Which river and which sea?

It was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. Even secular Jews, those who give the synagogue a wide berth 364 days a year, feel compelled to offer their devotions on Yom Kippur.

Crowds gather outside synagogues, people’s eyes lowered, their heads bowed, their expressions solemn. For some, this is a chance to come to terms with God and expiate their sins. But others see the crowd as easy pickings, a target to hit by way of venting their own hatred as demanded by their own God.

One such evil man was appropriately named Jihad Al-Shamie, 35, who, as the papers hastened to inform us, was a British citizen of Syrian descent, naturalised as a child. A perfect Briton, in other words, bred if not born.

You know what happened. Al-Shamie drove his car into the crowd of worshippers outside the Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester. The fallen bodies acting as a brake, he jumped out of the car and went to work with a knife. Two people died and four were injured before the police arrived and shot the murderer dead.

No one was surprised that his name wasn’t something like Nigel Smith or Kevin Jones. Jihad Al-Shamie? Of course, he was. He was a Muslim, wasn’t he? That’s what Muslims do. No, hold on, officer, I didn’t mean to say that most Muslims kill Jews. What I meant was that most people who kill Jews are Muslims.

But most people who root for Muslim murderers aren’t Muslims themselves. They are what Americans call liberals, Europeans call left-wingers, and I call scum. They may espouse any religion or usually none, but the adhesive gluing them all together is hatred of Jews as an extension of wider animosity.

These are the yahoos who march through great Western cities chanting “From the river to the sea!”, thereby demarcating the killing field for millions of Jews. Or are they really demarcating it?

The usual assumption is that they mean ‘from the Jordan to the Red Sea’, but this is unnecessarily limiting. Like their hatred, the slogan is open-ended. They might as well mean from the Thames to the North Sea, or from the Rhine to the Mediterranean. The scum want to kill Jews wherever they can be found, everywhere, not just in Israel.

Muslims may act as the catalyst of this anti-Semitic rampage, but they don’t make up its greatest numbers. Most faces contorted with venomous hatred on Free Palestine marches belong to the kind of scum who might as well be named Nigel Smith or Kevin Jones.

They are the ones who cancel concerts of Israeli musicians throughout Europe, most recently in Holland. They are the ones who refuse to invite Israeli scientists to conferences or Israeli lecturers to campuses. And they are the ones who densely populate our governing party.

They are also the ones who last night went on anti-Semitic rallies in Manchester, Leeds, Bristol and elsewhere, openly celebrating the murders. The police were watching on with bored insouciance, as they always do unless they themselves are attacked.

If Israel and Hamas didn’t exist, the scum would have to invent them. Without that eternal conflict in the Middle East, they’d have to resort to scrutinising birth certificates, taking cranial measurements and drawing swastikas on Jewish-owned shops. That, however, may still be frowned upon in the wider community.

But as long as they use Zionists or Israelis as the shorthand for Jews, they are on safe grounds. They can claim the usual scum affection for noble, which is to say Third World, causes. They can insist they are driven by love for the oppressed Hamas terrorists, not by hatred of Jews.

When they aren’t out screaming “Free Palestine!” and “From the river to the sea!”, they put on sanctimonious expressions and pronounce on diversity, equality and inclusion – but not for the Jews, is the unspoken refrain.

This is yet another conflict of scum pieties, far from the only one. The same pro-Hamas marchers swear by feminism, even though their ‘Palestinian’ idols treat women as livestock. They regard rape as the worst crime but welcome the mass immigration of those most likely to commit it. Their feminism happily coexists with their commitment to transsexualism, which real feminists abhor. They scream their support for LGBT rights, while professing solidarity with those who throw LGBT practitioners off tall buildings.

I call this a conflict of pieties, but the term somewhat misses the mark. No pieties exist for real, they are merely rhetorical window dressing, an outer expression of inner hatred.

The scum don’t really love ‘Palestinians’; they hate Jews. They don’t love LGBT; they hate traditional morality. They don’t love ‘the underprivileged’; they hate those they see as privileged. They are an anomic, deracinated mob, a rudderless ship cast adrift and propelled by winds of hatred.

It’s telling that the Manchester outrage occurred days after Starmer’s government rewarded anti-Semitic, anti-Israeli, anti-Western hatred by recognising the non-existent Palestinian, aka Hamas, state. This inconceivably idiotic act can be partly understood in light of domestic British politics.

Apparently, Labour has been losing support in communities with sizeable Muslim populations, who now have their own parties to vote for. Recognising Hamas and treating Israel as an enemy state are thus the sops thrown to potential blocs of votes.

But this is only a part of it. Starmer, a man of little intellect but much cunning, has a visceral understanding of the scum ethos from which he himself comes. It’s not just about the rivers and the seas, but about the undercurrents of hatred and resentment sloshing underfoot in a vast group shaped, directly or otherwise, by Marxist tenets.

Jew hatred is but a brook flowing into a raging maelstrom of anti-Western animosity, where it joins the vortex drawing in throngs of malcontents. They are told loud and clear that they no longer have to be coy about hating Jews. They can do so openly and to the accompaniment of ‘liberal’ hosannas, provided they scream abuse of Israelis, not Jews.

That’s today. Tomorrow their hatred many be channelled into other conduits, besides, not instead of, anti-Semitism. Give them the cause, and they’ll find the mob.

The ambient air is full of hateful electricity, and some scum individuals are occasionally galvanised to do murder. Starmer will shed crocodile tears and promise support for the victims, this time the Jews. But he’ll do nothing because he himself is whirled around by the same vortex, imbued with the same ethos.

Starmer and his ilk are the epicentre of this ethos. The likes of Jihad Al-Shamie are merely its cutting edge.