Yesterday in Manchester, England, a man named Jihad al-Shamie took a knife and a car and on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, attacked people outside Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation synagogue. Two were killed. Another three were hospitalized.
I wish I could say I was shocked after hearing the news.
Sorrow, yes. Anger, yes. But shock? To be shocked by this development would have required ignoring the news for the past 727 days. And for the years before October 7, 2023, in which open demonization of Jews was waved off as “criticism of Israel”; in which antisemitism was mainstreamed, tolerated, and systematically ignored.
What happened in Manchester was not a matter of if, but of when. As the British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore writes today in our pages:
This was the inevitable result of two wild years of anti-Jewish racism and radicalism, dehumanizing anti-Jewish slogans and images, blood libels, support for terror, calls to “globalize the intifada” and “decolonize Israel now,” unleashed on the streets and in the media.
These were barely policed by policemen who stood by; nor by politicians who swung between crowd-pleasing Manichaean hyperbole and sensible, balanced reassurance; nor by the television anchors who disgraced the noble vocation of journalism with irresponsible exaggerations and mistakes that were never corrected; nor by the National Health Service doctors openly keening to kill Jews who are still working in hospitals, despite condemnations from Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Wes Streeting.
As for the killer himself, this is what his father posted on October 7:
UK police today announced that al-Shamie was on bail for an alleged rape when he carried out the attack. This is a country where a woman was just arrested for standing outside a hospital with a sign, and another woman did jail time for posting angrily on social media in the wake of a triple child murder.
So today we want to explain how we arrived here and where Britain might go next.
We begin with an eyewitness account of the atrocity, courtesy of a team of reporters at The Mill, a start-up local newspaper in Manchester. They describe the awful events that made this Yom Kippur “the darkest of days” for the city’s 300-year-old Jewish community. Read their report here.
This attack did not happen in a vacuum. It happened, writes Ayaan Hirsi Ali, because Britain has been subverted. By that she means that the country has been transformed from within. “To look at Britain today is to see subversion in action,” she writes. “The lesson of Manchester is stark. When we appease, the subversion grows. And with it comes terror.” Why has Britain allowed this to happen? And what can be done to fix it? Read her essay to find out.
Next, Simon Sebag Montefiore says that the intifada has come to the UK. And the scale of the problem was made clear not just by the terror attack yesterday morning, but also by what he calls the “bloodthirsty fiestas” that followed in the streets of London and Manchester. Britain, he writes, “tossed helplessly on a storm partly of its own making.” Can its leaders steady the ship?
Ben Freeman, who has always been proud to be British, is not waiting to find out. “This was my home,” he writes. “Today, I am preparing to leave it.” He explains that he does not “want to live in a country where being Jewish means living behind security fences and hiding who we are. I no longer want to fight for the right to belong. I want to live in a place that fights to keep us, to show us that we matter.” Read his personal essay here:
The Yom Kippur attack was a sign of a deeper sickness, wrote Brendan O’Neill in the hours after the attack: “The ugly rebirth of antisemitism is always a sign that a society has veered off the path of enlightenment and taken a very dark turn indeed.” The Manchester terror attack is a “warning to Britain, and to humanity,” argued Brendan. A day later, that sounds exactly right.
