If you walked down the Strand in London on Tuesday this week you would have been greeted by hundreds of people outside King’s College London. The gathering was organised by students from KCL, the London School of Economics and University College London. They chanted ‘Intifada, intifada’ and ‘Long live the intifada’. They had chosen the day well – Tuesday was the second anniversary of the 7 October massacre, in which some 1,200 Israelis were killed and hundreds more taken hostage.
Tuesday’s hate-fest was not, of course, an unusual event. The first demonstrations in support of the 7 October massacre of Jews took place in west London on the day of the massacre itself. And the protests have not stopped since. In fact, they have only swelled in number.
For two years now, people in London, Manchester and other cities across the UK have had to put up with weekly, sometimes daily, parades of people celebrating the killings and spreading the libel – the lie – that the Jewish state of Israel is carrying out a ‘genocide’ in Gaza. Indeed, even during the first major protests in the UK these same protestors were already spreading the claim that Israel was committing genocide. This was before the Israel Defence Forces had even entered Gaza with the aim of finding the hostages and destroying Hamas.
The seeds sown by these lies flowered quickly. On 15 October 2023, a 45-year-old asylum seeker from Morocco – Ahmed Alid – broke into the bedroom of his housemate, a Christian convert from Islam, in Hartlepool. He hacked at Javed Nouri while he slept. ‘Allahu akbar,’ shouted Alid. Fleeing the scene, still armed with a knife, Alid then ran into the street to target whoever he could find. He ended up stabbing to death a pensioner called Terence Carney. Alid subsequently told the police he had attacked Nouri because he was an ‘apostate’ and had killed the passing pensioner because Alid wanted ‘Palestine to be free from the Zionists’ and ‘because Israel was killing children’.
Last week in Manchester the desire of the protestors to ‘globalise the intifada’ had another success. On 2 October, 35-year-old Jihad al-Shamie chose the Jewish religious day of Yom Kippur to carry out an attack on the Heaton Park synagogue. After trying to access the building as the congregation was heading in, he ended up going back to his car and ramming it into the Jewish worshippers, then getting out and stabbing at them. His shouts included ‘Allahu akbar’. A 66-year-old congregant, Melvin Cravitz, was among those killed and wounded as a result of al-Shamie’s murderous spree. As al-Shamie was trying to break through the synagogue’s doors, held shut by security and congregants, he shouted that this was what the Jews ‘get for killing our children’.
Al-Shamie, a British citizen of Syrian origin, was subsequently shot dead by police. His family said that they condemned his actions. But it soon became clear that his father – a trauma surgeon – had responded to the 7 October massacre by praising the terrorists of Hamas as ‘Allah’s men on earth’ and claiming that the actions of Hamas’s rapists and murderers that day ‘proved beyond any doubt’ that Israel would be destroyed.
In the immediate aftermath of al-Shamie’s attack, police said that they were searching for a motive. Until the attacker’s name came out and turned out literally to be ‘Jihad’, the BBC speculated that the attack may have occurred due to an increase in rhetoric from ‘the far right’. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood told GB News: ‘The only person responsible for this attack is the attacker himself.’ In fact, attacks like this happen for a whole range of reasons – not least an increase in the rhetoric and lies of people who have spent decades spewing hate against Jews in general and the world’s one Jewish state in particular.
Hate crimes against Jews in Britain have almost doubled in the two years since 7 October 2023. The peak came in the six months after Hamas’s bloody attack (2,019 incidents) and reached the second highest on record in the first half of this year (1,521 recorded incidents, according to the Community Security Trust).
Even in NHS hospitals, Jewish people no longer feel safe. A top doctor was suspended last month after a series of ‘anti-Semitic’ tweets. Dr Ellen Kriesels, a consultant paediatrician at a north London hospital, described Hamas as ‘oppressed resistance fighters, not terrorists’. The account linked to Dr Kriesels also claimed that efforts ‘to frame the Jews as victims’ were ‘ridiculous’ and ‘excruciating’. Another NHS surgeon was this week struck off after referring to another social media user as ‘circumcised vermin’, while a junior doctor who made a ‘slit your throat’ gesture to Jewish protestors escaped suspension after an initial tribunal found she had a ‘right to freedom of expression’.
Security at schools has also been beefed up. ‘No other faith group, as far as I know, has to have a level of protection in its places of worship, in its schools, in its community buildings,’ Richard Verber, from the United Synagogue charity, told Reuters. ‘We’re talking fences, we’re talking spikes on rails, we’re talking barbed wire, we’re talking CCTV, we’re talking about them all being plugged into local police forces.’
