#manchester synagogue

By: Sarah Vine

Published: Oct 5, 2025

Let me ask you a question, an honest question. How many Jewish terrorists have blown up stadiums full of excited, innocent teenagers in recent years? How many Jews have strapped bombs to their bodies and detonated them on Tube trains and buses?

How many Jewish paramilitaries have tortured or executed women for not wearing a headscarf, or for listening to music, or for daring to leave home without their husbands?

How many Jewish people have stabbed people peacefully going to their place of worship?

How many have flown aeroplanes into buildings full of innocent people? Driven cars into crowds of Christmas shoppers? Filmed themselves raping and mutilating ‘infidels’? Kidnapped entire schoolrooms of teenage girls and taken them as sex slaves?

Genuine question. Answer: none.

And here’s another. What is the common denominator in all these attacks?

The answer is radical Islam. The glorification of death in the pursuit of a global jihad; the branding of non-extremist Muslims as ‘apostates’; the rejection of Western culture, and in particular the rights of women and minorities; the belief that only an all-encompassing Islamic state ruled by Sharia law can be legitimate – and the pursuit of that state by any means necessary.

No other faith on this planet has such an agenda. The Catholic Church may have been guilty of similar crimes in the past, but those days are long gone. Certainly not Christianity in its current form.

And certainly not the Jews. All they are asking for is the right to exist, peacefully, to go about their business and practice their religion without being hounded out of existence. As they were in Europe in the 1930s. As they are being now, in the Middle East – but also, increasingly in traditional places of safety such as Britain and the US.

That is not to say that there have never been Jewish extremists. One thinks of the assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, by one of his own people, Yigal Amir; the deplorable Jewish Underground, who operated in the 1980s; and the group responsible for the 1946 King David hotel bombing in Jerusalem. There are bad Jews, of course there are.

But in the recent annals of terrorism, by far the most prolific terrorists are those who subscribe to the most hardline forms of Islam, whether they be Al-Qaeda, ISIS, the Taliban, Boko Haram, Hamas, Hezbollah or Islamic Jihad. That is not propaganda, nor is it Islamophobia; it is just a fact – one that I am sure most Muslims find as disturbing as I do.

So, can we please stop the gaslighting? Can we please stop pretending that there isn’t a problem here, a big problem, and that it has its roots not in the existence of a Jewish state but in the spread of a radical religious agenda whose prime target – the elimination of Israel – is just the first step in a clear and stated aim of eradicating all non-believers and establishing a global caliphate?

Can we stop pandering to this misogynistic death cult that oppresses its own people and has committed several well documented genocides, from the Yazidis in Iraq and Syria to the Darfur genocide of the early 2000s, in which 300,000 people were either killed or displaced?

Can we just stop victim-blaming and making excuses for Jew-hate?

I am not Jewish. I’m good old C of E, that most vanilla of faiths, and it suits me just fine.

But I am furious on behalf of Jewish people.

What happened in Manchester last week was a turning point, the moment when all their fears came true. It was the ugly culmination of month after month of mounting anti-Jewish feeling, in the streets of our cities, on college campuses, online: relentless, ill-disguised, ugly. And largely unchecked.

Britain fought an entire war to stop this kind of thing. My grandfather and many of his generation lost their youth and their sanity to that cause. We cannot stand by and let it happen all over again.

Whatever mistakes Israel has made, Jew-hate is not OK – just as Islamophobia is unacceptable regardless of how many crimes are committed in the name of a twisted interpretation of the Muslim faith.

Israel is the Jewish nation, but it is not all Jews. Conflating the actions of Israel with Jewish people everywhere is irrational, in the same way that conflating the EU with Europe was during the Brexit referendum. It is perfectly possible to criticise one without hating the other.

That is why we correctly and studiously do not judge the actions of all Muslims by, say, the behaviour of the grooming gangs, or by the atrocities committed by the Taliban or by Boko Haram.

