It is not often that the news gives you a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach. Today’s news from Manchester does. Two dead and three others in a serious condition following a car and stabbing attack outside Heaton Park Synagogue. Britain must now wear that greatest of ignominies – we have become a nation where Jews are murdered at their place of worship.
Britain must now wear that greatest of ignominies – we have become a nation where Jews are murdered at their place of worship.
We await further information about the suspect and the victims. But we can say with certainty that this is a dark day for our kingdom. One of the darkest of recent times. For we appear to have been visited by an apocalyptic form of violence that we normally only read about in the history books. Next time I read about Kristallnacht or any of the other murderous events from Europe’s descent into barbarism, I will think: ‘Like Heaton Park?’
People will ask how such a horror could have occurred. How, in 2025, the Jews of England could be violently attacked on the holiest day in the Jewish calendar: Yom Kippur. How, 900 years after the birth of the blood libel in Norwich and 700 years after their expulsion from England, our Jewish friends and neighbours still find themselves besieged by violence. I think I have an answer to that question, and I think many people will not like it.
We will soon discover, perhaps, what was in the suspect’s mind as he inflicted such hellish cruelty on the peaceful Jews of Manchester. But one thing we already know is that anti-Semitism 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 believe this may prove to be the case with Manchester: that it was not an out-of-the-blue atrocity but rather one that grew like a cancer from the quiet march of Jew hatred these past two years.
I and others have been begging officialdom and the opinion-forming classes to take anti-Semitism 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 faeces were smeared on Jewish buildings in Golders Green. 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 per cent rise in anti-Semitic incidents following Hamas’s atrocities of 7 October.
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 could remove their school blazers on the way to and from school to escape the attention of Jew-haters. As an elderly Jewish lady was burnt to death in Colorado by a man shouting ‘Free Palestine’. As a young couple were shot to death outside a Jewish museum in Washington, DC, also by a man shouting ‘Free Palestine’. Such barbarism might blight Britain next, we said.
And too often we were ignored. When I think of my Jewish friends who have been crying out for two years about the slow but steady growth of anti-Semitism, and about how they were too often ignored or accused of exaggeration or told they were trying to silence anti-Israel activism, it makes me feel profoundly ashamed. Jews pleaded for the attention of politicians and activists and influencers, but they rarely received it. People looked the other way as Jews said they no longer felt safe in certain towns and cities in this once great nation.
It is possible that the horrors of Heaton Park come not from a vacuum, but from all that. From a culture of silence. From a reluctance to grapple with the return of Jew hatred to 21st-century Europe. Enough is enough. The ugly rebirth of anti-Semitism is always a sign that a society has veered off the path of Enlightenment and taken a very dark turn indeed. Heaton Park is a warning to Britain, and to humanity. If we fail to heed it, not only our Jewish citizens but our society itself will be in greater trouble than we can imagine. Where Jews are not safe to worship, barbarism has superseded civilisation.
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