#manchester synagogue attack

I can only hope for the recovery of those in hospital following the attack, and for the support of the families and friends of Adrian Daulby and Melvin Cravitz (may their memories be a blessing) to find peace someday after facing such tragic losses.

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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What I felt when I saw the news was relief. Relief that I absolutely did not expect and it took me some time to realize why. I expected worse. I truly thought there would be multiple synagogues attacked, many more people killed. Yom Kippur is the holiest day of our year and antisemites have used that against us. They see Yom Kippur as the day when we are at our weakest.

Baruch atah, Adonai, m'kor hachayim.

I spent all day at Synagogue. I sing in the choir and I was performing at services for most of the day. When I got home I finally checked my phone, and what I felt was relief. Thank you God. It was only two.

Baruch atah, Adonai, m'kor hachayim.

The death of two of my people should not be a source of relief. We have been saying for years that the Jews are tired, and now I am exhausted. We have been screaming into a void for almost two years now, and no one has cared to listen. Now they will all perform some kind of sympathy before going right back to ignoring our screams. And we will make space in our hearts for two more.

Baruch atah, Adonai, m'kor hachayim.

I am exhausted, I am angry, I am sorrowful, I am relieved.

Baruch atah, Adonai, m'kor hachayim.

I have said these words a lot today. Now I say them with relief. Thank you God. It was only two.