There has been yet another terrorist attack targeting Britain’s Jewish community. This time, two Jewish men were stabbed on Wednesday in Golders Green, London - a leading center of Jewish life and culture in the UK. The incident follows a series of recent attacks on Jewish targets, including assaults on Jewish ambulances in north London just weeks ago, and comes amid a broader surge in anti-Jewish violence across Australia, the United States, Europe, and beyond.
The reaction to this attack has been more marked than any previous antisemitic attack in the Uk that I can remember. It has dominated headlines here, in the mainstream media including the BBC. Prime Minister Starmer reacted with condemnation within minutes of the attack taking place. Politicians on all sides - almost all sides - have said that British Jews have to feel safe, have to have confident expectations of being able to live a normal life like other communities in the UK. More Jewish people have been interviewed by the media and the messages they have been giving out are consistent. They do not feel safe, they do not feel they are understood.
The man suspected of committing the two stabbings has been named as Esse Suleiman, a British national born in Somalia. Responsibility for the attack has been claimed by a terrorist organization with links to Iran.
I have written about this problem before, and I have two contentions that should make this relevant to all readers of the Cipher Brief. The first, as I have said before, is that antisemitism has to be treated as a national security issue. The second and related is that antisemitism is not just a threat to the Jewish community but to democracy. You cannot have a democracy in which one group of the community is battered into silence, fear and flight.
The issue therefore matters to people everywhere who share the values of democracy and tolerance.
The clear goal of these attacks is to make Jewish people in England - perhaps less than 0.5% of our population - feel so unsafe that they leave the country. If they take the obvious route - to Israel - this will somehow only play to the conspiracy theories of Islamists and the extreme left. So where else do they go?
I do not think most British Jews will be going anywhere, but they need more than words from the political class, more than a few extra police officers, or cameras and fences around synagogues, Jewish schools and other buildings.
The need is for a government strategy that specifically counters antisemitism. It has not been enough for people to unite against racism because many people who claim to be, think they are, anti-racist still wittingly or unwittingly perpetrate antisemitism. So, antisemitism is a distinct problem, with distinct causes and needs distinct solutions. The idea that Jews are somehow not an ethnic minority but people at the top of the pile needs to be countered. The idea that there is an alternative to a homeland for Jews needs to be countered. Conspiracy theories that I do not need to retail, but which continue to flood across social media, have to be identified and refuted.
How? When we recognized we had a problem with violent Islamist extremism after the London bomb attacks in 2005 it was recognized that ideas behind the extremism needed to be challenged. Now the same is true of anti-Semitism. The police and intelligence agencies need more power to stop violent attacks, but the battle of minds has to be fought in the public sector - through how teachers understand their pupils and how they counter anti-Semitic ideas often innocently expressed. Community leaders of all faiths and none need to be educated in what antisemitism is, why they should counter it and how. Politicians need to understand the difference between legitimate criticism of the actions of Israel and statements that strike fear into the hearts of Jews.
We need a government led strategy that will expose, discredit and discard anti-Semitism. Only then will Britain’s Jews feel not only safe but free.
To repeat, this is a national security issue and should be treated as seriously as any other national security issue. Our own people should not be terrorized - by state or non-state groups, or by individuals.
This has to start now. It is getting very late.
