At 9:30 in the morning on Oct. 2 in Manchester, northern England, Jihad al Shamie got into his car, put on a fake explosive belt, drove around the corner, accelerated toward the doors of the Heaton Park synagogue, and hit at least one of the Jews who were on duty for Yom Kippur services. If he wore a seatbelt as well as a suicide belt, Shamie released it before he got out and started stabbing Jews with his knife. The Jews ran into the synagogue, barricading the door with their bodies as Shamie stabbed at them and tried to force his way in.
Armed police arrived after seven minutes. Two men, Melvin Cravitz, 66, and Adrian Daulby, 53, were killed, Daulby by a stray police bullet that went through the synagogue doors. Three more congregants were hospitalized with serious injuries: one hit by a car, one stabbed, and the other shot by the police.
The Heaton Park attack was the first killing of Jews for being Jewish in England since the massacres and expulsions of the Middle Ages. Yet everyone in authority knew what to do and what to say. The Labour prime minister, Keir Starmer, hurried back to London from a meeting in Denmark to chair an emergency counterterrorism meeting. The Labour mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, said the Metropolitan Police were “stepping up patrols in Jewish communities and synagogues across London.” The bomb disposal unit of Greater Manchester Police declared Shamie’s suicide belt to be “nonviable” and blew open his car.
No one was surprised. Islamist terrorism is now as much a part of British life as complaining about the weather. So is incitement and violence against Jews. The Heaton Park attack, Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis said, was “the day we hoped we would never see, but which deep down, we knew would come.” Since the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, pro-Palestinian “Saturday marches” have disrupted the life of every major city. An alliance of leftists and Muslims calls for jihad and accuses Israel of committing “genocide” in Gaza. Some of them openly praised Hamas, which is proscribed as a terrorist organization in Britain, and have carried signs equating Israel with Nazi Germany.
The British state has picked a side. Government and police have ignored pleas from Jewish leaders for more protection at Jewish sites and for prosecutions when Britain’s laws against racial and religious incitement are broken. Prominent politicians from the governing Labour Party have endorsed the marchers and frequently used their language. The media, especially the state-funded BBC, have amplified Hamas propaganda. The police have stood by as the law is broken but have frequently arrested counterprotesters. In April 2024, a Met officer was caught on camera telling Gideon Falter, the chief executive of the Campaign Against Antisemitism, that his presence across the street from a pro-Palestinian march was a “breach of the peace” because he was “quite openly Jewish.”
The marchers’ slogan is “globalize the intifada.” This exports the conflicts, revolutionary doctrines, and barbaric tactics of Arab and Islamist insurgency into the streets of the West’s liberal democracies. This is not just a threat to the lives of Jews. It is a direct challenge to the liberal democratic state and its laws. The Heaton Park attack may well mean the beginning of the end for Britain’s tiny Jewish minority. It also confirms that the immigration of millions of Muslims now presents the British majority with a fundamental challenge to their way of life — at a time when decades of failed policy have generated a crisis of legitimacy for the British state.
Labour pangs
On the evening of Oct. 2, Starmer issued a recorded message to Britain’s Jews. “I know how much fear you will be holding inside of you,” he said. “I promise you that I will do everything in my power to guarantee you the security that you deserve, starting with a more visible police presence, protecting your community.” Hatred of Jews, he said, is “rising once again, and Britain must defeat it once again.” He promised that “over the coming days, you will see the other Britain, the Britain of compassion, of decency, of love.”
Starmer blamed the Heaton Park atrocity on a “vile individual.” Though his government had immediately designated the attack as terrorist, and though images of a burly, bearded, and Arab-looking attacker with a knife and a suicide belt were all over the news, Starmer did not mention the words “Islam,” “Muslim,” or “Islamist.” Meanwhile, pro-Palestinian marchers celebrated in Manchester, chanted, “Long live the intifada,” fought the police outside in London, and closed down major railway stations.
On Oct. 3, the head of Greater Manchester Police’s counterterrorism unit said Shamie “does not appear to be known to Counter Terrorism Policing.” But on Oct. 6, one of Shamie’s neighbors told the Guardian newspaper that she had notified Greater Manchester Police “in the summer of 2020 or 2021” about what the Guardian called the “apparently fanatical interest in Islam shown by the killer and another family member in recent years,” and also Shamie’s efforts to radicalize children. Greater Manchester Police now admit they “have no records” of her report.
