The British people are told that the 589% increase in attacks on Jews in their country since October 7, 2023, has nothing to do with Jews as members of a religious faith. The argument, it is claimed, is with the state of Israel and its policies toward its Arab neighbors, especially the Palestinians.
Thursday was the most sacred day of the Jewish calendar: Yom Kippur. It is a day of atonement, of repentance, and a day of contemplation.
For Jews in Manchester, England, it was also a day that reminded them of the fragility of life and the growing danger that simply living life as a Jew can pose.
A 35-year-old British citizen of Syrian descent, Jihad Al-Shamie, drove his car to Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation synagogue on Thursday morning. An onlooker told police "of a car being driven towards members of the public outside Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation Synagogue, and a man being stabbed."
Police responded quickly, killing Al-Shamie in a hail of bullets. It later turned out that officers may have killed one of the victims who died in the attack. According to CNN, "The police said they believed the two victims were huddled behind a door in the synagogue in the northern English city, trying to prevent the attacker from entering, when they were shot."
Al-Shamie gave the lie to the notion that there's any difference between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. He also proved (if such proof was necessary to anyone) that antisemites use "anti-Zionism" as a beard to disguise their Jew hatred.
The attack, obviously premeditated, occurred on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. It was a strike against the Jews as a people, as a distinct cultural and religious minority. Israel had nothing to do with the attacker's motives.
Writing in The Free Press, Brendan O'Neill writes that "antisemitism is very often a slow-burning thing. It brews and bubbles and spreads, sometimes imperceptibly, before it blows up into acts of outright violence."
I and others have been begging officialdom and the opinion-forming classes to take antisemitism more seriously. We watched as synagogues were graffitied with the words “Free Gaza.” And as Orthodox Jews were humiliated with the squirts of a water gun. And as feces was smeared on Jewish buildings in Golders Green, London. And as Jews were insulted, attacked, and, in the case of a Hasidic girl in Stamford Hill, pelted with a glass bottle. We watched as there was a 589 percent rise in antisemitic incidents following Hamas’s atrocities of October 7, 2023.
We watched as radical Islamists on those marches against Israel openly called for the return of the army of Muhammad to finish off the Jews. As Jewish kids were told they should remove their school blazers on the way to and from school to escape the attention of Jew-haters. As an elderly Jewish lady was burned to death in Boulder, Colorado, allegedly by a man shouting “Free Palestine.” As a young couple were shot to death outside a Jewish museum in Washington, D.C., also allegedly by a man shouting “Free Palestine.” Such barbarism might blight Britain next, we said.
This is no way for anyone to live, especially in a supposedly "free" country. The latest outrage for British Jews, the recognition of a fictitious Palestinian state by Keir Starmer's Labor government, is moral posturing that will likely get more Jews killed in Great Britain.
It's part of what UnHerd's Jacob Howland calls the "Israel delegitimisation machine.” It includes international organisations, NGOs, news media, and organized labor, including teachers’ unions. "It gathers data and produces reports, but its purpose is not to establish facts or determine truth," Howland notes.
The most egregious example of this "machine" is the mindless repeating of Gaza casualty figures from the Hamas-owned and operated Gaza Ministry of Health by the media, or "the U.N.’s dubious assertion that 14,000 Gazan babies would die within 48 hours without humanitarian aid."
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There is a direct line to be drawn between the "machine" and attacks like the one in Manchester on Yom Kippur.
Incitement to violence against Jews is no longer confined to fringe elements. Public figures have helped amplify hateful narratives, normalising antisemitism in public discourse. A member of music group Kneecap was this year charged with support for terrorist organisation Hezbollah in front of crowds of thousands, while another act, Bob Vylan, called for “death to the IDF”. In both cases, their popularity has skyrocketed.
Mass protests, happening regularly since 7 October, frequently promote violence against Jews, with calls to “globalise the Intifada” and the ancient anti-Jewish battle cry “Khaybar, Khaybar ya Yahud”, which was heard regularly. As these slogans abound, police merely stand by. Schools have seen a surge of swastikas and Nazi slurs. Last month, the General Medical Council (GMC) allowed an allegedly Holocaust-denying doctor to keep her job, during a period of record antisemitism in the NHS.
Jews are in danger across Europe. It's perhaps emblematic of the total loss of religious belief on the continent that intolerance against Jews is on the rise and leading to violence.
"The normalisation of speech encouraging violence and the failure to adequately address it embolden perpetrators and contribute to the erosion of Jewish safety in the UK," writes Limor Simhony Philpott in UnHerd.
It's hard to imagine what life will be like for England's Jews in five years. That is, if there are any left.
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