After Heaton Park

The days since the terrorist attack at the Heaton Park Synagogue on Yom Kippur, when Melvin Kravitz and Adrian Daulby were cruelly killed and three others injured by an Islamist extremist, have been full of statements of sympathy, messages of support and solidarity. It’s been incredible and deeply moving: from politicians and royals, friends and neighbours, colleagues and strangers. I’ve felt it personally, and I know many Jewish people have experienced the same. Interfaith networks have buzzed with online hashtags; at my local synagogue, passers-by even came along to lay pebbles on the wall of the shul, just under the security fence, in memory of those killed.

It’s a reminder that Britain remains a country of common decency, a country in which the slaying of Jews on their way to prayer on the holiest day of their year shocks the ordinary. When you look beyond the bubble of heated political argument and furious protest, there is a vast reservoir of instinctive support for Jews amongst the general public. On Thursday morning, the suggestion that Britain is no longer safe for Jews did not seem so far-fetched; the days since have reminded us not to be so hasty. As Alan Levy, chair of Heaton Park shul, said in a remarkable interview after the attack, there is a defiance in the Jewish community, amidst the fear.

And yet, things cannot go on as they did before. This is also a country where antisemitism has risen to unacceptable levels in recent years. It is a country where antisemitic slurs and violent rhetoric are allowed to pass unchallenged on the streets and are cheered from the stage at the Glastonbury Festival. Where a doctor can spread Nazi-style hatred about “Jewish supremacists” and call for Jewish communities to be held to account and is cleared to continue practicing. And it is a country where, within hours of the terror attack in Manchester, anti-Israel protestors were back on the streets, chanting for an “Intifada”, with all the associations of car rammings and stabbings that term brings to mind.

There is shock and grief in the Jewish community following Jihad Al-Shamie’s murderous attack in Manchester, but there is little surprise, and because of that, there is much anger. We have seen jihadist terrorism target Jews before, although not fatally within the United Kingdom. But even here, there was the case of Munawar Hussain, who stabbed two people at a Marks & Spencer in Burnley in 2020 because he thought M&S funds Israel. There was Malik Faisal Akram, who flew from Blackburn to Texas in 2022 to take people hostage in a synagogue. There were Asif Muhammad Hanif and Omar Khan Sharif, two British Muslims who killed three and wounded 50 in a suicide bombing at Mike’s Place bar in Tel Aviv. And just last year, Jewish-Israeli music producer Itay Kashti was the victim of a bungled kidnapping, leaving him badly beaten and handcuffed to a radiator by Muslim kidnappers “motivated by political and religious reasons.”

There are neo-Nazi terrorists too, plenty of them, and they pose a lethal threat to Jews as well. It is not a case of one or the other. But there is a dangerous discrepancy in how people treat deadly antisemitism, depending on where it comes from. The largest opinion poll done on the subject found that British Muslims are 3.5 times as likely as the general population to ‘hold hard-core antisemitic attitudes’, and over half have at least one antisemitic belief (that poll was in 2017; the figures may have changed since). In fact, levels of antisemitism amongst British Muslims came out at roughly the same levels as people who self-identified as far right politically. Yet for a lot of people, antisemitism from Muslims seems much harder to recognise, name and tackle than antisemitism from the far right. Even when it results in dead Jews.

Amnesty UK, who have never shown much interest in tackling antisemitism, posted a message of solidarity and sympathy after the Heaton Park Synagogue attack, and warned politicians not to stoke further hatred in the days following. That’s nice, to a point; but when, a few days later, a mosque was burnt by arsonists in Sussex, their condemnation was much more pointed and political. “This follows months of increasing hostility to racialised and migrant communities in the UK – boosted by anti-migrant rhetoric across the political spectrum and in the media”, they wrote; “We are watching the real-life consequences of outpourings of hatred.”

Spot the difference? There is a discernible reluctance to discuss the comparable “outpourings of hatred” and hostile rhetoric that lie behind a jihadist terror attack on a synagogue. Too difficult, too sensitive, too compromising for their own anti-Israel politics. Baroness Warsi called the mosque arson a consequence of “the daily demonising, maligning , stereotyping and stigmatising of Muslims- from mainstream politicians to the far right, from sections of the media to extremism on social networks” - but has little appetite for the suggestion that politicians may have stoked the hatreds that fuel anti-Jewish terrorism. Whether you agree or not about the specific allegations, it is the difference in approach that is so striking. It is as if antisemitism is treated a natural disaster, a tragedy of course, but something inexplicable and unfathomable; whereas other forms of racist violence are much more readily ascribed to incitement by specific activists and agitators, and the familiar dynamics by which extreme rhetoric leads to violent action.

