nasal measurements on the spot. One can just hear a Met officer saying to a pedestrian: “Awfully sorry, suh, but your nose is half an inch too long for this street, like.”

As to the concern for the man’s safety, let me make sure I understand. Sir Robert Peel, then Home Secretary, created the Metropolitan Police in 1829 for the express purpose of protecting public order and the safety of law-abiding individuals.

He bequeathed to his heirs not only the monikers based on his name (‘bobbies’ or ‘peelers’) but also a clear definition of their duties. Now they openly proclaim either their reluctance or their impotence to do the job. So what are the police for? They seem to be qualified or empowered only to enforce woke diktats, not the law.

In general, vigilantly as the police guard against every manifestation of anti-Muslim or anti-black bias (real or putative), they don’t seem to mind public displays of blatant anti-Semitism. Of course, it would be defying statistics to believe that the police force has a lower percentage of anti-Semites than the national average.

I don’t know what the national average is, but on this evidence it seems rather high. There’s no doubt that not only policemen but also indignant pedestrians would disperse any procession demanding that every black in, say, sub-Saharan Africa be killed.

Yet no one seems to mind when a crowd of fanatics marches through London streets screaming death to all Israelis (that’s what ‘from the river to the sea’ actually means). And the zealots don’t distinguish between Jews living in Israel or in Golders Green.

Policemen, being a captive audience, are easier to indoctrinate than the rest of the population. The public at large, at least some of its more recalcitrant members, can still resist constant brainwashing about ‘Palestinians’ being exterminated by genocidal Jews.

Cops, on the other hand, must follow the guidelines issued by their superiors. So even officers who are personally neither anti-Semitic nor pro-terrorist must enforce the rights of racist militants while denying the rights of people peacefully walking the streets.

The line between personal inclinations and official guidelines isn’t always easy to draw. Just look at the actions of another officer and tell me what his motivation was.

A woman took exception to the posters featuring swastikas at another such march last month. She complained to a policeman on duty, who in response gave her a lesson in both dialectics and history. That little logo isn’t necessarily a sign of anti-Semitism, he explained. The swastikas “need to be taken into context”.

Which context would that be? A sun-worshipping Hindu rite, where the swastika symbolised both the star and purity? If that’s what the cop meant, one has to applaud his erudition, which isn’t widely regarded as the core strength of our police force.

However, one suspects that’s not what he had in mind. He was simply fobbing the woman off by telling her to grin and bear it.

The cop knew perfectly well that, in the ‘context’ of today’s London streets, the swastika symbolises not the sun and not even purity, but the wholesale massacre of Jews. It’s just that he couldn’t see why a Jewish woman should be offended by the sight of the symbol under which half the world’s Jews were murdered just one lifetime ago.

His colleagues, on the other hand, had no doubt that the sight of a Jew was so unbearably painful to a frenzied mob that its feelings had to be protected.

How long before our mayor Sadiq Khan declares London a Jew-free zone (Judenfrei)? And authorises rallies like those so expertly filmed by Leni Riefenstahl? Nothing would surprise me. I’m rapidly losing the ability to be surprised.