Badenoch links pro-Palestine demos to synagogue attack in defiant Tory Conference speech
Conservative leader tells delegates extremism on the UK's streets had gone 'unchecked'
Kemi Badenoch has used her leader’s speech at the Tory Party conference to draw a direct link between pro-Palestine protests on Britain’s streets and the Manchester synagogue terror attack.
Speaking on Sunday at the start of the party’s conference in Manchester, she said extremism on the UK’s streets had gone “unchecked” and the pro-Palestine demos are in fact “carnivals of hatred directed at the Jewish homeland”.
Badenoch said she had visited members of the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation shul and told delegates at the conference the “strength of Manchester’s Jewish community is humbling.”
She also noted how, since the first Jewish community was established in Manchester in the 1780s, Jews have been “part of the fabric” of the city.
“The horrific and despicable attack at Heaton Park Synagogue on Thursday has shocked us all,” Badenoch told the conference.
“But for many in the Jewish community, it did not come as a surprise. Many have been living with a sense of rising dread that an attack like this was becoming inevitable.”
She then added, “Extremism has gone unchecked. We see it manifest in the shameful behaviour on the streets of our cities.
“Protests which are in fact carnivals of hatred directed at the Jewish homeland. You hear it in the asinine slogans.
“You hear it in ‘From the river to the sea’ – as if the homes, the lives, of millions of Jewish people should be erased.
“You hear it in ‘Globalise the intifada’ – which means nothing at all, if it doesn’t mean targeting Jewish people for violence. We have tolerated this in our country for too long.
“And we have tolerated the radical Islamist ideology that seeks to threaten not only Jews, but all of us, of all faiths and none, who want to live in peace.”
Badenoch said the message from her party, and ” from every decent and right-thinking person in this country must be that we will not stand for it anymore.”
She said:”We cannot import and tolerate values hostile to our own. We must now draw a line and say that in Britain, you can think what you like, and within the bounds of the law, you can say what you like, but you have no right to turn our streets into theatres of intimidation. And we will not let you do so anymore.”
Naming the two victims of the Yom Kippur attack – Adrian Daulby and Melvin Cravitz – she said the Tory Party stood “shoulder to shoulder” with the Jewish community.
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