There is nuance to this: certainly not all Muslims are antisemitic, and not all antisemitism is due to Muslims. That same 2017 poll also pointed out that, due to their status as a minority, British Muslims’ overall responsibility for the total level of antisemitism in the UK is rather small. Anti-Jewish attitudes are much more widespread than that, and Muslims are sometimes an easy scapegoat that lets everyone else off the hook. I’ve received countless messages of support from Muslim friends and contacts since the Manchester attack, and there is a genuine desire amongst some to tackle Islamist antisemitism. In fact, this desire is often easier to find amongst Muslim activists than it is amongst supposed anti-racists on the left.

The bald fact is that the anti-racist left abandoned Britain’s Jews a generation ago. Whereas they had stood roughly shoulder to shoulder with Jewish and other communities against the National Front and the British National Party, this solidarity evaporated when the wave of antisemitism that hit European Jewry during the Second Intifada came primarily not from the far right but from radicalised Islamist extremists. It was al-Qaeda who murdered Jews in Tunisia, Turkey and Morocco in the early 2000s; and it was French Muslims who killed French Jews with increasing regularity in the years following. This reality was at first denied, then justified or excused. When neo-Nazis killed Jews, this was rightly recognised as a racist murder; but when jihadists did it, it was seen as an illegitimate expression of a legitimate anger about Israel.

This was partly because the anti-racist left did not want to assist in demonising Muslims, who were themselves the targets of racist and Islamophobic violence. But it was also because of a categorical failure to understand the deep ideological roots of Islamist antisemitism. Rather than grasping the fundamental role that antisemitic conspiracy theories and anti-Jewish demonisation plays in Islamist ideology, there was a flawed assumption on much of the left that when Muslims attacked Jews, it was a misguided expression of anger towards Israel; and even if they disapproved of the methods, they shared the anger.

There is also the small matter of complicity. The campaigns against the 2003 Iraq War were led by a coalition of far left groups working with organisations aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood. The left’s traditional ability to sniff out antisemitism was neutered by their co-opting into those same Islamist campaigns. Sometimes it takes a bit of distance to discern the true shape of something that ought to be familiar; and parts of the left have become so close to Islamists when it comes to the issue of Jews, Zionists and Israel, that their vision is completely blurred. Anti-Jewish diatribes that would evoke left wing outrage if they came from far right racists go completely ignored when they come from mosque pulpits. We are repeatedly told that “resistance” doesn’t mean slaughtering Jews in their homes, when on October 7, that is exactly what it meant. The pro-Palestinian movement in this country may like to think of itself as anti-racist, but there are an awful lot of anti-Jewish racists who seem to feel quite at home there.

Added to this is the utter inability of most anti-racist training, built as it is around notions of colour-based structural discrimination, to explain why a jihadist would murder Jews at a synagogue in Manchester. Most DEI training is simply not fit for purpose when it comes to addressing antisemitism. If the progressive, anti-racist left is going to be any help at all - rather than being part of the problem, as much of it is right now - then some fundamental rethinking is necessary.

Into this vacuum leaps Tommy Robinson, propelled by the idiocy of Israel’s Diaspora Minister, pouring fuel on a fire that will inevitably burn Jews as well as Muslims. As I’ve written before, Robinson is not just a far right extremist but is also antisemitic, and can never be an ally in this fight. It is to be expected that bigots and xenophobes will try to co-opt outrage at anti-Jewish violence for their own sinister agendas, but that does not mean Jews, or Israelis, should help them.

Sanity on this subject needs to tread a path between the left’s inability to see that Islamist ideology plus anti-Israel hatred is a combustible mixture that generates antisemitic terrorism; and the far right’s cynical manipulation of Jewish fears to stir up anti-Muslim prejudice. Instead, we need to fill that vacuum with action that does not leave space for extremists and apologists to either exploit the horror of the Manchester attack, or distract us from our determination to ensure it does not repeat. There will be many policy proposals and ideas put forward in the days and weeks to come, and there is no room to go through them all here. But they all come down to the same basic principle: we can’t continue as if nothing has changed. Too many institutions and organisations, regulators and enforcers, public and private, have turned a blind eye to antisemitism for too long and let it fester to the point of lethality. Britain is still a decent country, all said and done. But we want that Britain back.