This is not the first time that Greater Manchester Police has mislaid vital documents in a case that touches upon crimes committed by British Muslims against non-Muslims. Their early inquiries into “grooming gang” activity (the grooming, rape, drugging, and trafficking of thousands of white English girls by gangs of mostly Muslim Pakistani origin) encountered similar bureaucratic obstacles. In 2021, senior detective Maggie Oliver resigned and went public with claims that senior police had ignored and covered up grooming gang activity in the name of “community relations.” Similar anxieties shaped Labour’s fumbled attempt to massage public perception in the aftermath of Shamie’s attack.
Shamie is reported to have called the British emergency number 999 and said, “I have killed two Jews in the name of the Islamic State.”
“The only person responsible for the attack is the attacker himself,” the new home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, said on Oct. 6 as counterterrorist police made six arrests among Shamie’s associates in Manchester. Anyone with a phone could see screenshots of social media in which Shamie’s father celebrated the Oct. 7 attackers as “Allah’s men on earth.” While Mahmood claimed the attack had nothing to do with the Middle East, one of the men who had barred the synagogue doors had told ITV News that Shamie had shouted, “This is what they get for killing our children.”
It took Mahmood three days to admit what everyone already knew. Even then, she struggled to speak. Asked by a BBC interviewer on Oct. 6 about the Manchester police’s assessment that Shamie was motivated by “extreme Islamist ideology,” Mahmood stuttered, “The police very quickly did declare this to be, er, a terrorist, er, incident and it is our, er, view at the moment that that is, er, extremist, er, ideology that he is, um, he was an Islamist in that, in that sense.”
By then, Starmer and Mahmood were preoccupied with a closer threat — one that is already undermining Labour’s electoral base. The Left-Islamist coalition intended to march in London and elsewhere on Oct. 4. Mahmood claimed that she lacked the legal means to prevent it. This was simply not true. The Public Order Act of 1986 allows for banning marches intended to “intimidate others” or cause “serious disruption to the life of the community.” Home secretaries have used these powers many times. In 2011, for example, then-Home Secretary Theresa May banned the nationalists of the English Defense League from marching through Tower Hamlets, a majority-Muslim inner-London borough.
While Chief Rabbi Mirvis called on the government to “get a grip” on the “dangerous” pro-Palestinian marches, Starmer and Mahmood pleaded with the marchers. Mahmood said the protesters should summon some “love” and “solidarity” and wait out “the next day or two” before resuming their campaign of organized incitement. The marches went ahead. Over the next two days, London police arrested more than 400 people. London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who, after the 9/11 attacks, was the consultant lawyer for the al Qaeda terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui, was uncharacteristically silent.
On Oct. 6, Starmer said there are “people on our streets calling for the murder of Jewish people they have never met.” He did not say who these people were or why they might call for murder, or whether, having met some Jews, they would still think it’s a good idea. Nor did Starmer, a former director of public prosecutions, say he considered it a crime. He did not sound like a leader. He sounded like Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) when she characterized mass murder by Islamists in the 9/11 attacks as “some people did something.”
Compare Starmer’s evasions over Muslim racism and Islamist violence to his statement after the riots of the summer of 2024, which followed a massacre of little girls by the son of Rwandan immigrants. “I won’t shy away from calling it what it is, far-right thuggery,” Starmer said at once, and called for fast-tracked and exemplary prosecutions. After the Southport disturbances, the police arrested hundreds of people for tweets. Prosecutors and judges withheld bail and handed down prison sentences. But now the prime minister shied away from calling murder anything at all.
Hate speech
Labour cannot govern in the national interest. The party is hoist on the petard of its own policies. Its electoral strategy depends on the votes of Britain’s growing Muslim population. Those votes are splintering. The 2024 elections were a glimpse into a future in which heavily Muslim wards, most of them of Pakistani or Bangladeshi origin, no longer need Labour’s patronage and are able to obtain their own welfare subsidies. A handful of “Gaza independents” stole Labour seats in the 2024 elections. Starmer allies such as Jess Phillips, now minister for safeguarding and violence against women, and Wes Streeting, now health minister, came close to losing their seats.
There are roughly 300,000 British Jews. They form less than 0.5% of the British population. There are, officially at least, just under 4 million British Muslims, about 6% of the population. Starmer knows that an alliance with Israel makes Britain stronger by association with the United States. He knows it makes Britain safer, too, because Britain’s antiterrorism police benefit from Israeli intelligence-sharing. But he is intimidated by his backbenchers, his backers in the trade unions, and above all by Labour’s grassroots.
