News and Views 26 February 2026 

Antisemitism

• UK in grip of antisemitism crisis. Antisemitism campaigners say Jew-hatred is ‘rife’ across Britain today. Experiences were shared at an 'emergency summit' held on Wednesday at the House of Commons, attended by MPs, peers, and antisemitism advocates. Jews are now eight times more likely to be victims of religious hate crime than any other group. There were 3,700 anti-Jewish hate incidents recorded in 2025 -  a staggering 280% rise since 2015. One Jewish campaigner stated; 'Jews are being ostracised and it's happening every single day. We're only 270,000 people in Britain and many are leaving the country.'
• Teachers ignore Jewish boy being called 'Jewish scum'. Dozens of victims have come forward to report hate incidents, including one Jewish mother who said her vulnerable 14-year-old son faced a daily barrage of antisemitic abuse at school, including being incessantly called a 'Yid' and 'Jewish scum'. Classmates turned on Bunsen burners and made hissing noises to echo the horrors of the gas chambers. On one occasion a younger pupil shouted 'Kill the Jews' at the terrified teenager and followed him all the way home. But despite multiple complaints made by his parents to the school in east London, the boy was advised by his headmaster to 'be more resilient'.
• Disturbing pro-Palestine door-knocking campaign. Pro-Palestine activists continue to be accused of “intimidating” Jewish residents with a co-ordinated door-knocking campaign calling for a boycott of Israeli goods as part of a new Apartheid-Free Zone (AFZ) movement. It started in Brighton, but has spread to Hackney, Bristol and Sheffield. Disturbingly, activists have allegedly been recording the addresses of those whose doors they had knocked on, along with whether they were “supportive” or “not interested” in the boycott. A woman in Sheffield was allegedly headbutted after confronting those taking part. Jewish residents are feeling ‘targeted’ and ‘unsafe’. Nearly 7% of Hackney’s population is Jewish, while the area is also home to one of the largest Haredi Orthodox Jewish communities outside New York and Israel.
• Purity test inquisitional Jew hunt. Groups opposing these ‘purity test inquisitions’ include Labour Against Antisemitism and Campaign Against Antisemitism. Police forces say they are assessing activities but that no offences have been identified so far. Meanwhile, pro-Palestinian activists in Bristol who went door-to-door asking locals to boycott Israeli products were stopped after counter-protesters accused them of engaging in a ‘Jew hunt’, forcing them to hide in a pub. 

• Oxford student Samuel Williams, who chanted “put the Zios in the ground” at a pro-Palestine rally in October, will not stand trial for another two years. (Contrast this to Lucy Connolly who was in court in under a month.)
• Oxfam’s former chief executive has accused the charity of being toxic and anti-Semitic during her tenure, saying the charity has a disproportionate focus on Gaza compared with other world crises, and that Oxfam was too quick to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza as 'genocide'.
• Green Party Leader Zack Polanski has said he will support a party motion titled “Zionism is racism” if it is linked to the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza. Israel has in turn branded the Green Party ‘racist and hateful’. Read also.
• There are growing claims that the BBC’s international editor, Jeremy Bowen, is overtly hateful of Israel - Spiked’s Limor Simhony Philpott stating that his bias "is visible from space.”
• The British Museum has removed the word “Palestine” from some of its displays, saying the term was used inaccurately and is no longer historically neutral.
• A Church of England primary school invited a Muslim speaker who compared the war in Gaza to the Holocaust to teach pupils how to pray to Allah.
• The Olympic Committee of Israel has demanded an apology and the potential suspension of a Swiss journalist who accused a member of the Israeli bobsleigh team of supporting “genocide in Gaza”, and a bobsledder as being “Zionist to the core”.

Israel

• Did Israel and Hamas finally agree on Gaza death toll? A month ago, a senior officer from the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) reported, for the first time, to multiple Israeli news outlets, the estimated number of people killed in its war on Gaza since October 2023. It acknowledged that figure as 70,000, adding that it was not known what proportion of the total was made up of terrorists. Confusingly, the IDF’s English-language spokesperson quickly issued a denial of the senior officer’s remarks, leading Spiked commentator Andrew Fox to claim the IDF’s ‘admission’ “was based on an anonymous background briefing” (read his significant analysis here).
• Claims Gaza death toll a third higher than previously thought. Three weeks later, a new study in the medical journal The Lancet – the first to use independent, population-based survey methods – estimated that about 75,200 people had been killed violently up to early January 2025 (compared to the roughly 49,000 deaths recorded by Gaza’s Hamas-run health authorities over the same period). The Lancet claimed further that another 16,300 people died from indirect or non-violent causes, including pre-existing health conditions and the broader collapse of essential services during the conflict. The research appeared to confirm that the Gaza Ministry of Health, which is run by Hamas, was not inflating the numbers (they claimed 71,667 deaths). In fact, claimed the study’s lead author, “their figures were a substantial undercount, not an over count.”
• Death toll estimated, not verified. Media bias exposure website, Honest Reporting claims The Lancet is an unreliable publication with a history of anti-Israel bias, whose analysis methods were debunked in the past. It notes that “Household surveys depend on accurate reporting, stable sampling frames, and reasonable assumptions about representativeness. In a densely populated war zone with widespread displacement, each of those elements is complicated.” The article concludes, “In this case, the study deserved a clearer explanation than many readers received.” Read also the analysis of Mark Zlochin.

