Two years after the Hamas attacks on October 7, Scotland’s Jewish community will say a Kaddish and ask why they now live in fear in the country they love, says Kevin McKenna

The process of normalisation is difficult to track and pin down. It involves a measure of shape-shifting where that which might once have been thought morally wrong, gradually becomes acceptable. A blurring begins to occur and then switches are pulled and signals appear. At these moments, influential voices, seemingly random (though there is nothing random about them) emerge to promulgate the newly-minted truth and then to endorse it. And so it is rendered safe to declare in the public realm and in normal, day-to-day life.

In post-war America, the madness of McCarthyism took root when fear of the Red Menace led to thousands of trade unionists, business owners, actors and scriptwriters having their lives and careers destroyed. Until relatively recently, it was acceptable to use racial slurs against members of the Indian, Pakistani and Afro-Caribbean communities even as they were helping to rebuild Britain after the Second Word War. It was rendered normal and acceptable by television sitcoms and music hall comedians.

In Scotland, in recent years to confess to Catholicism or to the most faithful of the Reformed Protestant churches is to risk being labelled far right and to face the career and societal consequences that come with that. It has become normalised by the diktats of leading politicians and media commentators. As these societal iniquities have risen and fallen though, one ancient hatred, older than all the other revilements has remained: the evil that is anti-Semitism. It knows when to conceal itself and can channel the impression that it no longer exists.

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