What is it about those images of Israelis kidnapped by Hamas that so infuriates certain sections of the public? Since the Hamas pogrom of 7 October, people have been putting up posters of the hostages in cities across the Western world. And almost everywhere they have been torn down, desecrated, destroyed, binned.

The faces of the men, women and children seized by the anti-Semites of Hamas seem to elicit an almost reflexive rage in some passers-by. We’ve seen videos of fuming people clawing at the posters to ensure no part of them survives on our streets. Others have daubed vile and racist insults on them. In Finchley Road in London some lowlife even doodled Hitler moustaches on the faces of toddler twins who were stolen by Hamas (the twins have since been released).

We should be confronting Jew hatred, not witlessly green-lighting it like this

Clearly the solution to this poster-ripping frenzy, these ceaseless assaults on images of pogrom victims, was to go digital. To emblazon the photos of the Jews still being held by Hamas on digital billboards so that no curiously angry individual could tear them down. And yet even that hasn’t worked. The mob has managed to eliminate even digital pictures of the hostages.

The Israeli Embassy in London, along with the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, made a deal with London Lites, an advertising firm that owns some of the most premium digital billboards in London. They arranged for images of the 137 Israelis still being held by Hamas to be displayed around London for two weeks. Yet a measly six days into the campaign, London Lites pulled the plug in response to an ‘unprecedented number of concerns from the public’. In short, the mob came knocking and London Lites capitulated.

Apparently London Lites received thousands of complaints. Threats were made against its employees. The owners of some shops near the digital displays were also reportedly threatened. To my mind, this was all the more reason to keep the images up. We should never allow a noisy, bigoted minority to determine what can and cannot be displayed on the streets of a free city. And yet that is exactly what has happened. The Israelophobic mob now enjoys an effective veto over public imagery in the capital.

Such surrender is obscene. It will have serious consequences. It will embolden the anti-Semites among us whose tyrannical instinct is to erase all evidence of the crime against humanity committed by Hamas on 7 October. It sends a signal to those people that threats work. If you see an image of an Israeli victim of Hamas barbarism, just issue a threat of violence and it will be removed. We should be confronting Jew hatred, not witlessly green-lighting it like this.

And it will say to London’s Jews that they are second-class citizens. In this city, you can wave the Palestinian flag to your heart’s content. You can gather on the streets every weekend to holler your hatred for Israel. But express so much as a whisper of concern for the Israeli Jews seized by the racist army of Hamas and you will be mobbed and shut down.

In other words, Muslims and middle-class sympathisers with Palestine enjoy free speech, but Jews and supporters of Israel do not. We are sleepwalking into a neo-racial dystopia where if you have the wrong identity and the wrong views your posters will be destroyed, your adverts taken down and your voice silenced. Say anything too Jew-sympathetic and watch the mob arrive.

Few things have made me worry for my city as much as the poster-defacing fury of recent weeks. The delirious intolerance for any kind of awareness-raising about the Israeli hostages speaks to a latent bigotry and illiberalism in our society. We have glimpsed, I think, the iron fist of communal wrath and competitive grievance that hides in the velvet glove of ‘multiculturalism’.

There is something else going on too. People hate these posters because they are a reminder of the fascistic atrocity committed by Hamas. They are a reminder of why this war started – not because Israel is the bloodthirsty colonial power of the deluded left’s fever dreams, but because racist terrorists launched an unprovoked attack on the Jews of Southern Israel of the kind we had not seen since the Holocaust.

This is why they scream at and tear and destroy these photos of the men, women and children whose liberty and dignity was so grotesquely violated by Hamas on 7 October. Because they complicate the narrative. They interfere with the infantile story the chattering class tells itself about Evil Israel and Victimised Palestine. They rudely intrude upon the black-and-white morality tale the middle classes have written about the Middle East. They remind us that the current war began with an act of evil, and that that act of evil was carried by ‘our side’.

Let’s keep putting the posters up, then. That they enrage racists and puncture the lazy moralism of the elites is all the justification we need.