Covid and the Vaccines

• “Unexpected” massive surge in vaccine harm claims. There have been more than three times the number of claims under the Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme for Covid jabs than during the previous four decades for all other vaccines combined. Nearly £50 million of taxpayers’ money has been paid by the NHS to a firm assessing claims of medical harm caused by vaccines, because the volume of claims “has exceeded the anticipated levels”. Most of the claims relate to the AstraZeneca jab. Yet, while tens of thousands have now applied for help under the VDPS scheme; a staggering 99% of them have been denied or delayed. Only 1% have been successful. The high threshold means that some people with serious, life-changing injuries receive nothing, even where the personal and financial consequences are profound. Meanwhile, Angus Dalgleish, Professor of Oncology at St George's Hospital Medical School, London, claims that links between covid jabs and cancer can no longer be denied, quoting research that lists 20 increased cancer risk factors that studies have linked to the jabs.

Free Speech

• A lone Met officer who knows the law on free speech. A Metropolitan policewoman has been praised for her response to Muslim hecklers who shouted at and pushed a Christian street preacher, insisting that Whitechapel was a “Muslim area”. The officer boldly but calmly told the men: “In this country, we have freedom of speech.” One man was later repeatedly heard shouting at the preacher: “Your God is a Jew.” Read more and watch the video-clip here.
• The incident appears as a rare and exceptional case. More commonly Christian preachers have been targeted by other religious groups – and more concerningly police officers – for expressing their right to free speech. They are often arrested, DNA swabbed, detained in custody for hours, and hauled before the courts at the taxpayers’ expense – only to be cleared of any offence and even paid out in damages. 
• History of false arrests of street preachers. In November, preacher Shaun O'Sullivan was cleared of racial harassment after he was arrested for the 16th time – after saying “We love the Jews.” Just last week, Christian preacher Dia Moodley was arrested for “inciting racial hatred” and detained for eight hours after giving a street sermon in Bristol in November. He claims he has faced repeated enforcement action by Avon and Somerset Police for the past four years. Last week also, a Sudanese asylum seeker who dragged Christian preacher Daniel Ayettey off a ladder and threatened him with a knife at Speakers Corner was spared jail.

Politics

• Reform and Restore vow to protect Britain’s Christian heritage. Rupert Lowe’s Restore party has vowed that “Britain is a Christian country and that under Restore, it will remain a Christian country.” Meanwhile, Reform UK proposes to reintroduce Christianity into the school curriculum, also saying it would grant all churches 'listed' status to prevent their conversion into mosques. It is thought that at least 50 churches have been turned into mosques in recent years. Reform’s new “shadow” home secretary, Zia Yusuf (a practising Muslim, ironically), said the move was designed to restore Britain’s Christian heritage and ensure Christianity remains “core” to its history and the “DNA of the country”.  Reform has also pledged to ban the burka outright (Read also), and to impose a visa ban on Pakistan plus five other high-refusal countries that won’t take their failed asylum seekers back. But read also here, here and here.

Islam

• Police ‘turn blind eye’ to sharia courts in Britain. Police have been accused of turning a blind eye to the spread of sharia courts in Britain, with newly released Government figures showing that less than 3% of so-called “honour crimes” were successfully prosecuted last year. These include female genital mutilation, homicide (honour killings) and forced marriage. The “privatisation of justice” within some Muslim communities through sharia courts makes it harder for the state to intervene, fostering a parallel justice system operating behind closed doors with no state oversight. Last year, 2,949 honour-related offences were recorded in Britain, but only 95 defendants were prosecuted. 109 cases of female genital mutilation were reported to police last year – none of them resulted in prosecution. 766 forced marriages were reported to police between 2020 and 2025 but just 118 resulted in prosecution. There are believed to be as many as 85 sharia councils operating in Britain.

Broken Society

• Nearly 11,000 children, some as young as four, have been suspended for attacking teachers in England in the 2023-24 academic year, nearly double the official figure for two years earlier.
• The number of young adults (16-24) sleeping rough on the streets of Britain has risen by almost 7,000 in just one year, to 123,934, marking the third year in a row that youth homelessness has increased in the UK.
• A Transport for London advert which showed a black man harassing a white woman on a bus has been banned over “negative racial stereotypes”.
• More than £15 billion of benefits have been handed to migrant households over the last 18 months, two thirds in the form of Universal Credit to those not in employment.
• A mentally ill man who later killed three people was released by medics who flagged the “over-representation” of young black men in detention.
• An imam has been found guilty of raping women and girls as young as 12 after using his position as a faith leader at his east London mosque to convince them he had magical powers.

Church Matters

• Church’s change in attitude towards Israel. There is evidence of a significant development among evangelical churches in the UK in regard to their views on Israel. According to journalist Charles Gardner, “Certainly I am very saddened to hear of some churches who seem most reluctant to address the issue of our Jewish roots and generally standing with the Jewish people now in fear of walking our streets …. But as I understand it, the recent conference of the FIEC (Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches) was clearly impacted by an appeal for greater support from a representative of the International Mission for Jewish People. All of this is reflected by widening support from the monthly newspaper Evangelicals Now which could well lead to a paradigm shift of emphasis on the UK church scene.”