But for some reason we do not afford Jews the same privilege. Why? Anti-Semitism.

Anti-Semitism is also why, if attacked, Israel is somehow expected to simply turn the other cheek.

What nation other than a Jewish one would be expected to behave this way? If America had suffered a similar assault as the one carried out by Hamas on October 7, do you imagine it would have held back? Of course not.

Yet somehow, because Israel is Jewish, it is expected to put up and shut up.

In a world of woke and political correctness, it seems that Jew-hate is the only acceptable form of prejudice left. That’s why the police are reluctant to arrest anti-Israel protesters, even if they are chanting openly anti-Jewish slogans. It’s fine.

They’re ‘untermenschen’, so it doesn’t count.

That’s also why, when I recently reported Dr Rahmeh Aladwan – the radical NHS doctor who has said that ‘90 per cent of Jews on Earth’ are genocidal, that she will never condemn the October 7 attacks and that ‘the Royal Free Hospital in London is a Jewish supremacy cesspit’ – to the social media platform X, they wrote back to tell me she had not breached community guidelines.

Seriously? Substitute the word ‘Jewish’ for ‘black’ or ‘Muslim’ and I doubt they would have been so lenient.

What happened in Manchester was a direct result of all this. Once you start saying that Jews are causing a genocide, then the worst people feel emboldened to do terrible things.

If the authorities and our politicians not only allow but, in some cases, also encourage the demonisation of an entire religion through the actions of its politicians, people get hurt.

It’s the same as judging all Muslims by the actions of the Ayatollah Khamenei.

I’m not religious, not particularly. I don’t much mind what you believe in or how you express that belief, just as long as you don’t expect me to do the same or abide by your rules. This is true of the Jews. They have their traditions, but they don’t expect others to share them. They might keep themselves to themselves, but they don’t hate those who don’t believe what they believe. They don’t vow to destroy everyone who is not them.

That is not true of radical Islam, which considers itself the only true faith and wishes to impose itself by any means possible.

The father of the man who stabbed those people at the synagogue glorified the perpetrators of October 7.

He praised them on Facebook, writing that images of ‘fighters storming’ Israel with paragliders and motorbikes ‘prove beyond a doubt’ that Israel would be destroyed.

That same man named his son Jihad, and so it came to pass.

His son fulfilled his destiny in Manchester.

How many more may follow him? How many more atrocities will be committed before we wake up and acknowledge what the real problem is here?

[ Via: https://archive.today/OAqfG ]

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By: Andrew Doyle

Published: Oct 4, 2025

‘I was looking out of the window in the door at the man trying to get in. And I saw evil. And I saw hate.’ These were the words of Rabbi Daniel Walker, one of those who barricaded the doors of the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation, the Manchester synagogue that was attacked on Thursday leaving two dead and three injured.

The choice of the date was not coincidental; this was Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. The police are treating this as a terrorist incident, but have yet to officially confirm the motive. That the murderer was from Syria, was replicating the tactics of Islamist terrorists, wore what looked like an explosive vest, and was called ‘Jihad’, may give us some clue.

The growing tolerance for anti-Jewish hatred in western countries has been one of the most shocking developments in recent years. While citizens have been arrested and even imprisoned for memes or offensive social media posts, the police have turned a blind eye to overt calls for violence against the Jewish community. Leaving aside the endless demands for ‘intifada’ and chants of ‘from the river to the sea’, the men who drove through a Jewish area in London waving Palestinian flags and screaming ‘fuck the Jews, rape their daughters’ had their charges dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service. Had these cries been about Muslims, does anyone seriously believe the outcome would have been the same?

That this surge in antisemitism has been galvanised by the pogrom of 7 October 2023 in Israel is incontestable. In the year following this frenzied act of barbarity, there were over 5,500 antisemitic incidents recorded in the UK, three times more than the previous year. It’s as though every atrocity seems to embolden this evil. On the very day of the Manchester synagogue attack, protesters assembled in train stations across major UK cities to chant their slogans against ‘Zionism’. The timing of these protests makes their intentions clear. To gather in public and gloat about antisemitic murder is a degree of moral bankruptcy that few of us can comprehend.

