The left’s grotesque betrayal of women and Jews

The hatreds of the Dark Ages have cast their shadow on Britain once more. In Essex, on Saturday, people taunted Jews with dead babies. They carried dolls in shrouds stained with fake blood and hollered ‘Stop killing babies!’ as families walked home from synagogue after Sabbath prayers for Passover. In Edinburgh, also on Saturday, angry men openly dreamed of executing witchy women. ‘Bring back witch-burning… JK’, said a placard at a trans rally. The suggestion was as clear as it was sick: for the crime of her belief in biology, JK Rowling should be strapped to the stake and set alight. Another placard drove the point home: ‘Kill JK Rowling.’

It is 2025 and we are witnessing the public shaming of women and Jews, the taunting of them with slanders and threats. In Essex, life was breathed back into the medieval libel that damned the Jew as baby killer, as nefarious luster after the blood of innocents. Images of pious ‘pro-Palestine’ activists marching past Orthodox Jews while carrying blood-stained infants should chill the spine of all who know the history of Jew hatred. In Edinburgh there was the dream of witch trials. The cry went up: drag these bitches who deny the womanhood of men and punish them with fire for their disrespect.

In the UK, on the same day, in our supposedly enlightened era, the blood libel and the witch hunt made their return to public life. Jews, once again, found themselves surrounded by sick, dark whispers about baby killing. Women, once again, found themselves condemned for witchcraft. We need to talk about this. That two supposedly ‘progressive’ causes – support for Palestine and support for trans rights – can rekindle such pre-modern bigotries, such ancient hysterias, is both alarming and telling. Saturday might prove to be the day we learned just how menacing to civilisation the politics of identity can be.

All of Easter Saturday’s ‘political’ gatherings were grotesque spectacles. It was in Westcliff-on-Sea in Southend, Essex that the ‘pro-Palestine’ marchers assembled. This is a part of Essex with a significant Jewish population. And it was Sabbath. Passover, too. Yet that wasn’t going to stop the Israelophobes. To the horror of local residents, they chanted about Israel’s ‘targeting’ of ‘sleeping babies’. They waved their blood-spattered dolls in onlookers’ faces. They noisily accused the Jewish nation of laying waste to ‘the birthplace of Jesus’, getting perilously close to reanimating the trope of the Christ killer, the Jew as destroyer of messiahs.

‘Even by the standards of the past 18 months, the march in Southend was despicable’, said a spokesperson for the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA). The chants about the slaying of babies alongside those grim, funereal displays of shrouded dolls represented a ‘chilling echo of medieval blood libels’, the CAA said. It is nearly 900 years since the sick calumny about the bloodletting Jew was born, in Norwich, England. It is deeply shaming, intolerable in fact, that England’s Jews once again find themselves negotiating mobs of people howling about child slaughter and waving bloodied shrouds.

As for Saturday’s ‘trans’ rallies – in London, Manchester and Edinburgh – they were orgies of misogyny in the unconvincing drag of civil rights. They were called in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling on the legal definition of a woman. Protesters fantasised about pissing and shitting on women and, if that fails to bring them to heel, then killing them. ‘I love pissin’ on TERFs’, said one placard. Another suggested that people ‘shit… on the head of another TERF’. ‘The only good TERF is a _ _ _ _ TERF’, was a common slogan, alongside an image of a stick figure being hanged. I wish they’d make their minds up: do they want to burn women alive or hang them by the neck?

Protesters made clear their intention to intrude into women’s spaces. ‘We piss where we want’, said a placard in Manchester. ‘After this protest, I’m going to use a women’s toilet, then I’m going to use another women’s toilet’, said a ‘transwoman’ in Dundee. So you’re a bloke who’s going to mark his territory? Who’s going to piss where he pleases to demonstrate his dominion over womankind? These were gross displays of supremacy, not ‘progressive’ marches. The trans activists promised to invade women-only areas; the ‘pro-Palestine’ activists plied their libels about Israel in a fairly Jewish area. Every moral sensibility found itself trampled under the boot of their narcissistic urges. Decency be damned – trans activists will shit where women are, and Palestine activists will holler where Jews are.

For me, one of the most chilling sights from this day of hate was when women’s rights activists in Sheffield were told by police that their display of the Suffragette flag might cause offence. You know you’re in the company of misogynists when it’s a risky act to wave the flag of women’s liberation. It brought to mind the time last year when cops in Edinburgh suggested a Jewish man hide his Star of David necklace lest it ‘trigger’ people on a ‘pro-Palestine’ demo in the city. ‘Would you mind tucking your star behind your jumper?’, an officer said. These are words we should not forget. We should never forget that in Britain in the 2020s a Jew was advised to disguise his Jewishness to placate a mob of Israel-haters.

Behold the monster wokeness has spawned. A situation where it’s dangerous to wave the Suffragette flag or to wear Jewish paraphernalia. A situation where you demonstrate your support for women’s rights or your existence as a Jew at your own peril. And it isn’t only the UK. Across the Anglo-American world, the rights of women and Jews are sacrificed at the altar of identitarianism. In the US, Jews are harassed on campus, women are robbed of their sporting glory. In Australia, Jews’ temples are burnt down while women who dissent from the gender cult are set upon by feral mobs. Saturday’s hate marches in the UK, against the security of women and the security of the Jewish State, were a testament to the woke era’s resuscitation of ancient hatreds.

Nothing better demonstrates that wokeness is an anti-Enlightenment creed than the ghastly reanimation of the blood libel and the witch hunt. The new left’s rejection of modernity has seen it get dragged ever further into the derangements of an older age. Its embrace of the post-truth ideology of gender has led to the burning at the stake of women’s rights. Its intoxication by Israelophobia has led to the libelling all over again of the Jewish people. The fight for women’s dignity and Jewish safety starts again. Dust down your Suffragette flags, call your Jewish friends, and get out there.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy