Many less murderous than Vickrum Digwa have exploited Britain’s cultural commitment to DEI
Daily Telegraph 06/06/26
As Henry Nowak lay dying of stab wounds inflicted by Vickrum Digwa, the terrible, stifling and wholly predictable teachings of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) came to life, squawking with terrible glee. Knowing full well how much leverage there is in Britain in crying racism, Digwa did just that.
The Nowak murder is many things: disgusting, yowling abuse of all that is precious about our liberal democracy, a mockery of Enlightenment values and a human tragedy with the resonance of an Euripides play.
Britain’s zeal for DEI training is pinned to the broader framework known as intersectionality, the defining social idea of the contemporary Anglosphere. Intersectionality says that the more “marginalised” identities you can claim, the more power you deserve. So by this logic Nowak deserved little sympathy.
But it is not just white men who are relegated to the bottom of the solidarity pile. Within intersectionality’s horrible pincer, Jews, despite being the West’s most persecuted minority, were always going to be squashed.
If you are drilled in the tenets of intersectionality/DEI/social justice (it’s all the same), Islamo-Leftist anti-Semitic propaganda will sound about right to you. For the far Right, we are not nearly white enough, but for the far Left, the Jew is an ultra-white avatar for Israel. Not only are we white (even when we aren’t) but we are symbols of all that is racist, imperial, settler-colonial, apartheid-loving, genocidal, rich, powerful, conniving, string-pulling, and endlessly self-pitying.
Many less murderous than Digwa have exploited Britain’s cultural commitment to DEI and have used it to their advantage. Jews, however, often feel as if they are at the opposite end of this continuum.
Back in March when I reported to police the Nazi-style swamp of frothing Jew hate that was the “artist” Matthew Collings’s show, Drawings Against Genocide, at the Joseph Wales Studios in Margate, my report was dismissed. Most who saw the images after I posted them found them shockingly anti-Semitic. But the Kent police took a different view of the jamboree of swastikas, stars of David, and IDF soldiers stamping on skulls. I was told this was all just legitimate criticism of Israel. Two days later, the Hatzola ambulances in Golders Green were blown up.
The discrepancy between what is taken seriously (the right kind of racism) and what isn’t (the wrong kind) is clear and cold as ice. All this may feel new, but the ideology is not. Anti-whiteness and anti-Semitism have long been intermingled.
The American civil rights movement of the 1960s saw collaboration between Jews, who were mostly Democrats, and activist African Americans. Jews, whose European brethren were so fresh from almost-total annihilation just 20 years before, wanted to do their best to help bring freedom and dignity to their black countrymen.
But at the same time, and to the dismay of Dr Martin Luther King and his ilk, movements like Black Power emerged, advocating militant self-defence and the seizure by force of educational institutions and businesses serving black people. Jews were very explicitly identified within Black Power as objects of fear and loathing, and architects of white supremacy and evil capitalism.
By the 1970s, the civil rights movement had splintered into other causes, including feminism and gay rights. Feminism in particular embraced anti-racism and anti-Zionism. And bad ideas, emanating mostly from France, piled in. The “posts” – postcolonialism, postmodernism, poststructuralism – became catechism among everyone with a Lefty or academic bone in their body.
Then there was Ireland and Russia: trouble then and trouble now. The Irish Troubles saw opposing sides playing out a series of grimly literal interpretations of the shackled rising up against the free. In the 1970s, Irish Republicans began embracing the Palestinian cause, right down to the terrorism training they conducted with the PLO from 1975. Culturally it’s not hard to see where Hezbollah-praising band Kneecap, “genocide”-obsessed rockers Fontaines DC or Gaza-obsessed author Sally Rooney, come from.
And then there’s Russia, a good century into sowing instability and unrest in the West through embedding evil ideas in the minds of our useful idiots. In the 1960s, the great Communist experiment – beloved of so many an armchair revolutionary here in Blighty – began mass-exporting the brilliant credo of Zionology, elucidated in Yuri Ivanov’s 1969 classic, Beware! Zionism.
Zionology was a pseudo-academic, state-sponsored discourse pretending to be objective social science, whose mission was to rebrand traditional anti-Semitic conspiracies of hawk-noses and money-grubbing as anti-imperialist, Marxist-Leninist critique. Western lefties swallowed it hook, line and sinker.
The history goes on and on, enough to fill several books. Still, for decades, that history drew shy of the great British (and American) institutional mainstream. Now the problem has breached a critical barrier. Let us hope that Nowak’s fate, and that of the Jews murdered at synagogue and stabbed in the street in broad daylight by Muslim men while the great and the good insist that the real problem is Islamophobia, mark a turning point.
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