Opinion
Jews are getting what they deserve – isn’t that what you meant to say, Giles Coren?
We have translated the Times columnist’s latest piece on Israel and Gaza so you don’t have to read it
September 9, 2025 12:44
2 min read
We have translated the Times columnist’s latest piece on Israel and Gaza so you don’t have to read it
September 9, 2025 12:44Hey you – Jew. Shut up with your moaning. Those faeces on the wall of your synagogue? It’s YOUR FAULT. Those guards outside your kids’ school? YOUR FAULT. The calls for you to be slaughtered? The shrieks that Hitler was right? YOUR FAULT. Those people kicking you in the street? YOUR FAULT. All of it is YOUR FAULT, Jew.
If only you were more like me – metropolitan, savvy, comfortable in my own skin. Morally superior. Decent. Ugh, look at you with your ‘it’s complicated’ attitude to Gaza.
I’ve translated Giles Coren’s latest Times column so you don’t have to subject yourself to reading it.
But if you really insist on some of his own words, this is the gist of it, on why he stayed away from Sunday’s march against antisemitism: “One friend I called said to me: ‘Not only am I not going; but I don’t even know what antisemitism is any more. It used to be making up lies about the Jews to incite stupid people to kill us. But they don’t have to make up lies any more. The shit we really are doing is bad enough.’”
Not exactly original, is it? The Jews have been blamed for antisemitism since the Jews were the Jews. The specifics vary, but the theme is always the same: if only Jews would stop doing Jewy things then no one would hate them. But because they keep doing those Jewy things, it’s no wonder they’re hated. You only have to spend a minute on social media to see it: the Jews have been chased out of everywhere they’ve ever been, so there must be a reason why everyone hates them. Etc.
Coren has now joined that chorus. It’s the Jews’ fault that there’s antisemitism. Welcome to the community of the good, Giles.
But I’ve some bad news. When push comes to shove, they won’t think of you as “the good Jew". The operative word will always be “Jew”. You might now tell the world proudly that you go to church, not synagogue, but that’s just semantics to them.
Just look at what is happening to Jeremy Corbyn. His new Your Party is splitting, with one of the fault lines being Zionism. And – this is objectively hilarious – he is being attacked as being too pro-Israel. Jeremy Corbyn is being attacked as being too pro-Israel.
One writer on their in-house journal, Electronic Intifada, wrote this weekend how, “In a 2018 opinion piece for the Guardian, Corbyn claimed there were ‘honourable’ Zionists and that it was ‘wrong’ to describe Zionism as racism”. He then attacked “Corbyn’s pandering to the Israel lobby within the Labour Party”. For these people, even Corbyn is an example not of a man discredited because of his attitude to and tolerance of antisemites, but because he was too nice to the Zios.
Since Coren’s piece was published this morning, he has backtracked, with apologetic posts on social media such as: “I thought I had something to say but I expressed it clumsily and regret the effect it’s had.”
As a fellow columnist, I can empathise with him over clumsy expression; we’ve all been there. But there’s nothing clumsy about his central argument: the Jews are getting what they deserve. It’s an argument we’ve faced for millennia. And it’s no less foul just because you say you wished you’d expressed it better.
To get more from opinion, click here to sign up for our free Editor's Picks newsletter.