According to the latest report from the Community Security Trust, the defence organisation of British Jews, attacks on Jews in Britain reached their highest level for more than two decades last year.

There were nearly 600 antisemitic assaults, incidents of vandalism, cases of abuse and threats made against Jewish individuals and institutions, it found. The number of attacks was up by nearly a third on 2005. More than a third, 37 per cent, of attackers whose background was known were Asian or Arab. Since 1984, when the recording of antisemitic incidents by the trust began, white attackers have been in a minority only last year and in 2004. The report said a disprortionate number of the attacks were carried out by people from ethnic minorities. It said: ‘The percentage overall is clearly not contiguous with the ethnic breakdown of the general population of the UK.’

The poisonous climate of incendiary lies about Israel and the global Jewish conspiracy have resulted in the victimisation of Britain’s Jews. So how did the Guardian choose to reflect on this sobering revelation? With a comment piece by Maleiha Malik, which managed to write current Jewish victimisation out of the script altogether and claimed instead that Muslims were now the new Jews. Just as a tiny number of Jewish anarchists at the turn of the last century had led to the stigmatisation of all Jews in Britain, she asserted, so Muslims were now being demonised in an identical manner.

Jews and now Muslims have been and are the targets of cultural racism: differences arising from their religious culture are pathologised and systematically excluded from definitions of ‘being British’. Both antisemitism and anti-Muslim racism focus on belief in religious law to construct Jews and Muslims as a threat to the nation.

Come again? ‘Anti-Muslim racism’? Since when were Muslims a race? Islam is a religion. It is the Jewish people who are victims of something well-nigh identical to racism. But of course, in order to appropriate to Muslims the victimisation of the Jews, Muslims have to be presented similarly as the victims of ethnic prejudice

The comparison, in any event, is odious. Yes, there were anarchists who were of Jewish origin, but their numbers were statistically insignificant. They had also overwhelmingly — if not universally — abandoned any identification with Jewish practice. They certainly did not carry out their attacks in the name of Judaism, and had no support from the Jewish community in Britain for their aims, let alone their methods. Islamic terrorism, by contrast, is known as such because it is carried out in the name of Islam, in accordance with a now dominant interpretation of the religion which is endorsed by the principal Islamic religious authorities, and with the express purpose of destroying western civilisation and replacing it by an Islamic empire.

There is also no comparison between a Jewish community which has always been painfully loyal to Britain and a Muslim community where up to 16 per cent support terrorism against the UK. The comparison becomes even more odious given the fact that — as the CST statistics reveal —British Jews are actually under threat from part of the Muslim community, where anti-Jewish prejudice is running at an alarming level. Last year, an opinion poll in the Times revealed that a horrifying 37 per cent of Muslims polled believed that that the Jewish community in Britain was a legitimate target’; 53% believed British Jews had ‘too much influence over the direction of UK foreign policy’, and no fewer than 46% thought the Jewish community was ‘in league with Freemasons to control the media and politics’.

Equally revolting is Malik’s dismissal of the former Dutch Somali politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali:

Hirsi Ali, whose research is funded by the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute, argues that the west should launch a war against Iran - with the prospect of the deaths of thousands more innocents - as it earlier agitated for war on Iraq.

But Ayaan Hirsi Ali only lives in the US at all because she was forced out of the Netherlands, where she had to be guarded night and day against threats to her life for speaking out against the subjugation of Muslim women of whom — genitally mutilated as a child — she had been one. To present her as an aggressive warmonger when Hirsi Ali, a victim of Islam who has spoken out heroically against it, merely wishes to prevent a second holocaust being committed by Iran in its name, is beyond grotesque.

The propaganda that ‘Muslims are the new Jews’ is being assiduously promoted. In the wake of the Birmingham kidnap plot arrests up popped Mohammed Naseem, chairman of the Birmingham Central Mosque, who further inflamed the already dangerous resentment at the terror raids among local Muslims by claiming that British Muslims were now being treated like the Jews were treated by the Nazis.

‘The German people were told Jews were a threat. The same thing is happening here,’ he said. Dr Naseem described the terror arrests in the city as an example of the Government justifying its political agenda and anti-terrorism laws. ‘This is a persecuting course of action that the Government has taken. They have invented this perception of a threat. To justify that, they have to maintain incidents to prove something is going on. There is dismay and people feel they are being persecuted unjustly.’

The comparison between Britain and Nazi Germany is of course beneath contempt. It is worth remembering, however, that Naseem is a major player in the fantasy league. After the 7/7 atrocities in London, he said that there was no proof that the suicide bombers were Muslims. He called Tony Blair a ‘liar’ and an ‘unreliable witness’ and questioned whether CCTV footage issued of the suspected bombers was of the perpetrators. He said that Muslims ‘all over the world have never heard of an organisation called al Qaeda’.

This man is considered a moderate. So, too, was the Muslim Council of Britain until recently, when both the government and the Conservative party finally and correctly identified it as an extremist body. This has not gone down at all well with the MCB’s fellow travellers and apologists on the left. A letter to the Guardian signed by the TUC General Secretary, Brendan Barber, Sadiq Khan MP, London mayor Ken Livingstone Mayor of London and journalist Cristina Odone, took issue with the Tories’ equation of the MCB and the British National Party.

The MCB calls for British Muslims to carry out only legal and peaceful activity and is opposed to racism. With over 400 affiliates, it is a body of Muslims in Britain which must be engaged with by decision-makers. Fascism is an ideology in whose name millions were murdered on the basis of their race or beliefs.

But the MCB — which has under its umbrella countless fascistic and racist bodies which promote hatred of unbelievers — itself subscribes to the ideology of Maulana Maududi who said: ‘The truth is that Islam is a revolutionary ideology which seeks to alter the social order of the entire world and rebuild it in conformity with its own tenets and ideals.’ Its spokesman Inayat Bunglawala has a record of antisemitic comments. And it explicitly supports — as does Livingstone —Yusuf Qaradawi, the Islamic religious authority who is a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood which wants to Islamise the west and subjugate all non Muslims, and who says human bomb attacks in Israel and Iraq are a religious duty, who would kill gays and beat women, and who has called upon Muslims to murder Jews in the name of Islam.

And while this poisonous filth is being spewed out in Britain in an unstoppable torrent, a teacher has been sacked for telling the truth. The BBC reports:

A supply teacher has been sacked from a secondary school following complaints from Muslim pupils. Andrew McLuskey was sacked from Bayliss Court Secondary School in Slough after a Religious Education lesson discussing the pros and cons of religion. Pupils at the predominantly Muslim school claimed Mr McLuskey said most suicide bombers were Muslim… The school authorities denied they were being heavy-handed and said their first priority was pupils’ welfare. ‘I don’t think it’s important what I think,’ said the school’s deputy head teacher Ray Hinds. ‘It’s what the pupils think that were in the classroom at the time. And they were very upset.’

Welcome once again to Londonistan.