I'm the reason Diane Abbott wrote that letter, and I stand by what I said

Telegraph

18-07-2025

Two years ago I wrote a column for The Observer. It was, I thought then, one of the more uncontroversial columns I have written in my career. It had two general points. The first is that Jews can be victims of racism; the second is that any definition of racism that excludes them is worthless and sinister.
Who could possibly object to these points? They are almost so basic as to be not even worth expressing. The middle of the twentieth century was indelibly marked by one of the most gruesome acts of inhumanity ever perpetrated: the annihilation of European Jewry. And the people who committed this crime – the Nazis and the regimes who collaborated with them – saw Jews not simply as a religious group. They were demonised as a race; atheist Jews were also slaughtered in the gas chambers.
I ask who could object to such a point, but what I really mean is which figure would stoop so low to do so. There are cranks in academia and the media, of course, who may reiterate the nonsense argument that only black and brown people could be victims of racism. But I was astonished, a week after I wrote my column, to learn that a member of Parliament would object to the main points I made. And not just any member of Parliament, but someone as experienced and well-respected as Diane Abbott.
Jews can experience prejudice like 'redheads', she wrote in a letter, but they can't experience racism. She apologised soon after and was suspended from the Labour Party. But it seems her apology meant nothing in the end, and she has just been suspended again by the Labour Party. The reason? According to Abbott, in a recent interview with the BBC's James Naughtie, she doesn't regret her letter from 2023. She added that: 'Clearly, there must be a difference between racism which is about colour and other types of racism, because you can see a Traveller or a Jewish person walking down the street, you don't know.'
That Jews cannot be recognised simply by looking at them would be news to those who are verbally and physically abused on the streets.
But there's something else going on here that needs to be unpacked: it is the notion of a hierarchy of racism. In her original letter to The Observer, Abbott argued that Jews were not put at the back of the bus in segregationist America. Nor were they oppressed in apartheid South Africa. That they were oppressed and victimised in other ways is beside the point; Jews are white, according to this logic, so they can evade the prejudice against black and brown people.
I have no personal animosity towards Abbott. I sympathise with the racist and misogynistic abuse she has suffered. And I thought her recent stand against assisted dying was brave and principled. More than anything else, I feel sad that someone so ostensibly committed to the cause of anti-racism can embarrass herself in this way. This doesn't mean I have changed my mind on the article I wrote. In fact I stand by it even more fiercely than before. The piece was written 6 months before October 7, the greatest massacre of Jews since the Second World War, and since then the subsequent orgy of anti-Semitic abuse and violence throughout the world has reinforced the necessity of speaking out against anti-Jewish racism. And it has made it even more important to call out people like Abbott who spread untruths about what constitutes racism.