by Bari Weiss, The Free Press
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Brendan O’Neill, and others on the Yom Kippur attack.
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.
See also: The Intifada comes to Manchester: spiked podcast with Sun editor Harry Cole, Fraser Myers and Tom Slater.