Joshua Bonehill-Paine is the Conservative candidate for Crewkerne South and founder of the YouTube channel The Crewkerne Gazette.
Between January and June this year, the Community Security Trust recorded 1,926 anti-Jewish hate incidents in Britain. It is the second-highest total CST has ever recorded in the first half of a year and a 21 per cent increase on the same period in 2025.
Behind every statistic is a Jewish child, family, synagogue, school or business made to feel unsafe in their own country.
I read these figures differently because I once contributed to the hatred they describe. More than a decade ago, I embraced antisemitism, spread conspiracy theories and targeted prominent Jewish figures like Labour Peer, Luciana Berger, in the most abhorrent way. I was convicted, imprisoned and deservedly punished.
I was 21 when antisemitism became my whole way of seeing the world. It turned grievance into ideology, paranoia into purpose, and hatred into identity.
Since leaving prison, I have spent years opposing antisemitism and extremism. I am responsible for delivering training sessions and seminars to universities, schools, colleges, Prevent professionals, police officers, probation services and social services.
My work involves explaining how radicalisation develops, how extremist organisations recruit and influence vulnerable people, and how professionals can recognise the warning signs. I draw heavily on my own experience to explain how grievance, isolation and conspiracy theories can gradually pull someone into an extremist worldview.
I also work directly with vulnerable people who are at risk of radicalisation or had already begun embracing extremist beliefs. By sharing my own story and challenging the ideas they had adopted, I try to help them understand where that path could lead and support them in moving away from extremism.
My actions caused profound pain, particularly within the Jewish community. The recent announcement of my selection as the Conservative candidate for Crewkerne South on Somerset Council has been a stark reminder that those actions still cause hurt today. That is entirely understandable, and I do not seek to diminish it.
Rehabilitation does not erase what I did. If anything, it gives me a sense of duty. While I cannot change my past, I can warn others away from the same destructive path.
I know how this ideology works because I lived inside it.
It did not arrive all at once. It behaved more like an infection. It attached itself to grievance, humiliation and drift. It distorted what I saw, gave me a false explanation for my failures, and slowly convinced me that I had discovered some forbidden truth. Before long, everything I looked at became evidence. Everything became connected.
It begins by turning Jews from human beings into symbols. They become the explanation for political failure, social change, financial hardship and personal grievance. Antisemitism made my ignorance feel like knowledge and my resentment feel like courage.
In my own case, the ground had already been prepared. I had spent years in social services care. Three of my friends had died before the age of 21 through suicide or drug addiction. I had no job, no real direction, and no proper sense of what my future might be. I could have sought discipline, work, purpose and responsibility. Instead, I chose resentment. Instead, I chose to surrender myself to that ideology. I do not blame anybody else for my antisemitism but myself.
My beliefs were eventually broken by consequences, human contact and an honest confrontation with what I had become. In prison, I met Jewish people who bore no resemblance to the monsters created by my ideology. I began to understand that I had taken my own failures, anger and humiliation and placed them upon people who had done nothing to me.
The language changed, but the underlying ideas often did not.
One of the things people still fail to understand about antisemitism is that it is not just a prejudice in the ordinary sense, and it is not simply a dislike of Jews. It is a total explanatory system. It offers a villain for every disappointment, a culprit for every humiliation and an answer for every chaos. It can make a failed man feel like a prophet. It can make paranoia feel like insight.
This strain of hostility has deep roots on the revolutionary Left. Karl Marx’s On the Jewish Question associated Jewishness with money, commerce and selfish materialism. Marx did not invent hatred of Jews, but his writing gave intellectual and political expression to prejudices that remain recognisable today.
CST reports that 41 per cent of incidents in the first half of 2026 referred to Israel, Palestine, Hamas or the conflict in the Middle East alongside anti-Jewish language, motivation or targeting. Events abroad are repeatedly being used as an excuse to intimidate and abuse Jewish people in Britain.
The consequences are not confined to social media. This year has included the Golders Green stabbing and Iran-linked arson and attempted arson attacks against Jewish organisations and synagogues in London.
Britain condemns each outrage, expresses shock and then moves on. Jewish people do not have that luxury. They continue sending children to guarded schools and entering protected synagogues while wondering whether the next threat will become an attack.
Antisemitism changes its clothes, but not its nature. It can emerge from the extreme Right, the extreme Left, religious extremism or online conspiracy movements. Wherever it appears, it must be confronted without political convenience or excuse.
The Government, police, universities and political parties must stop treating this as a passing controversy. Those who threaten Jews or attack Jewish institutions must face serious consequences, and the ideologies feeding that hatred must be named honestly.
I know where this road leads. Britain must act before even worse figures force us to admit that we saw the warning and chose to look away.