Nobody is suggesting that peaceful protest against the military strategies of Israel are not legitimate; these kinds of protests have often occurred within Israel itself. But to ignore the prominent streak of anti-Jewish hatred that so often dominates these events is no longer tenable. Hostility towards Jews is now as much a compulsory feature of the ‘omni-cause’ as kneeling for BLM or waving the Progress Pride flag.

In this climate, the fear of being seen as identifiably Jewish is growing. In April 2024, a police officer was filmed at a pro-Palestine demonstration, raising concerns to a man who he said looked ‘openly Jewish’. If a kippah skull cap puts one in danger on the streets of London, the problem surely does not lie with the man who is wearing it. It is incredible that this even needs to be stated.

In a piece for his Substack, Andrew Gold has explained the reality for Jewish people living in the UK today:

‘A year ago, my wife’s family in Argentina bought us a Mezuzah as a wedding gift. These are little scrolls that sit beside the front doors of Jews. It was a lovely idea (even though I’m an atheist), but it filled me with sadness having to explain to them that this was simply not possible anymore in the UK. Almost every Jew I know has removed theirs.’

How have we reached the point where Jews need to hide themselves away for fear of violent reprisals? This shameful situation is one that has become increasingly common throughout Europe. Last November, Berlin’s chief of police Barbara Slowik issued a warning that gay and Jewish people should be circumspect in how they present themselves in districts with large Arab populations. ‘There are areas of the city,’ she said, ‘we need to be perfectly honest here, where I would advise people who wear a kippah or are openly gay to be more careful’. One doesn’t need to be a trained historian to know that Berlin has experienced such problems before.

There is no longer any doubt that there exists a clear correlation between mass immigration and the rise of anti-Jewish hostility. Anyone with the slightest familiarity with Muslim-majority countries is aware that antisemitism is the norm, not the aberration. The combination of reckless levels of immigration, and a complete failure to insist on cultural assimilation as a condition of citizenship, has meant that Jews are yet again bearing the brunt of broader political failures.

Exacerbating the problem, we have the witless bien-pensants of the self-declared ‘progressive’ movement, whose historical and geopolitical illiteracy is exceeded only by their colossal self-assurance. How else can we account for the cognitive dissonance of those who claim to be ‘anti-fascist’ but who have cheered on the murder of Jews? Even before the bodies were cold at the Nova music festival, the ghouls were out in force, celebrating the atrocity on the streets of London. In Sydney, Hamas supporters were filmed crying out ‘Fuck the Jews’, and in New York City others held a banner declaring ‘Long live 7 October’. Jewish cemeteries and monuments have been daubed with swastikas and antisemitic slurs. This is not political activism; it’s racial hatred.

By: Heather Mac Donald

Published: Oct 7, 2025

A day after an Islamist rampage against a British synagogue and two days after the indictment in Berlin of three suspected Hamas members for planning terror attacks in Germany, German chancellor Friedrich Merz and French president Emanuel Macron met in Saarbrücken, Germany, and warned of . . . right-wing threats to European democracies. Neither said a word about the Manchester assault or the Berlin indictment.

Instead, Merz announced to the European potentates commemorating the 35th anniversary of German reunification that “our liberal way of life is under attack, from both outside and within.” German broadcaster Deutsche Welle decoded for the clueless: Merz’s enemy “within” was the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), Germany’s voice for immigration restrictionism.

Macron connected those external and internal threats: “authoritarian countries” outside Europe are “aligned with the extreme parties” inside Europe, he said. Europe’s “extreme parties” embrace a “new nationalism,” based on “hate of the other,” according to Macron. Unless European democrats fend off the “dark Enlightenment,” the European continent would become “like many others,” filled with “conspiracy theorists, extremes, noise, and fury.”

