It is difficult to fathom how an incident as horrifying as the kidnapping of Israeli musician Itay Kashti by three men in Wales barely registered as a blip on the national news agenda. In any just world, this crime – motivated by anti-Semitic hatred, religious fanaticism, and a chilling sense of political grievance – should have dominated headlines. It should have sparked national debate, serious introspection, and urgent discussions about the growing wave of anti-Semitism sweeping the UK and beyond. And yet, aside from a handful of reports, silence reigned.
Kashti was lured to a remote cottage in Llanybydder, Wales, on 26 August 2024, under the false pretence of a music collaboration. When he arrived, he was brutally attacked, handcuffed to a radiator, and warned that if he tried to escape, he would be killed. His captors had stocked the house with enough supplies to hold him for at least a week. They had meticulously planned every step, fuelled by an ideology that justified their actions in the name of religion and political grievance.
The kidnapping occurred against the backdrop of a disturbing global surge in anti-Semitism, particularly in the wake of Hamas’s 7 October 2023 invasion of Israel. Since that massacre, Jews worldwide have found themselves increasingly vulnerable – to physical violence, threats, and a climate of hostility that has emboldened those who hold deep-seated hatred. And yet, even when a Jewish man is kidnapped, abused, and threatened with death on British soil, the response is muted.
Kashti later described his ordeal as his ‘own personal 7 October’. It’s easy to understand how he could have feared something similar, as his Muslim attackers beat him and threatened his life. He also reflected on the Holocaust. For Jews, these echoes of the past – of Jewish men, women, and children bound, beaten, and brutalised for no reason other than their identity – are deafening.
The political and religious motivations of the perpetrators were explicitly documented in court. One of the men claimed in his messages to his co-conspirators that they targeted Kashti because he attended pro-Israel marches. Another alleged that he was involved in West Bank settlements, taking ‘Palestinian land’. The men’s communications on an encrypted Telegram group revealed their chilling mindset, with one message declaring: ‘All three of us have complete, 100 per cent faith in Allah, so we can’t fail.’
The brutality of this case is not an outlier, nor is Britain alone in witnessing such hostility toward Jews. Across Europe, anti-Semitic aggression is growing more overt, more tolerated, and more ignored by those in power.
In Dublin, just days ago, an Israeli businessman was spat at while dining in a restaurant, his only crime being his nationality. He later said that nobody intervened, nobody objected. ‘People just kept eating,’ he recounted. There is something profoundly disturbing about this image – not simply the act of hatred itself, but the quiet complicity of those who chose to look away.
This attitude is not confined to the streets. It reaches the highest levels of power. During Ireland’s Holocaust Memorial Day event, a Jewish Israeli woman was forcibly removed from the room after protesting the Irish President Michael D Higgins’s grotesque comparison of the Holocaust to the situation in Gaza.
This is the climate in which Kashti was kidnapped. A world in which anti-Semitism is becoming normalised, in which the mistreatment of Jews provokes not outrage, but shrugs of indifference.
The brutality and anti-Semitic motivations behind this crime are disturbingly reminiscent of another case: the 2006 kidnapping and murder of Ilan Halimi in Paris. Halimi, a 23-year-old Jewish mobile phone salesman, was abducted by a gang of primarily Muslim men, the self-proclaimed ‘Gang of Barbarians’. They believed the age-old anti-Semitic trope that all Jews are wealthy, demanding exorbitant ransoms from Halimi’s family. For 24 excruciating days, they held him captive, subjecting him to unspeakable torture – burning him, beating him, and starving him – before ultimately dumping his broken body by a roadside. Once discovered, he died on the way to hospital, having suffered unimaginable agony.
At the time, French authorities were disturbingly slow to recognise the anti-Semitic nature of the crime. Police initially dismissed the religious and racial motivations, treating it as a simple kidnapping-for-ransom. Only later did it become more widely accepted that Halimi was tortured specifically because he was Jewish. The case became a watershed moment in France, forcing a long-overdue reckoning with the rising tide of violent anti-Semitism in the country.
Today, it is only by the grace of God that we are not mourning a murder instead of a kidnapping. Despite being tied to the radiator in the house the men had rented specially for his abduction, Kashti was able to escape. He managed to hide in nearby bushes and call his wife, who raised the alarm. His taxi driver – unwittingly caught up in the ordeal – alerted police. Had events unfolded differently, we might have been speaking about yet another Jewish man tortured and killed in Europe simply because he was a Jew.
The three men responsible for this heinous crime were sentenced to just eight years and one month in prison – a shockingly lenient punishment given the gravity of their actions. In the United States, they could potentially have faced decades in federal prison.
The Ilan Halimi case forced France to confront a harsh truth: violent anti-Semitism was alive and well, thriving in parts of French society. Left unchecked, it can have horrific results. Nearly two decades later, Britain now finds itself facing the same moment of reckoning. Will Itay Kashti’s kidnapping force Britain to acknowledge the reality of Muslim anti-Semitism within its borders? Or will it bury the issue, reluctant to address the uncomfortable truths it exposes?
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