The Manchester synagogue attack requires us to ask three questions: where are we, how did we get there, and where now?
Where we are is British Jews attacked on Yom Kippur, two dead, more injured, countless more afraid. This requires an acknowledgement by the governing classes that multiculturalism and mass immigration are false doctrines which have severely harmed this country and its people. Jihad al-Shamie is the latest in a grim roll call of first or second-generation immigrants to be welcomed to Britain only to repay that welcome with carnage.
Instead of being taboo, the varying societal costs brought by different nationalities should inform the criteria for accepting migrants
The terrorists who slaughtered eight people on London Bridge in 2017 were migrants from Pakistan and Morocco. The Libyan national who stabbed three men to death in Reading in 2020 was granted asylum in Britain after fighting for a terrorist group. Three of the 7/7 terrorists were the children of Pakistani immigrants and one had migrated to the UK as a child. Lee Rigby’s killers were the children of Nigerian immigrants. The Manchester Arena bombers were the offspring of Libyan refugees. David Amess’s murderer was the son of Somali migrants.
In addition to dead commuters and concert-goers, Britain’s immigration and asylum policies have imported virulent and violent strains of anti-Semitism. Anthony Julius once called anti-Semitism ‘the background noise against which we make our lives’. While the volume has risen and fallen with developments in the Middle East, by the late 20th century, violent, clerical and literary anti-Semitism had become largely taboo in England. Political anti-Semitism endured wherever cranks assembled and Marxism was subsidised, and so the university became its natural habitat.
The multicultural experiment turned background noise into a cacophony. Anti-Semitism in Britain speaks in newly arrived tongues, confidently clucking prejudices imported from cultures unburdened by the English instinct for shame and where tribal and religious conflict is the norm. The result is Manchester, and not only Manchester. It’s Palestine-flagged cars charging through Jewish neighbourhoods with chants of ‘fuck the Jews, fuck all of them, fuck their mothers, rape their daughters and show your support for Palestine’. It’s triumphalist marches after October 7 and public calls to ‘globalise the intifada’.
It’s 46 per cent of UK Muslims preferring Hamas over Israel and just 24 per cent expressing negative feelings about a foreign terror group proscribed under British law. It’s MPs elected on Gaza-centric platforms, the eternal lie of ‘genocide’ finally entering the mainstream, and the UK government recognising a non-existent state halfway around the world. None of this should surprise us, of course, for the results of this experiment are also grooming gangs, riots over The Satanic Verses, and a religious studies teacher still in hiding four years after including a picture of a religious figure in a lesson.
That is where we are. How we got there is by civilisational atrophy, the degradation of our institutions, and the moral cowardice of those who run them. The UK has imported unprecedented numbers of people from cultures alien to and perhaps irreconcilable with our own. The operative word is ‘cultures’. This is not a matter of race or ethnicity, neither of which is an impediment to Britishness, as the contributions of millions of black and minority ethnic Britons have demonstrated. All persons are equal in moral worth but all cultures are not, yet Britain persists in admitting en masse migrants from dysfunctional societies, including those where anti-Semitism and other expressions of primitivism (child ‘marriage’, consanguinity, tribal and ethnic violence, ‘honour’ killings) are endemic.
With smaller cohorts and aggressive integration policies, almost anyone could be successfully introduced to Britain. However, because the governing class insists on uncontrolled immigration and disdains assertions of British culture beyond the risible fiction that ‘diversity is our strength’, large-scale integration is unachievable. With little expectation on migrants to conform, some ghettoise and live in third-world enclaves that are British in theory but in practice function as more financially attractive outposts of their native lands. In these nominally British banlieues, extremism can find an echo and loyalty to kith and kin can trump fidelity to the law and the state.
At the same time, institutions have amplified grievance narratives and radical anti-Western ideologies. The progressive establishment is on a hair trigger for every conceivable racism — except one. Jews don’t riot. They don’t attack the police. They don’t stab MPs or behead soldiers or force teachers into hiding. In the marketplace of multicultural democracy they are poor in the two currencies that matter most: vote-banking and the implicit capacity for intimidation or violence. When you can bring out the votes or bring out the brothers you tend to get your way.
Where now? We must urgently heal our desiccated social order, repair the covenant between state and citizen, and restore the high-trust, well-ordered society in which Jews and other Britons could go about their business without fear of a barbarian’s knife.
Immigration is the problem and any response that doesn’t begin by recognising this is a mere avoidance strategy. Migration policy should be set with the national interest in mind, not the desire of the NHS, care sector and hospitality industry for cheap labour. Instead of being taboo, the varying societal costs brought by different nationalities should inform the criteria for accepting migrants. Migrants should be compelled to integrate and public services prohibited from accommodating religious, cultural or linguistic requirements beyond those which have historically been accommodated. Cousin marriage should be criminalised. Recourse to public funds, including housing, welfare, and non-emergency medical treatment, should be limited to UK and settled EU citizens, with those who acquire citizenship by migration ineligible for an additional period (say, ten years). Remittances should be taxed at a level sufficient to discourage the transfer of UK-generated wealth to the economies of foreign countries.
There should be a presumption in favour of deporting legal migrants convicted of violent crimes. The Home Office should denaturalise non-native citizens who espouse extremist views, attempt to impose their religious or cultural preferences by intimidation or mob behaviour, or whose alienation is deemed necessary for the public good. Illegal boat crossings should be deterred with an Australia-style policy of turnbacks, offshore detention, and mandatory deportation of all persons who pass through safe countries before entering the UK. Anyone who returns to their country of origin without good reason while seeking asylum or enjoying refugee status should be refouled. Where possible there should be minimal derogation from the UK’s treaty obligations but where this is impossible, the national interest must be placed ahead of international agreements.
The Manchester attack was motivated by anti-Semitism and Islamic extremism, but it is also a story of immigration trends in Britain. Jews have been living in England for centuries, even through expulsion and readmission, legal discrimination and toleration, and they have enriched their country beyond measure in the fields of science and medicine, the arts and philosophy, commerce and the law. British Jews have, on the whole, proved industrious, self-sufficient, orderly, family-oriented, community-spirited, and patriotic. If it sounds like I’m suggesting they are a model minority, that’s because I am. Jews have been all they can be to Britain, Britain must be all it can be to Jews.
Many Jews feel a precariousness about their lives here, and while the universality of anti-Semitism contributes to that, so too does the demographic revolution the country has undergone. The UK’s Jews and their interests are under siege from cultures which cannot match their deep British heritage let alone the scale of their contributions to national life. Jews are the great integration success story of British history. They should be the example that others strive to emulate. Any culture that regards Jews as enemies, and keeps producing persons bent on killing them or relaxed about others killing them, advertises its incompatibility with life in Britain. We should take notice and make policy accordingly.
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