Again: who counts?
Last week three men were stabbed in London by the same individual, a man born in Somalia though now a British citizen who had previously been imprisoned for stabbing a police officer and his dog and had recently been released from a south London psychiatric unit. The first man stabbed was attacked at Great Dover Street on the south-eastern edge of central London and was also of Somali origin. The other two were Jewish men, attacked at Golders Green, an area of north London which is actually mixed but is also a centre of the Jewish community. After this, he was arrested by a group of officers who used a Taser and kicked him repeatedly in the head. The second two stabbings were proclaimed a terrorist incident by the Metropolitan Police; the terrorism threat level was raised from substantial to severe, the second highest of five levels (low, moderate, substantial, severe and critical; since 2006 it has never been lower than substantial). The incident prompted a lecture from the Prime Minister and much hand-wringing in the mainstream print and broadcast media: calls to “stand with the Jewish community”, people claiming antisemitism was now a matter of national security, and that the marches against the Gaza genocide which have been taking place every two or three weeks in central London since the start of the Gaza genocide should be curtailed, or that what the protesters are allowed to say be policed a lot more because it “makes Jews feel intimidated” and contributes to antisemitism. Meanwhile, Twitter (now X) saw tweets from broadcasters such as Sky News referring to the incident as a double stabbing when in fact the man had been charged with three counts of attempted murder.
Melanie Phillips posted a tweet moaning that “the really terrible thing is that the lies told about Israel day in, day out have poisoned British discourse so badly that people don’t want to hear about the Holocaust or Jewish suffering ever again”. That tweet embedded a video in which Rabbi Doron Birnbaum said he had received the news of the stabbings while accompanying a group from a London Jewish school to Poland, suggesting that one day someone might lead Jewish schoolchildren around London as he had just done in Krakow, pointing to inscriptions on walls and saying “a Jew lived here”. The real reason people are weary of protestations of Jewish victimhood is that we have had a bellyful of it since 2015: one spurious or exaggerated claim of ‘antisemitism’ after another, many of them from people with columns in national newspapers or seats in Parliament. After a two-and-a-half year genocide, amply documented by the victims and in some cases the perpetrators in both mainstream and social media, the idea that a few stabbings and arson attacks in London are the first killings of a new Holocaust or a harbinger of pogroms looks fanciful. Phillips’s tweets was shared by “La Scapigliata” (Maja Bowen), a Serbian bigot most notorious for her doctrinaire stance on transgender issues and waving her medical degree to prove that her stance must be right, who then complained about the “lies told about Serbia and Repblic Srpska (sic), day in, day out” etc. The people who inhabit Republika Srpska ran concentration camps for Bosnian Muslims in the early 90s, in some of which women and girls were gang-raped by men who had been their neighbours months earlier. They massacred the men and boys of Srebrenica after the town fell, an acknowledged act of genocide. Some of their atrocities, like the Sarajevo bread queue massacre, have been echoed (or copied) in acts by the Israelis during the genocide in Gaza. Anyone over 40 remembers this; nobody except the very old remembers anything that happened during World War II, which ended 81 years ago.
The word ‘terrorist’ is being widely misused, including officially, detached from what most people understand by it. Those of us who lived through any part of the Troubles in Northern Ireland know what terrorism looks like and what it involves: principally, bombs and bullets, used to stage mass-casualty events. The same effect can be achieved through vehicular impact and the sabotaging of equipment or computer networks (though these two activities are not always terrorism). One man with a knife, acting without instruction from anyone, cannot commit a terrorist attack. A political motive, or a presumed one, is not enough. The state, within hours of last Thursday’s stabbings, rushed to apply the label of ‘terrorism’ and raised the “terror alert level” before knowing anything about the perpetrator, including his history of mental illness and his criminal record, let alone another stabbing he carried out hours earlier, purely because the victims were Jewish, a measure not taken after attacks by white racists on members of other minorities. A racist attack is not a terrorist attack; a terrorist attack is a mass-casualty attack (or one intended as such) on members of the public. It does not cause mere disruption but loss of life or injury.
Twice since the last general election, we have seen mob attacks on Muslim and immigrant communities in this country. The first was because of a triple murder wrongly believed on the basis of rumour to have been a Pakistani; the second was because of a report of a rape that turned out to be false. There have been a Muslim woman deliberately hit by a car and two Sikh women, believed to be Muslims, raped. Social media has been full of the most insane slurs on Muslims and Islam that I have seen at any time, even exceeding the worst of the pro-war mid-2000s blogosphere, much of it being boosted by accounts belonging to certain feminists or serving or former police officers. By contrast, there has been no mob attack on Jews any time since the genocide began and nobody raped; campaigners for Palestinians’ rights are careful to mention Israel and Zionists or Zionism rather than Jews in general. The only violence anyone in the campaign defends is the sabotage of military hardware being manufactured here that is known will be used on civilians. Yet, the dominant pro-Israel voices in the mainstream media refer to our peaceful protests as “hate marches” and accuse us of fomenting antisemitism or even terrorism, while using words like ‘protesters’ in reference to the mobs which roam around looking for immigrants or their homes to attack (as I write, they are fomenting another ‘protest’ in Skegness).
Nobody needs to have gone on any protest to know what Israel has been doing. We do not know if the Golders Green knifeman or any of the people who have carried out the small numbers of attacks on Jews this year — their total number is considerably fewer than those who descended on Epsom to avenge a rape that never happened — attended a single protest. They just have to have seen any of the vast number of videos that come out of the West Bank, Gaza and now Lebanon. The fact that attacks on Jews and Jewish properties in London only started happening on a regular basis in March this year, just as Israel and the US attacked Iran, suggests that most of the recent spate is not the work of ordinary Muslims or Palestinian sympathisers outraged at Israel’s massacres but of Iranian-backed groups and that the Palestine solidarity campaign and its protests are innocent of any involvement or contribution. However, anyone who must ask why everyone is not “standing with the Jewish community” has to look at the attitude that community has displayed since the genocide began. True, ordinary British Jews are not the state of Israel but many of its official bodies act as de facto press offices for it.
A large contingent of the Jewish community, including a number of mainstream Jewish community groups, Synagogue chains and senior leaders, in the western world actively supports Israel. This does not just mean believing in principle that there should be a state of Israel, much as believing women should have the right to vote does not make you a feminist in 2026. It means amplifying its propaganda, repeating false claims about anything from the 1948 Nakba to the 2023 attacks on Israel and beyond, sowing and then reinforcing false doubts about Israeli abuses in both Gaza and the West Bank and blaming victims. It means organised letter writing to the media, complaining of ‘bias’ whenever a newspaper or broadcaster fails to echo Israel’s version of events. It means trying to drive Muslim professionals out of their jobs by complaints to regulators such as the GMC. It means making demands that reminders that Palestinians exist, such as children’s artwork, be removed because it “goes against neutrality” or “makes Jews feel unsafe” or some other concocted reason. It means making false complaints about ‘antisemitism’ while straining the definition of that through the needle’s eye; this includes any mention or acknowledgment the existence of Jewish or pro-Israeli lobbies, or Jewish influence on the mainstream media or political parties. It means demanding the censorship and silencing of opposition to Israel and its oppressions. It means crying antisemitism when Jews are linked to Israel while maintaining actual links, not only to Israel itself but its armed forces, settlers and extremist organisations.
If you are one of the people doing any of this, don’t blame those who marched peacefully against Israel’s depredations on the natives of Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon for the lack of sympathy from people other than your friends in high places when you play the victim. We have simply heard these protestations far too many times already.
