The response of the British left to the knife attack on two Jews, Moshe Shine, 76, and Shloime Rand, 34, in London’s Golders Green on Wednesday was telling. The leader of the left-wing Green Party, Zack Polanski, retweeted a post on X accusing the police of brutality for “violently kicking a mentally ill man in the head.” Well, a kick in the head is perhaps the least this attacker should have expected after refusing to give up his weapons; in many jurisdictions, he would be dead. Essa Suleiman has now been charged with attempted murder.
The men stabbed in Golders Green were treated by Hatzola, the same Jewish volunteer emergency services organisation whose ambulances were firebombed in April by a group claiming to be Iranian proxies. Last Monday, a street away in this historically peaceful Jewish enclave, there was an arson attack on a memorial to those killed on October 7 and to Iranian protesters. Last month, there was another arson committed against a Jewish-owned shop in Watford. These outrages followed the bloody Islamist terror attack on a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur last October. Two Jews died at the hands of one Jihad Al-Shamie, a British citizen.
The government has now raised the terrorist threat level in the UK to “severe,” which means the security services believe a further attack is “highly likely” in the next six months. The head of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Mark Rowley, said April 29 that there is “an epidemic of antisemitism across the world and in Britain.” The government’s adviser on terrorism, Jonathan Hall KC, says British Jews are “now thinking they cannot live a normal life”.
No wonder. The Golders Green knife attacker was 45-year-old Essa Suleiman, born in Somalia but described as “British,” as if his ethnic origins were dissolved when he arrived in the UK. Suleiman was known to the authorities, had a history of extreme violence and had been referred to Prevent, the government-sponsored “deradicalization” program. But he developed mental health issues (in the parlance of our times), so he was apparently allowed to walk free.
Britain’s antisemitism epidemic is underpinned by a kind of institutional unwillingness to take it as seriously as Islamophobia, the much-discussed “two-tier justice system.” As the Jewish author and comedian David Baddiel put it in his book of the same name: “Jews Don’t Count.”
Since the Hamas assault on Jewish civilians on October 7, 2023, Jew-hatred has risen measurably in this supposedly tolerant country. The independent Community Security Trust (CST), which monitors anti-Jewish hate crime, recorded 4,103 incidents in 2023 alone, the highest annual total since records began in 1984, with two-thirds occurring after October 7. The CST records include assaults on Jews in the streets, Jews harassed on public transport, threats against synagogues, schools and community centres, antisemitic graffiti and vandalism, abuse on university campuses, and the online glorification of Hamas. Jewish schools in London often resemble armed camps manned by security guards. Many Jews claim to be afraid to walk the streets.
Yet responses to the problem from politicians and public officials have been muted. Polanski has said that fears of antisemitism in Britain are a “perception of unsafety” and not “actual unsafety.” This kind of sophistry is widespread. Celebrities such as the football presenter Gary Lineker and the author Zadie Smith are quick to accuse Israel of “genocide” in Gaza but somehow lose their voices when faced with home-grown racial violence against Jews.
Academics celebrate the gender theorist Judith Butler’s view that the October 7 attacks were “armed resistance” and many Britons agree and believe Israelis are “war criminals” murdering women and children in Gaza indiscriminately. Too many people, especially under-24-year-olds in Britain, think that the Hamas atrocity was an “understandable” response to the oppression of Palestinians in their “homeland” by “settler colonialists,” as if these Jews had some imperial metropolitan homeland to which they could return. The result is not thoughtful criticism of the Israeli government, but widespread indifference or animus toward British Jews.
It is only a couple of years since the Labour MP Diane Abbott declared that racism against Jews was not possible. It is like “prejudice against redheads,” she insisted in a letter to the Guardian, not “real racism”, which is “always against people of colour.” This was after the then leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, was suspended by his own party after the Equality and Human Rights Commission reported that antisemitic racism very definitely did exist and was endemic to what had been the party of government.
And that is why the current hand-wringing by politicians such as Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood over the rise in antisemitic terror rings false. We hear endlessly about institutional racism against Muslims. Islamophobia may soon be made a criminal offence. But institutional antisemitism is arguably the greatest failing of British officialdom. It is a myopic inability to see Jews as anything other than rich, white war criminals. And the result is bleeding on London streets.
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