by Patrick West, spiked
After Golders Green, we must refuse to ignore the ideology that’s terrorising British Jews.
There was something palpably different about the reaction to the latest atrocity to befall Britain – yet another attack on Jewish people and another act of terror. The alleged knifing of two men by a Somali-born British national in the north London suburb of Golders Green didn’t generate the usual roll-call of pieties, but a combination of rage and exhaustion instead. A feeling that enough was enough. It was as if a tipping point had been reached.
This sentiment was made evident to viewers of GB News that Wednesday afternoon, many of whom will have seen presenter Martin Daubney struggle to compose himself, welling up conspicuously with sorrow and anger. It showed itself on the front page of the next day’s Jewish News, which bore the headline: ‘Bull$#@# bingo. Jews bleed. Cue the clichés.’ Underneath ran examples of those banalities that have become so familiar over the past 25 years of terror: ‘We must choose unity at times like this’; ‘Our thoughts and prayers are with you’. It showed itself in a speech by comedian and presenter Josh Howie in central London last Friday, which concluded: ‘I don’t want to call out Islam because I don’t want to be murdered. I’m scared… but if we don’t call it out, we’re going to be fucking murdered anyway!’
Those words captured the seething fury many have incubated in the past quarter of a century – fury at the repeated failure by too many in the establishment to speak honestly about the threat posed by certain adherents to Islam. They have been ostensibly scared to do so because they live in fear of the faith’s most extreme followers, who love death more than we love life. That much was made clear in America on 9/11 and, not long after, in the UK on 7/7. Yet many have been afraid to speak out for a far less admirable reason: the fear of being labelled a racist, and the fear of losing face as a consequence.