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I think, in a way, that the best response to the near-slaughter (five were injured — many more victims were intended) in Monsey, N.Y., came before the event and from across the water. I’m not being cute about so grim and grievous an event, but rather pointing to a public man, a prime minister, who addressing the return/rise of anti-Semitism in his beloved England, used both the right words and right tone when giving his Hanukkah message.

Boris Johnson is clear, direct and speaks like Boris Johnson. By the latter I mean he doesn’t “order out” for his speeches, doesn’t go to the fudge and cliché factories that are the resource of almost every politician — from mayors to prime ministers — who mutter their formal addresses with bland, dead and dull formulations, stuffed with kindergarten bromides, and affecting a slow-voiced, precious tone that are otherwise heard only from fake yogis, New Age aromatherapists and deliquescent hippies.

Boris Johnson doesn’t 'order out' for his speeches

“We must have more love. There is no room for hate. This is not who we are.” Cliché and platitude journeying to pure narcolepsy.

Not so, Mr. Boris. And so when it came time for him on Hanukkah to address British Jews, there was none of that — no preening, no halting, no sigh-voiced exhalation of dead words or thought. He spoke and — here’s the miracle of the day — in words he most likely wrote himself, and what is more, that he actually really meant.

He did not elide past the troubling stirrings of anti-Semitism in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, nor the rise of anti-Semitic incidents in his country. He tied past and present, and was both casual and formal as is his way: “It is a time to celebrate not just the miracle of the oil but also your unique identity. To pop the Hanukkah Menorah in the window and say to the world, just as Judah and his small band of poorly-equipped Maccabees said to Antiochus III and his mighty Greek army all those years ago: ‘I am Jewish and I am proud of it.’” When referencing the anti-Semites, he spoke “the language such as men do speak.” There’s no newspeak false euphemism in this: “I know that recent years have not been easy ones for British Jews. In the media, on the streets and particularly online, anti-Semites have, in alarming numbers, been emboldened to crawl out from under their rocks and begin, once again, to spread their brand of noxious hatred far and wide.”