OPINION — In 2017 an Islamic suicide bomber detonated at a pop concert in Manchester, killing 22 people and injuring over a thousand others.
Now another terrorist has struck the same city, this time targeting a synagogue on the most solemn of Jewish holy days, Yom Kippur. Two people have been murdered and others are reported to be seriously injured. Police responded quickly to the incident. They killed the terrorist, who seemed to be wearing a suicide belt, within ten minutes of the incident starting.
Political leaders of all parties have denounced the terrorist act. Prime Minister Keir Starmer cut short a visit to Copenhagen so that he could get back to Britain and chair a meeting of the cross-government emergency committee, COBRA, earlier this afternoon.
Intensive police investigations have been launched. Who committed the attack? Jews have learned to fear attacks from all corners, extreme left, extreme right, extreme Islam. Manchester police said they believe the attacker is a British citizen of Syrian descent. Was anyone else involved? We gather that three arrests have been made, but how they were connected with the attack, whether there was a plot, training, funding, we do not know. It is important not to jump to conclusions before more is known. My hunch, for what it’s worth, is that the attack was not well planned or coordinated and the terrorist could have been acting alone. But we’ll see.
Disturbing questions are already being asked, however, including about British counter-terrorism policy. A central part of that policy has been counter-radicalisation, trying to offer an alternative to the “single narrative” of Muslim oppression, which underpinned Islamic extremism in the early days of Al Qaida and ISIS, and to conspiracy theories of extreme right and left. But has counter-radicalisation been successful? Some surveys of Islamic attitudes to Jews here have produced disturbing results. The British Jewish community, as elsewhere in Western Europe and North Americahas seen an upsurge of violence since 7 October 2023 – not all of it Islamic: online attacks, excrement smeared on synagogues, physical attacks on Jewish people and buildings. Most Jews feel less confident here than they felt two years ago, less happy to be identifiably Jewish in public.
Prime Minister Starmer has promised more police protection for the Jewish community. “We will do everything to keep our Jewish community safe”, he said today. Fine except that anti-semites here – Islamic, far right, far left – know that that is unsustainable. Jews do not want to worship or go to school behind barbed wire with armed police round the corner. Chillingly, two non-political Jewish entertainers were prevented from appearing at the Edinburgh festival this summer because of “concerns over staff safety”. While some protective measures are appreciated, they represent a dead end for the Jewish community. Who wants this sort of life?
The only long-term hope is that attitudes towards Judaism will change. 2000 years of anti-semitism are not going to be eradicated by a government initiative. But a bolder and sustained push against anti-semitism should be seen not as a luxury. It is needed as integral to a successful, holistic counter-terrorism strategy. Terrorism cannot be defeated as long as the ideologies behind it are unchallenged.
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