Four years after it was removed, London neighborhood restores antisemitism to list of hate crimes

Four years after a borough of London removed antisemitism from an online list of forbidden hate crimes, mention of Jew-hatred has been restored to the controversial image, The Telegraph reports.

Since 2022, a poster for National Hate Crime Awareness Week in Tower Hamlets has been cropped to remove antisemitism from a list of prejudices that includes transphobia, Islamophobia, disablism, and other forms of prejudice.

Last week, after a councillor raised the issue, the image was altered to make the word antisemitism visible, The Telegraph says. Tower Hamlets admitted that the word had been cropped out, but denied it was intentional, the report says.

The controversy follows a terror attack in Manchester two weeks ago, in which two Jewish men were killed outside a synagogue on the Yom Kippur holiday.

“In the wake of the murderous terrorist attack on a Manchester synagogue, and frequent hate marches on the streets of London, it is doubly unforgivable that Tower Hamlets’s Jewish community has been treated in this way,” says MP James Cleverly, the shadow secretary for housing, communities, and local government.

Tower Hamlets is home to some of Great Britain’s oldest Jewish communities, such as Whitechapel and Spitalfields, The Telegraph notes.