Joshua Bonehill-Paine is the Conservative candidate for Crewkerne South and founder of the YouTube channel The Crewkerne Gazette.
Between January and June this year, the Community Security Trust recorded 1,926 anti-Jewish hate incidents in Britain. It is the second-highest total CST has ever recorded in the first half of a year and a 21 per cent increase on the same period in 2025.
Behind every statistic is a Jewish child, family, synagogue, school or business made to feel unsafe in their own country.
I read these figures differently because I once contributed to the hatred they describe. More than a decade ago, I embraced antisemitism, spread conspiracy theories and targeted prominent Jewish figures like Labour Peer, Luciana Berger, in the most abhorrent way. I was convicted, imprisoned and deservedly punished.
I was 21 when antisemitism became my whole way of seeing the world. It turned grievance into ideology, paranoia into purpose, and hatred into identity.
Since leaving prison, I have spent years opposing antisemitism and extremism. I am responsible for delivering training sessions and seminars to universities, schools, colleges, Prevent professionals, police officers, probation services and social services.
My work involves explaining how radicalisation develops, how extremist organisations recruit and influence vulnerable people, and how professionals can recognise the warning signs. I draw heavily on my own experience to explain how grievance, isolation and conspiracy theories can gradually pull someone into an extremist worldview.
I also work directly with vulnerable people who are at risk of radicalisation or had already begun embracing extremist beliefs. By sharing my own story and challenging the ideas they had adopted, I try to help them understand where that path could lead and support them in moving away from extremism.
My actions caused profound pain, particularly within the Jewish community. The recent announcement of my selection as the Conservative candidate for Crewkerne South on Somerset Council has been a stark reminder that those actions still cause hurt today. That is entirely understandable, and I do not seek to diminish it.
Rehabilitation does not erase what I did. If anything, it gives me a sense of duty. While I cannot change my past, I can warn others away from the same destructive path.
I know how this ideology works because I lived inside it.
It did not arrive all at once. It behaved more like an infection. It attached itself to grievance, humiliation and drift. It distorted what I saw, gave me a false explanation for my failures, and slowly convinced me that I had discovered some forbidden truth. Before long, everything I looked at became evidence. Everything became connected.
It begins by turning Jews from human beings into symbols. They become the explanation for political failure, social change, financial hardship and personal grievance. Antisemitism made my ignorance feel like knowledge and my resentment feel like courage.
In my own case, the ground had already been prepared. I had spent years in social services care. Three of my friends had died before the age of 21 through suicide or drug addiction. I had no job, no real direction, and no proper sense of what my future might be. I could have sought discipline, work, purpose and responsibility. Instead, I chose resentment. Instead, I chose to surrender myself to that ideology. I do not blame anybody else for my antisemitism but myself.
My beliefs were eventually broken by consequences, human contact and an honest confrontation with what I had become. In prison, I met Jewish people who bore no resemblance to the monsters created by my ideology. I began to understand that I had taken my own failures, anger and humiliation and placed them upon people who had done nothing to me.
The language changed, but the underlying ideas often did not.
One of the things people still fail to understand about antisemitism is that it is not just a prejudice in the ordinary sense, and it is not simply a dislike of Jews. It is a total explanatory system. It offers a villain for every disappointment, a culprit for every humiliation and an answer for every chaos. It can make a failed man feel like a prophet. It can make paranoia feel like insight.
This strain of hostility has deep roots on the revolutionary Left. Karl Marx’s On the Jewish Question associated Jewishness with money, commerce and selfish materialism. Marx did not invent hatred of Jews, but his writing gave intellectual and political expression to prejudices that remain recognisable today.
CST reports that 41 per cent of incidents in the first half of 2026 referred to Israel, Palestine, Hamas or the conflict in the Middle East alongside anti-Jewish language, motivation or targeting. Events abroad are repeatedly being used as an excuse to intimidate and abuse Jewish people in Britain.
The consequences are not confined to social media. This year has included the Golders Green stabbing and Iran-linked arson and attempted arson attacks against Jewish organisations and synagogues in London.
Britain condemns each outrage, expresses shock and then moves on. Jewish people do not have that luxury. They continue sending children to guarded schools and entering protected synagogues while wondering whether the next threat will become an attack.
Antisemitism changes its clothes, but not its nature. It can emerge from the extreme Right, the extreme Left, religious extremism or online conspiracy movements. Wherever it appears, it must be confronted without political convenience or excuse.
The Government, police, universities and political parties must stop treating this as a passing controversy. Those who threaten Jews or attack Jewish institutions must face serious consequences, and the ideologies feeding that hatred must be named honestly.
I know where this road leads. Britain must act before even worse figures force us to admit that we saw the warning and chose to look away.