The video below is my immediate response to the Yom Kippur Manchester synagogue terrorist attack. Click on the arrow below to view it, and a transcript follows underneath.
A short time ago, I emerged from a day spent in synagogue in Jerusalem, where I was observing the 25-hour fast of Yom Kippur, to learn of the murderous attack on the Manchester synagogue where hundreds of Jews were similarly praying on the holiest day of the year. Two were killed and four were left seriously injured.
Immediately, there were expressions of shock and sympathy from Labour politicians. I’m afraid to say these have curdled the stomach.
After all, what on earth did they expect? British Jews have been warning about the lethal incitement against them for a long time, but have been totally ignored.
Keir Starmer says now he will do everything possible to keep British Jews safe. The fact is he has done nothing to keep British Jews safe. He said hatred against Jews is rising once again and Britain must defeat it once again. But his government and his party have been fuelling it.
Jews in Britain have been unsafe for years. All synagogues and communal events have long been guarded. Some Jewish schools have been forced to erect barbed wire. But for the past two years since the October 7 massacre in Israel and during the war that has followed in Gaza, Starmer’s government has allowed gross incitement against Jews to run riot unchecked.
The all-too regular demonstrations against Israel, organised by Hamas and the far left and supported by many of his MPs, have heard a constant chanting not only to destroy Israel but also to kill Jews. And yet the police have done absolutely nothing to arrest these people, to charge them, even though these are examples of clear criminality.
Instead, we’ve heard bleatings about protecting freedom of speech. Well, freedom of speech is great, but it’s different from incitement and intimidation which has been going on on these demonstrations. One demonstrator was captured on video saying “All Zionists must die”. Does Britain really think that statement is to be applauded as freedom of speech and protected?
The fact is that most British Jews are Zionists. And when these demonstrators chant “Globalise the Intifada”, what does the Starmer government think that meant? It meant precisely, I’m afraid to say, what has now happened in Manchester in that attack. That’s what they meant. “Globalise the intifada” means killing Jews across the world.
Now, for the past two years it’s been open season on Jews in Britain. An already very dangerous and unpleasant atmosphere has been whipped up into rampant Jew hatred and an absolutely toxic atmosphere.
Orthodox Jews have been regularly attacked. Students on campus have been forced to conceal their meetings. They go to some lengths to conceal the venues and the timings of their meetings because they are so frightened of being attacked. And yet the university authorities by and large have done absolutely nothing to stop this intimidation.
Can you imagine in Britain today — under a Labour government, which is supposedly in favour of anti-discrimination, anti-racism and peace on earth and the brotherhood of man and all that kind of stuff — in Britain today, Jewish students are so frightened they have to conceal their activities?
We see supermarkets running boycotts of Israeli goods and there’s absolutely no pushback against this from the government, which is pretty amazing because these boycotts are clearly unlawful discrimination. And didn’t we think perhaps that the Labour government was against discrimination? Not when it comes to Israel.
We have a situation now in Britain where Jews are concealing signs that they are Jews. For the past couple of years, there have been discussions in the Jewish community whether they should tell their kids to remove their blazers on public transport if they go to Jewish schools to conceal the fact they go to Jewish schools; whether to remove from their front doors the mezuzah which is the scroll that announces that this is a Jewish house; and there have been discussions about whether British Jews should conclude that there is no future for them in Britain as Jews and whether they should now pack up and leave.
This is an appalling situation, but all this has been ignored by the establishment.
Now, let’s be clear. What is being ignored is not just hostility to Israel. It’s not just a particularly toxic point of view. It’s something much deeper and much worse than that.
From the people who we saw tearing down the posters of Israeli babies and children and women taken hostage in Gaza, from that to the early reports about the Manchester attack on the BBC and Sky, which speculated that the perpetrator might have been “far-right” or might have had “mental health issues”, there has been no limit clearly to the attempt to show that Jews are never ever victims but always the aggressors.
This is ludicrous. Jews are the most persecuted people on earth. Antisemitism has been a thing in Britain and Western societies for hundreds of years and it is still very much there. We see reports by the Jewish community about record levels of antisemitic attacks and yet it’s being denied that they can be victims. Now, why? What could be the reason other than simple rank prejudice against Jews?
I mean, this situation just isn’t normal. This hysteria which has infected so many people who are apparently quite normal, decent people. This hysteria about Israel based on absolute lies and incitement isn’t normal. It’s a sick pathology to which Starmer and his Labour government have been totally silent.
At no point has Starmer done what any responsible and civilised leader should have done, which is to have said that this hysteria is based on lies and rubbish and error and prejudice and antisemitism. Why hasn’t he said that?
A number of reasons, but one of them is that he can’t say it because so many of his own members of parliament are stoking this very hysteria and stoking the Jew hatred that has followed.