It required no decoding to pick up the reference to the North American continent.

German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier took up the same theme: political forces looking to undermine democratic institutions and poison debate with hatred were gathering strength, especially in Germany’s East—another boilerplate reference to the AfD. “Let’s not allow our democracy to be further damaged,” said Steinmeier.

The Saarbrücken speeches illustrate a key rule of contemporary European power: wheresoever two or more members of the European elite gather together, they will denounce the “far right,” right-wing “extremists,” and “dangerous nationalists.” They will ignore Islamist violence. In Saarbrücken, Merz did not note that attacks on Jews in Germany have been spiraling upward. Merz did not mention Germany’s knifing assaults by first- and second-generation immigrants or the fact that immigrants and their progeny commit a vast disproportion of crime.

In August 2025, for example, an American was slashed in the face while trying to protect two women from nonnative attackers on a Dresden streetcar. In February 2025, a Syrian refugee stabbed a Spanish tourist at Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial so severely that the victim had to be placed in an induced coma. The refugee had been planning for weeks “to kill Jews.” In January 2025, an Afghan immigrant knifed to death a toddler and an adult in Aschaffenburg. In August 2024, an illegal Syrian fatally stabbed three people and seriously wounded ten others at a “diversity” festival in Solingen. In May 2024, an Afghan stabbed to death a police officer in Mannheim and gravely injured five other people at a rally protesting mass immigration.

At the German reunification ceremony, Macron did not mention France’s no-go zones, where state authority has broken down. He did not acknowledge France’s history of large-scale Islamist terror episodes.

Wheresoever two or more members of the European elite gather together, they will show no self-awareness that they are the ones threatening democracy with their “firewalls” against cooperation with democratically elected populists; with their ad hoc rule changes to block those democratically elected representatives from their parliamentary rights; with their attempted party bans; with their shunning, silencing, and sidelining of dissenters; with their press blackouts on coverage of populist party leaders; with their social media censorship of “hate speech,” and with their arrests of “haters.”

Germany’s AfD, France’s Rassemblement National, and Britain’s Reform U.K. have proposed no such democracy-quashing measures but seek only to exercise their political rights. Being an “enemy of democracy,” in establishment Europeanspeak, simply means opposing uncontrolled Third World immigration.

Germany’s elites and their European brethren pretend that the biggest threat to Jews in Europe comes from the right. Never mind that the AfD, the Rassemblement National, and Reform UK are the most philo-Semitic and pro-Israel parties in their respective countries.

Wheresoever two or more members of the European elite gather together, they will cloak themselves in the mantle of science and enlightened expertise. In Saarbrücken, Macron denounced the “return of the dark Enlightenment.” The “new Enlightenment,” as he put it, believes that “respect and science are stronger than hate and fury.” That is the same respect for “science,” presumably, which closed schools during the Covid epidemic—despite evidence that children faced virtually no mortal risk from the disease—established arbitrary social distancing rules, and shut down the economy without regard to costs and benefits.

The elites can hardly open their mouths without invoking diversity. In Saarbrücken, Merz insisted that Germany must be “open to the world.” British Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy couldn’t offer condolence for the Manchester victims without making reference to the Rainbow Coalition. “Our country, those of all colors, all faiths and none, stand with you,” he told mourners at a vigil. The risk that that Rainbow Coalition might break down is the biggest threat from Islamist terrorists, according to Lammy. “We cannot, must not, let them divide us—we must show them who we really are, not what they want us to become or to believe,” he said.

Actually, the Islamist agenda is oblivious to Western multiculturalism, even as that multiculturalism is the key to its power in the West.

On the evening of the Manchester attack, anti-Israel activists marched in Manchester and London, leading to 40 arrests, including six for assaulting police officers. The feckless British home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, expressed her disappointment at the demonstrations, which had ignored pleas by British leaders to give the country a chance to grieve. “Carrying on in this way does feel un-British,” Mahmood said. Mahmood is just now noticing that Britain has become decidedly un-British. Don’t expect that recognition to last.

Nigel Farrage, head of Reform UK, provided a sharper gloss: the Thursday night demonstrations were celebrations of the synagogue attack, he said.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Metropolitan Police Chief Mark Rowley promised beefed-up protection at Jewish sites over the weekend after the rampage. Physical protection is not what European Jewry and other European natives need. It is impossible to put enough police officers at every possible site of terrorist attack. The only lasting security involves reducing migrant populations through deportation and strict border control.

The obsession with the “far right” among European elites has become a psychotic delusion. AfD, Rassemblement National, and Reform U.K. voters are ordinary people, no different from their fellow citizens except in their willingness to oppose the open-borders status quo. Their leaders do not seek to destroy democracy; they only want to participate in it.

 Yet populist party members are portrayed as a pathogen within the body politic. British Housing Secretary Steve Reed said on September 28 that the Labor Party is the “disinfectant that is going to clean up the pollution of the Far Right in our politics.” Such concern with purity is ironic in people who rest their moral authority on their allegedly unique opposition to fascism.

The European globalists’ refusal to work with restrictionist parties is worsening government instability and incoherence. Macron is seeking his eighth prime minister since he took office in 2017. Five of those late PMs bit the dust since 2022. Macron’s most recent one lasted just weeks. The German “firewall” against the AfD has prevented Chancellor Merz from enacting the economic reforms, including to competition-busting climate mandates, that he knows are necessary.

By: Hadley Freeman

Published: Oct 4, 2025

The police were the giveaway. There are always security guards outside my synagogue — as there are outside all Jewish schools and synagogues in this country — and there were six when my kids and I arrived on Thursday morning for Yom Kippur services. We cheerfully greeted them, because I have long since stopped feeling sad that my children associate Jewish holidays and Hebrew school with security guards, locked gates and bag searches. Better than the alternative, as we Jewish parents say to one another. By the time we left synagogue 90 minutes later and we saw policemen standing next to our guards, we knew the alternative had happened.

Jews are used to being caught in a pincer movement. Scapegoated throughout history by the right and the left, condemned as communists, reviled as money hoarders. What has felt different in recent years in this country is that the antisemitism has come from three directions: the far right, the far left and radical Islam. And since October 7 the last two are increasingly allying with each other.

It is what the philosopher James Orr has described as an alliance of “rainbow and crescent”, united by a shared loathing of Israel. The fringe hard left has been mining the rainbow and crescent alliance for years — see: Jeremy Corbyn, George Galloway — insisting that Islam’s less than progressive views on women, gay people and Jews could be jazz-hands-ed away for the greater good of joining to rail against Israel. But that fringe has been moving towards the mainstream over the past decade, ever since Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party, and it has accelerated rapidly since October 7.

Glastonbury blanketed with Palestinian flags, but no mention of the Nova music festival, where young Israelis were murdered by Hamas; the Green Party now run by Zack Polanski, a Jewish gay man who once claimed he could make women’s breasts grow with the power of his mind, and his deputy, Mothin Ali, a conservative Muslim, who celebrated his electoral victory last year by chanting “Allahu akbar”; everyone’s favourite protest group, Queers for Palestine: such are some recent examples of the rainbow and crescent alliance.

Which brings me to last week. To recap, a man named Jihad al-Shamie — honestly, Chris Morris would have rejected this plotline for Brass Eye as too on the nose — rammed his car into Heaton Park synagogue, caused the deaths of two Jewish men and attempted to slaughter the entire synagogue of Manchester Jews on the holiest day of the Jewish year. Twenty-four hours later it emerged he was on bail for rape and his father, Faraj, a trauma surgeon, had described the October 7 attacks as “a miracle by all standards”. At least we know he meant his son’s name to be taken literally.

How did pro-Palestinian activists react to this, the worst antisemitic atrocity in this country in living memory? By holding anti-Israel protests on Thursday and Saturday, featuring the usual demographics: young white people in keffiyehs (cultural appropriation is good when it’s Palestine, FYI), older white people, some in keffiyehs (ditto), men who look like they got lost on the way to a Millwall game and conservative Muslims.

“Criticism of Israel is not necessarily antisemitic!” activists say. And that’s true. But as the suffering in Gaza has worsened, the corollary of that statement is increasingly ignored, which is this: and yet sometimes it is.

When I got home on Thursday my phone was filled with messages from friends checking I was OK, which was kind, but of course I was OK. I refuse to live in fear of lone crazies, and if they now come with names like Jihad, well, at least they’ll be easy to identify. But then I watched the protests on TV, and things felt less OK: disparate groups bound together by an oozing rage at Israel and a lack of interest verging on disdain for Jews in their own community, the fatberg of protests. The same thing happened after October 7: protest mobs erupting around the world to shout “F*** Israel” (Sydney) and “Palestinian resistance” (New York) even as Hamas was still killing Jews. Marching against Israel has become a Pavlovian response to the murder of Jews, maybe because protesters need to fill their heads with chants to block out the inconvenient news.

You think you’re marching for Greta Thunberg and her flotilla; the person next to you is chanting for the annihilation of Israel. Behold the rainbow and crescent alliance. Two thirds of British Jews are Zionist — meaning they support Israel’s right to exist — but “Zionist” is now used as a slur interchangeable with “racist”. How do good liberals explain this to themselves? Or maybe they too are so obsessed with Israel that they think it’s noble to chant “Globalise the intifada” and “From the river to the sea” — slogans about the murder of Jews, invariably chanted on these post-October 7 marches — only hours after Jews in their own town were murderously attacked.

“We’re protesting against Israel, not British Jews!” activists bleat. Yeah, we know, guys — maybe next time argue the difference with all the Jihad al-Shamies out there instead of us. But imagine if a British mosque were attacked on Ramadan, British Muslims murdered. And imagine if a planned anti-immigration protest still went ahead that night, decking the town in Union Jacks and (gasp) St George’s flags. That would seem pretty callous, wouldn’t it? Cruel, even? Well, that’s how this feels.

The British community is tiny but strong, and we can withstand the lone crazies. But mobs so obsessed with a foreign country that they no longer see the pain of their neighbours? That’s a problem.

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By: Euan McColm

Published: Oct 5, 2025

British Jews, many descended from those who fled the Nazis to seek refuge on these shores, no longer feel safe in their home country

They were billed as humanitarian protests but they looked and sounded a lot more like victory parades.

Just hours after an Islamist terror attack on a Synagogue in Manchester left two people dead, thousands of people swarmed railway stations across the UK, clashing with police and demanding the eradication of Israel.

On Thursday, as Jews marked Yom Kippur, the holiest day in their calendar, cosplaying revolutionaries and good old-fashioned anti-Semites showed just why so many now feel unsafe in the United Kingdom.

Some chanted that it was time to “globalise the intifada”, a sentiment shared by Jihad Al-Shamie, a 35-year-old British citizen of Syrian descent who, earlier in the day, drove his car into members of the public outside Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation synagogue before leaping from the vehicle and stabbing bystanders. Melvin Cravitz, 66, and 53-year-old Adrian Daulby were killed in the attack while three more victims remain in hospital.

It later emerged that Daulby was hit by police gunfire as officers brought down Al-Shamie, who had been on bail after being arrested on suspicion of rape. Worshipper Yoni Finlay was also shot by police, leaving him with serious injuries.

Of course, the political reaction to Thursday’s attack was swift. Words of sympathy and condemnation flowed. But many Jews were, perfectly understandably, unmoved. Where have the calls for calm been over the past two years as anti-Semites have swarmed major British cities on a weekly basis, calling for the deaths of Jews and the removal of their homeland from the map?

Almost two years after Hamas terrorists crossed from Gaza into Israel, raping and murdering men, women and children and seizing hostages, antisemitism is on the rise. Police have turned blind eyes during a series of protests where Jew-hatred has been celebrated.

We’ve heard the chants – whether on-stage at the Glastonbury festival or on the streets of major cities – calling for the death of Israeli soldiers and we’ve seen the banners demanding the execution of “Zionists”.

One might have thought – or, at least, hoped – that the shocking nature of the attack in Manchester would have caused anti-Israel protesters in the UK to pause for thought. Instead, it emboldened them. While Jewish schools and synagogues increased their security arrangements, self-styled “progressives” screamed for the killing of members of the IDF and the destruction of Israel. When challenged, these protesters will tell you they condemn antisemitism – and “all racism” – but that is a lie.

Imagine for a moment that, on Thursday, a Jew had driven a car into worshippers outside a Mosque. If, hours later, thousands took to the streets waving Israeli flags and calling for the deaths of Muslims, the cells of every city’s police stations would, quite rightly, have been overflowing. But anti-Semitism – racism for the dinner party circuit – gets a by because the anti-Semite claims to be an “anti-Zionist”.

As videos shared across social media show, Police were, on Thursday, in no mood to act. Vicious Jew-hatred was indulged, yet again.

In a statement issued on Friday, Al-Shamie’s family said they fully distanced themselves from the attack.

“Our hearts and thoughts,” they said, “are with the victims and their families and we pray for their strength and comfort.”

Later it emerged, the murderer’s surgeon father, Faraj Al-Shamie, had said Hamas’s attacks on Israel on October 7 were carried out by “men of God on Earth” in posts on social media.

Some statements of sympathy are worth more than others.

On Thursday afternoon, Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy visited Manchester where he was heckled by Jewish families.

Their anger was justified. The recent decision by the UK Government to recognise the state of Palestine was a huge victory for anti-Semites. This was a concession to Hamas terrorists, defended by politicians of the left as a move that would improve the chances of peace in the Middle East, but, in reality, it has given the murderous actions of Islamist terrorists legitimacy. Simply rape and murder hundreds of innocent people and you, too, can get a seat at the table.

The anti-Semite says that criticism of the Israeli government is not the same as criticism of Jews and this, of course, is true. But we have not, over the past two years, heard mere criticism of the Jewish state. We have heard relentless calls for its destruction.

Pro-Palestine activists, who make the simple complex and the complex simple, have minimised – even denied – the October 7 atrocities, framing Israeli defence and retaliation as unprovoked aggression. And they were at it again, yesterday afternoon, gathering in Trafalgar Square to show their loathing of the world’s only Jewish state.

After the unpleasant displays of Thursday evening, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood spoke of her disappointment.

“I do think,” she told the BBC, "that carrying on in this way does feel un-British, it feels wrong.”

Later, the Prime Minister said protests planned for yesterday afternoon would cause “distress” to British Jews. But British Jews are no better than any other kind of Jew to those who turned up on Trafalgar Square yesterday afternoon.

The freedom to protest is a priceless one and those who gathered peacefully – if cruelly – yesterday afternoon were perfectly entitled to do so. They had the right.

They also have the right – perhaps even the duty – to pause and think about what they achieved beyond terrifying an already vulnerable and scared community.

Many British Jews, a lot of whom are descended from men and women who fled the Nazis and sought refuge on these shores, no longer feel safe in their home country. Nothing that may be taking place in the Middle East can justify that.

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Four people are being treated for injuries after a serious incident outside a synagogue in Crumpsall, Manchester, on Thursday morning. Emergency services were called to Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation Synagogue, on Middleton Road, at 9.31am, following reports that a car had been driven towards members of the public and that a man had been stabbed. Greater Manchester Police (GMP) said firearms…