Starmer knows that Muslim votes will evaporate further if the government starts expelling illegal immigrants, as it has promised to do, or, as the French now do, expels foreign imams who preach hate and murder, or holds a national inquiry into the “grooming gangs” scandal. The entire apparatus of the British state has preferred to implicate itself in these compromises. Rather than confront the hostility of British Muslims, it has outsourced policy to their self-appointed representatives, many of whom have links to the Muslim Brotherhood.
After the Manchester atrocity, Tom Tugendhat, who was minister of state for security in the Conservative government, recalled that in the early weeks of the post-Oct. 7 protests, he had asked the leaders of the Metropolitan Police why their officers had failed to make arrests “for visible incitement to racial hatred using slogans intended to spread fear and support for proscribed terrorist groups.” The police replied that their “cultural adviser” disagreed. Tugendhat asked if they were “theologians or Arabists.” No, the police replied, “just people from the community.”
Starmer and his ministers have tried to square conditional support for Israel with a constant drip of condemnation. Labour’s leaders have accused the Jewish state of egregious criminality. Their inaction in the face of mounting incitement and assaults against Jews was a tacit admission of support. The party that believes that “words are violence” vituperates against the Jewish state with venom. In July, for instance, Starmer accused Israel of inflicting an “unspeakable and indefensible” humanitarian “catastrophe” on the Palestinians in Gaza.
Labour’s calumnies intensified in the run-up to Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, and the fast day of Yom Kippur. On Sept. 18, Khan accused Israel of “genocide.” On Sept. 20, Starmer recognized the fictional state of Palestine, a gesture acclaimed by Hamas as a “victory” and condemned by President Donald Trump as a “reward” for terrorism.
On Sept. 22, Labour ministers joined in the ritual condemnation of Israel at the United Nations General Assembly in New York City. On Sept. 29, they watched as delegates at Labour’s annual conference endorsed the “genocide” libel and called for sanctions against Israel. Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper accused Israel of “moral obscenity.” David Lammy, the deputy prime minister and justice minister, washed his hands and said it was for the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court to “determine the issue of genocide.”
Senior Labour politicians have played active roles in the boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign against Israel. In 2014, when Labour was in opposition, Mahmood joined her constituents in illegally obstructing access to a Sainsbury’s supermarket in Birmingham because it stocked Israeli-grown vegetables. “We lay down in the street and we lay down inside Sainsbury’s to say we object to the stocking goods from illegal settlements,” she said, visibly aroused as the mob behind shouted, “Free Palestine!” When a round of Israel-Hamas fighting broke out that year, Mahmood addressed a pro-Palestinian rally in Westminster. “Please, keep up the pressure on your members of Parliament,” she told the crowd. “Go to their advice surgeries, take 20 people with you and ask them to justify their views on Palestine and on Gaza.” This sounds like incitement to intimidate her fellow elected officials.
After the 2024 elections, Starmer appointed Mahmood as his justice minister. She is now the home secretary, responsible for policing and prosecuting the kind of people she was breaking the law with little more than a decade ago.
State failure
In the two years since Oct. 7, attacks on British Jews reached new heights. The Community Security Trust, the private charity that protects Jews and their institutions in Britain, recorded a record 2,019 “antisemitic incidents” in the first six months of 2024. This tally excluded a further 1,081 reported incidents for which motivation could not be confirmed, including “suspicious activity or possible hostile reconnaissance at Jewish locations.” In 2024, the number of British Jews who emigrated to Israel almost doubled year-on-year.
The first six months of 2025 saw 1,521 recorded incidents of anti-Jewish racism, the second-highest yet recorded. The highest number of incidents so far in 2025 occurred on June 26, the day the BBC broadcast a live performance from the Glastonbury Festival by the punk-rap group Bob Vylan. The group’s singer, Bobby Vylan, led the largely white and middle-class crowd in chanting, “Death, death, death to the IDF.” The BBC did not interrupt its broadcast. Starmer joined Jewish groups and opposition politicians in accusing Glastonbury and the BBC of disseminating “hate speech,” which is liable to prosecution under British law. The BBC announced an inquiry and subsequently acquitted itself.
The British authorities, and Labour especially, are responsible for all of this. They brought into Britain millions of people who already hated Jews and, it turned out, hated the English, too. To manage the resulting multicultural discontents, they used the power of the state to suppress the objections of the vast majority of British people and created a “permission structure” around disorder and violence against British Jews in particular. They have fostered the conditions for pogroms, racism, rioting, and sectarian collapse in a society that, until recently, was famed for its calm and cohesion. It is now too late for the arsonists to turn firefighters. The English intifada has begun.
Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Find him on X @drdominicgreen.
