Israel hit an Iranian synagogue during Passover, and the people who always claim to defend Jews suddenly found other things to talk about. Right, so Israel has hit a synagogue in Tehran during Passover, and the people who are usually first out of the blocks whenever something like this happens, an attack on Jews, an antisemitic strike as it readily gets called, have not exactly been trampling over each other in the rush to denounce it. It’s not like this event has been particularly hidden either, much has been made of it in regional news outlets, it’s just the Western ones that have tucked the story away, as if it is just a footnote for policy wonks with too much free time, if they have bothered to cover it at all. And frankly when you’ve seen the devastation Israel have wrought, that silence is all the more inexcusable. Appalling scenes, but also scenes that provide inconvenient truths too, the silence from the all too often vocally mainstream platformed apparent defenders of the Jewish faith. The proof of Israel’s atrocity is sitting there in the rubble, sitting there with the rabbi on scene, the damaged Hebrew books, and the Rafi-Nia synagogue in central Tehran left smashed after an Israeli strike that Israel has itself described as collateral damage from an attack on a nearby military target. This is not one of those familiar little media games where everybody pretends the facts are too murky to handle while still somehow finding the confidence to be very certain when the accused party is one of Israel’s enemies. A synagogue was hit, during Passover, and the organisations that spend half their lives talking like they are the emergency services of Jewish moral panic have managed an impressive impression of a power cut.