An antisemitism expert has called on The Observer to correct this week’s leader column after it falsely claimed that, prior to last week’s terrorist attack on Manchester’s Heaton Park Synagogue, there had been no antisemitic murders in the UK in almost 300 years.
In an October 5 piece titled “We cannot allow Britain to become an Unsafe Haven”, the paper’s editorial team wrote: “From the 1650s, for 300 years, there was no record of a Jew being killed in Britain for being a Jew.”
But this claim prompted a letter from Professor Tony Kushner from the Parkes Institute for the study of Jewish/non-Jewish relations at the University of Southampton, who pointed to at least three more recent examples.
In a letter to the paper, seen by the JC, he wrote: Sadly, this is not the case. In the eighteenth century, as I have outlined in my book, The Jewish Pedlar, several Jews were brutally murdered because of their Jewishness, including by having scorching bacon stuffed down their throats.
