Britain has abandoned Jews to this savagery

Six minutes. That is all it took for Britain to descend to a new low of infamy, in which Jews are slaughtered at synagogues. A nation whose entire postwar sense of self is bound up with the fight against the Nazis – against militarised anti-Semitism – is now a place where Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, has become stained in the blood of British Jews, brutally murdered by an assailant dressed all in black.

The attack this morning at the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation Synagogue in Crumpsall, at the heart of the Jewish community in the north of Manchester, is by turns horrific and horrifically predictable. A car rammed into congregants, a scumbag emerged and stabbed two dead, before being ‘neutralised’ by armed police as he tried to smash his way through a window, while wearing what appeared to be a suicide vest but may well have been a grotesque prop to his barbarous performance.

Words fail me. Because we have failed Jews. The horror in Crumpsall comes after years of anti-Semitism bubbling up from the depths, while the great and good did little more than spray some air freshener, offering warm words about standing with the Jewish community, while doing naff all else. In which Labour continues to prattle on about ‘Islamophobia’ or the ‘racism’ of Nigel Farage’s visa proposals, while the world’s oldest hatred has staged a barbaric comeback on our streets.

Even before 7 October in Israel – the most deadly assault on Jews since the Holocaust, two years ago this week – British Jews could see what was coming. Even before Hamas sent its killers and rapists into kibbutzim and dance parties, even before Western capitals erupted in jubilation about those apocalyptic incursions, British Jews made up 0.5 per cent of the population and a quarter of the victims of religious hate crimes. Jewish pensioners would be suckerpunched in north London. A Jewish cemetery in Kent was desecrated eight times in 10 years. Security around schools and synagogues became a grim fact of British Jewish life. Meanwhile, we had TV debates about whether it was racist for Boris Johnson to mock the burqa, or Adele to wear her hair in braids and wave a Jamaican flag during Notting Hill Carnival. It shames us.

Then came the pogrom, and the reins came off. Anti-Semitic incidents in Britain hit a 40-year high. Assaults on Jews surged by almost 100 per cent. Islamic activists chanted Arabic war slogans about the murder of Jews on London demonstrations, while Israelophobic leftists pretended not to notice. And this post-7 October 2023 carnival of Jew hatred peaked before the IDF rolled into Gaza, to destroy the jihadists and retrieve Israel’s stolen citizens. This was a bigoted, violent celebration of the murder of Jews. And it isn’t abating, either. The Community Security Trust recorded 1,521 anti-Semitic incidents in the first half of 2025, the second-highest number… since 2024.

We wait to learn more about the killer and his motives. Counter-terror police believe they know his identity, but aren’t letting on just yet. Investigations are ongoing. Two further arrests have been made. But I dare say we need not wait to conclude that Crumpsall is where years – nay, decades – of a growing, ambient Jew hatred leaves us. In which the age-old blood libels have been repackaged for the ‘pro-Palestine’ idiots. In which Israel is cast as the killer of babies and the grand puppeteer of geopolitical affairs. In which British Jews – a tiny, embattled minority smaller in number than British Sikhs – are once again cast as the eternal scapegoat for all of society’s and the world’s ills. As the great, sinister, ‘privileged’ bogeymen of the intersectional pyramid.

After Crumpsall, we must stand in solidarity with our Jewish brothers and sisters. And we must do so much more than that. Any gentile who has ever talked publicly or written about the scourge of anti-Semitism – even just occasionally, as I have – will have had this experience: British Jews offering their heartfelt gratitude, for what we all know should be the bare minimum. And yet far too many struggle even to do that. We have let this happen. It is our cancer to remove. And remove it we must.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater