#manchester synagogue attack

The charging of 31-year-old Mohammad Bashir in connection with terrorism-related activities linked to Manchester synagogue attacker Jihad Al-Shamie has added a new dimension to an already devastating case that left two worshippers dead and a community shaken. Prosecutors say Bashir played a role in earlier reconnaissance efforts involving a UK defence facility and also shared extremist material…

Iranian here. Here's a pro tip for everyone who’s not from the Middle East.

If you're going to let people named Jihad into your countries, you're probably going to have a bad time.

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: 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: 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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