When are we going to take radical Islam seriously?

So, Britain is now exporting anti-Semitism. Not content with harassing and abusing the Jewish community here in the UK, our racists are now taking their Jew-hatred overseas. It transpires that the man who held Jews hostage for 11 hours in the Congregation Beth Israel synagogue in Colleyville, Texas was a British national of Pakistani heritage named Malik Faisal Akram. He was from Blackburn. Two teenagers have now been arrested in Manchester in connection with this racist act of terror. Trekking from Blackburn to Texas to terrorise Jews – that’s some serious commitment to racial hatred right there.

Are we now going to have a serious discussion about the problem of Islamist radicalism in the UK? About the interlocking scourges of the Islamist ideology and hatred for Jews, both of which seem worryingly prevalent in 21st-century Britain? We must. When one of our citizens crosses an ocean, buys guns and subjects four attendees of a Shabbat service, including the rabbi, to a chilling 11-hour act of false imprisonment and violent menace, we surely know there’s a problem. Mercifully, none of the hostages were killed. Akram was, though: shot dead by cops. And yet the thankful lack of innocent fatalities should not distract us from the fact that, as President Biden has now confirmed, this was an act of terrorism and one clearly motivated both by racial animus towards Jewish people and Islamist beliefs (Akram called for the release of Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani national with links to al-Qaeda who is currently serving an 86-year prison term in the US).

This is not that the first time the Islamist ideology that has taken hold among sections of the population in the UK has been exported overseas to wreak terror and horror on innocent foreigners.

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Read also: Europe is blind to the next jihadi threat by Liam Duffy, UnHerd

Anti-Semitism is rife in the British-Pakistani community by Jake Wallis Simons, UnHerd