OPINION: The hatred of the Manchester attacker didn’t start with murder
Successive governments - as well sectors including the arts, our health service, and academia - have looked the other way, allowing hate to flourish
I’ve been writing about the threat of Islamist extremism since the days when Abu Hamza was allowed to preach his brand of unfiltered hate outside Finsbury Park mosque every Friday. These were days when one could wander into a book shop in central London and purchase a tome overflowing with naked hate for our community. As Jewish News did two decades ago in an investigation that helped secure the imprisonment of one hate preacher.
More recently, the assault rifle-emblazoned flag of Hezbollah, a terrorist group responsible for the murder of Jews globally, was allowed to fly with impunity for years as Jewish leaders pleaded with successive administrations to ban the group’s ‘political wing’. Even as its own leadership denied a distinction between the military and political wings, it wasn’t until 2019 that Hezbollah was fully outlawed in Britain.
There’s no doubt that the law has progressed to some extent to recognise the growing threat posed by radicals, sometimes at a greater pace than in America, where anti-Israel activists can still brandish the flags of Hamas and Hezbollah without the threat of jail time.
But that is no comfort whatsoever when other expressions of support for terror have been allowed to become normal, and antisemitism has too often been met by, at best, a shrug in the arts, health services and academia. Just as when we look back on the early 2000s with shock that such rhetoric was tolerated, scenes that have become part of everyday life in Britain over the last two years must be consigned to the dustbin of history. Only this time with far more urgency and without the community having to fight tooth and nail for every scintilla of progress. It’s not a matter of party politics, but simply a statement of fact to say that successive governments have failed to meet the scale of the challenge.
The first antisemitic murders of Jews in the UK for many years in Manchester – and the distinctly unsurprising news that Jihad al-Shamie was influenced by Islamist ideology – didn’t happen because he woke up to the news of the UK’s recognition of Palestine. But the horrors visited on Heaton Park Synagogue, and the wider rise in hatred against Jews, didn’t happen in a vacuum either.
We may never know to what extent al-Shamie was influenced by the hate preacher Sheikh Mishary Alafasi, who previously claimed Jewish law permits the rape of non-Jewish kids and whose social media account was one of a few followed by the terrorist. But we do know that the Manchester Jewish Representative Council’s warnings of the dangers of the city’s Bridgewater Hall hosting the cleric earlier this year fell on deaf ears.
Then there’s the poisonous events allowed to play out on campuses. When student events are held on the anniversary of 7 October and refer to ‘resistance’, as at least half a dozen did this week, the invite may as well say ‘join us to mark the murder of 1200 Israeli Jews’. It’s about as subtle as the call to ‘globalise the intifada’, which we heard screamed with impunity again this week and each of the 104 weeks before it. One shouldn’t need a degree from one of these universities to realise where such open hate could lead.
In the world of ‘entertainment’, we watched with horror (on our national broadcaster) the expletive-ridden rant by Bob Vylan about his ‘Zionist’ former manager and the notorious chants of ‘death to the IDF’. The BBC failed to pull the plug on an episode it has since acknowledged was antisemitic, yet no heads have rolled at the broadcaster and law enforcement haven’t brought any charges against the punk duo. Again, a message of impunity went out loud and clear. At the time of writing, in fact, Bob Vylan is still due to perform in Manchester next month.
It feels like no area of our lives have escaped infection including, perhaps most disturbingly, medicine. Encapsulating the lack of action against hate is the case of Dr Rahmeh Aladwan, who revels in posting diatribes abut “Jewish supremacy” and has labelled north London’s Royal Free Hospital as a “Jewish supremacy cesspit”. Yet, the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service ruled recently that she was free to continue practising. Was anyone surprised when, on 7 October, Aladwan tweeted ‘Glory to the Palestinian resistance. Glory to our martyrs’, alongside an image of Hamas terrorists entering Israel that horrific day?
If so, you’ve not been paying attention. As the academic Daniel Allington wrote in Jewish News this week: “My analysis shows that British Muslims with strongly antisemitic views were many times more likely to support Islamic State than their more tolerant co-religionists. The remedy is clear. Support for Hamas and other Muslim Brotherhood organisations is illegal throughout much of the Muslim world, and those who indulge in it should have no place in the UK either. Extremists and their fellow travellers should no longer be allowed to monopolise public spaces with their campaigns of disinformation and incitement. Hate preachers should no longer be given free reign to spread prejudice and discord.”
The hatred burning within the Manchester attacker didn’t start with murder, but that’s where it ended. As the reality of the antisemitic murders in this country sunk in this week, details emerged in a Manchester courtroom of an alleged 2024 plot to “kill as many Jews as possible”. Now the many British Jews like me who’ve no intention of vacating this country need those in power – including politicians and moderate Muslim leaders who’ve spoken out with clarity this week – to insist on nothing short of zero tolerance to hate.
With hopes raised for the end of the Israel-Hamas war, there should be no doubt that we are on the frontline of a battle at home. Only this one is certain to take longer than two years.
It’s a fight in which half measures won’t be enough. Not if this country is serious about holding on to a community that has given it so much.
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