Starmer has done absolutely nothing to stop the grotesque and patently ludicrous genocide smear. He’s never said this is absurd. He’s never said this is a malevolent lie invented by people who want Israel gone.
Instead, his government has repeatedly recycled Hamas propaganda lies about Israel: deliberately stopping food supplies into Gaza, being about to cause starvation and famine, killing too many people. This is all lies.
When Starmer recognised what he calls the “state of Palestine”, he said “tens of thousands have been killed in Gaza, including thousands as they tried to collect food and water. What he didn’t say was that most of those tens of thousands who’d been killed in Gaza have been Hamas men, Hamas terrorists; and he didn’t say that most of the thousands that he says were killed trying to collect food and water were murdered by Hamas, which has gone to enormous lengths to prevent Gazans from obtaining the aid supplies which they once controlled and which was the source of their power.
Now, this is a lie that Starmer has been telling, and it’s a lie which does more than make people dislike Israel. We have to understand what’s going on here. Let’s be very, very clear what this is, because in addition to these lies that he has been putting out, his government has viciously singled out Israel for treatment afforded to no other country.
For example, he has said he will arrest or government will arrest Israeli leaders, Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, the defence minister, if they were to set foot in Britain in accordance with the arrest warrant produced by the International Criminal Court.
Now, this intention to arrest Israeli leaders has painted Israel as worse than the tyrannies in the world where, you know, women are stoned and gays are hanged and thousands are murdered.
So we have to be very clear what we’re seeing here. This is not simply hostility to Israel. This is painting Israelis as evil, as diabolical. These are accusations which say that Israelis are deliberately starving civilians, wantonly killing babies, they’re being called Nazis.
Well, if people are evil Nazis, they are enemies of humanity. And what do you do with enemies of humanity? You justify killing them in a war. And that’s what’s being said about Israelis. And if it follows that Israelis are evil Nazis, any British Jews who support Israel are also evil Nazis. And they’re also then justifiably to be removed from the earth.
In other words, what Starmer has done, among many others who have participated in this terrible incitement against Israel and the Jews, is to paint an enormous target on the back of every British Jew.
The attack on Jews at prayer on their most solemn and holiest day has demonstrated beyond doubt that the claim made by the “Gaza First” crowd that they are against Israel and Zionism, but of course they’re not against Jews, that is a lie.
As I’ve said, most British Jews consider themselves to be Zionists, but the point is this. Zionism is nothing other than the Jews’ entitlement to live in their own ancestral homeland. This is actually integral to Judaism itself. So to attack Zionism, is to attack Judaism.
Now we now know that the attacker was called Jihad al-Shamie, a British citizen of Syrian descent. But even before we knew what his name and ancestry were, it was pretty obvious that this was most likely to be an Islamist terror attack. It was a car ramming attack, it involved a knife, it was directed at Jews at prayer on their holiest day. These are the characteristics of the murderous attacks on Jews in Israel and indeed across the world.
Yet amazingly, no one in Britain is allowed to speak of the rampant Jew hatred in the Muslim community in Britain and around the world without being smeared as a bigot. In Britain, there’s this appalling situation in which preachers in mosques are spewing Jew-hatred and incitement against Jews and Christians without any pushback by the craven Charity Commission, by the police or by Starmer’s government.
And no one speaks about the fact that the Palestinian cause itself is driven by genocidal hatred of Jews — not just of Israel, Jews. Palestinian Arabs teach their children to hate and murder Jews because they are Jews. They describe Jews in the images and tropes of classic Nazi antisemitism, classic medieval Christian exterminatory antisemitism. They want to destroy Jews because they are Jews.
And the Palestinian cause itself was invented solely to destroy Israel, but also to steal the Jews’ own history and entitlement to their own land. The Palestine flag, waved by so many people in Britain, is a terrorist flag. It was the flag of the Palestine Liberation Organisation terrorist movement, which conducted terror attacks on many, many occasions. And that flag of the PLO terrorist movement has now been repackaged as the flag of Palestine and adopted by the Palestinian Authority, which repackaged the PLO.
So anyone waving the Palestine flag or wearing it as a lapel pin is announcing in effect their support for a genocidal project to destroy Israel and murder Jews. And yet that terrorist flag is everywhere, and Jewish patients in Britain are having to confront it on the uniforms of NHS staff.
So to all this, Starmer’s response is not just inadequate. We are living through an attempt to destroy Israel and to drive the Jewish people from the world.
Starmer, his government and his Labour Party are part of this monstrous exercise. So are the media, led by the BBC, Sky and the Guardian, the universities and the schools, the Church of England, the arts, the cultural establishment — the whole of Britain’s elites are part of this.
The Syrian-heritage antisemite who attacked the Manchester synagogue is the person who’s responsible for the carnage he wrought there. But Britain’s political and cultural leaders have this blood on their hands too.