Those in power have remained deaf to even the clearest examples of hatred being sown
In reality of course any hate crime figures only scratch the surface of the problem. They do not take into account cases such as the ongoing trial of Walid Saadaoui and Amar Hussein, from Wigan, who appeared in court in London in May last year. They stand accused of planning an Islamic State-inspired machine-gun terrorist attack against Jewish communities in north-west England. Both have pleaded not guilty to the charge of preparation of terrorist acts.
Data on anti-Semitic incidents also necessarily cannot cover the unknown number of Jews who have felt unable to go into the centres of British cities for the past two years because of the weekly anti-Israel protests which have continued unchecked – or the number affected by the police stopping visibly Jewish people from being allowed in the vicinity of such protests.
From early October 2023, it was clear where all this would lead. The first marches on the streets of London and elsewhere included open calls for ‘jihad’, ‘intifada’ and for ‘Muslim armies’ to arise. The incitement has only escalated in the two years since. In June this year the still un-banned Khomeinist Islamic Human Rights Commission held a march which included an image of the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei, accompanied by the slogan: ‘Choose the right side of history.’
Back in late October 2023, the then home secretary Suella Braverman described the weekly protests going through British cities as ‘hate marches’. She was roundly condemned for this by – among others – our now Foreign Secretary. Yvette Cooper claimed that Braverman’s use of the term ‘hate marches’ was ‘irresponsible’.
In the wake of the Manchester synagogue attack last week, our current Home Secretary Ms Mahmood finally joined the growing number of voices calling for protestors to think again about the following day’s planned anti-Israel demonstrations. The organisers of these events – in Manchester and London – were told that their actions could divert police resources at a time when synagogues and other Jewish sites required an increased police presence for protection.
Even Metropolitan Police Commissioner Mark Rowley suggested that ‘some might say’ the planned anti-Israel demonstrations ‘lack sensitivity’. But of course the protests went ahead anyway. Indeed, within hours of the Manchester synagogue attack, hundreds of protestors organised a rally against Israel on Whitehall. One of the protestors was quoted summing up the mood: ‘I don’t give a fuck about the Jewish community right now.’
The Jews of Manchester are the latest victims of the intifada that people on our streets have demanded for years
Nobody in the Jewish community of Manchester was much surprised by what happened last week. Many had been warning the authorities in this country for two years about the increase in violence and hatred against Jews. But political leaders have been deaf to these cries. The police have admitted to being overwhelmed by the size of the protests and unable to arrest even a portion of those who have incited terrorism on our streets. The proceedings of parliament were changed at the hands of an anti-Israel mob in Westminster last year. But all the time those in power have remained deaf to even the clearest examples of this hatred being sown.
Since 7 October 2023, countless mosques in this country have hosted sermons praising the Hamas attacks. Most of these entities have charitable status, and yet neither the police, the charity commission, the Home Office or anybody else has bothered to do anything to seriously challenge it.
To take just one example, in the days immediately after 7 October, Harun Abdur Rashid Holmes of the Nottingham Islam Information Point gave a sermon in which he offered Islamic justifications for Hamas’s massacre. In a rare intervention, this year the Charity Commission finally issued a ‘warning’ to the Nottingham mosque.
In July, another preacher, Asrar Rashid, addressed anti-Israel protestors on the streets of Birmingham. This is part of what he said: ‘We take up armed struggle and we are not ashamed of it. We have jihad in our Quran, and jihad is standing up against oppression. What the Palestinian people are doing today is armed struggle, to stand up to the bankers’ state, which is known as Israel.’ Rashid had previously been on video saying that ‘Hitler did a favour for the Jews’ in the 1940s and that the Jews ‘held all politicians in their pockets’. But nobody did anything about this preacher.
Some might observe that Asrar Rashid is lucky not to be a middle-aged white woman, and that he is lucky not to have made his comments on social media but merely on the streets of Birmingham. But the truth is that the events of the past two years have revealed a clear problem that has been ignored for too long: a culture of open incitement, lies and hatred by people who hate not just the Jewish State and the Jews of Britain, but our society as a whole, and consider it a worthy target for terrorism and destruction.
As it happens, it was fitting that the pro-intifada protests this week should have congregated outside King’s College London. The university is one of many British institutions to have in recent years received huge sums of money from the government of Qatar – the same government that also funds Hamas. But it is doubly appropriate because in April 2003, during the Second Intifada, two British Muslims – Asif Hanif and Omar Sharif – went into a busy Tel Aviv bar named Mike’s Place and detonated a suicide bomb. Three people were killed and 65 wounded. The two perpetrators had been students at KCL. In fact they met there.
The Jews of Manchester are just the latest victims of the intifada that people on our streets have demanded for so many years. It is their misfortune to be in a country which, however loud these cries are, and for however long, refuses to hear them.
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