Where is the fury over the plot to massacre Manchester Jews?

So that’s it, is it? The fascistic plot to massacre Manchester Jews just fades from the headlines? A conspiracy to slaughter hundreds of Jews like dogs in the street becomes yesterday’s news, as if it were celebrity tittle-tattle or another lame Labour scandal? It’s just 72 hours since two men were sentenced for planning what would have been one of the worst racist atrocities in the history of these isles, and already we’ve moved on. No reckoning, no soul-searching, no anger. A Nazi-level scheme to gun down Jews is mercifully thwarted and the response is a collective ‘Meh’.

The Manchester plot ought to have been a nation-changing event. It was apocalyptic in its intent, historic in its sheer determination to destroy any future for Jews on this island. The conspirators were Walid Saadaoui, 38, and Amar Hussein, 52. Their Jewphobic plot was well advanced. They had purchased assault rifles, handguns and a thousand rounds of ammunition. Their black plan was to ‘kill as many members of the Jewish community as they could’. ISIS was their inspiration, hundreds of dead Jews was their dream.

Had their plot not been uncovered by intrepid police officers, the consequences would have been cataclysmic. They intended to go to a march of Jews in Manchester and fire indiscriminately into the crowd. They would then go to Cheetham Hill, the heart of Jewish Manchester, and gun down Jews as they left their schools, nurseries, shuls and businesses. It is not Godwin’s Law to say you have to go back to the demented pogroms of 1930s Europe to find a scheme as vile as this one. As the Manchester police said, it would have ‘ranked right up there’ with the worst atrocities the modern world has seen.

It was thanks to the intervention of an undercover cop, codename ‘Farouk’, that the plot was thwarted. The men were arrested in May 2024 as they went to collect their deadly munitions. They were found guilty in December 2025 of preparing acts of terrorism. They were sentenced last Friday. Saadaoui received life with a minimum term of 37 years. Hussein received life with a minimum of 26 years. Saadaoui’s brother was also locked up, for six years, for failing to disclose the plot to police.

It’s a great outcome. Men who were motored by a ‘visceral dislike’ of Jews taken off our streets. Islamo-fascists who harboured a ‘deep-seated hatred’ for the Jewish people put in the clink where they belong. But that’s not the end of it, surely? There needs to be more, right? Where’s the fury? Where’s the national self-reflection? Where’s that burning question that ought to push aside every other concern in the UK right now – namely, how did 21st-century Britain come to harbour such fascist-like animus, such hell-bent Islamists consumed by blind loathing for Jews, Britain and the West itself?

I have found the public response to this case dispiriting in the extreme. Keir Starmer issued a perfunctory tweet in response to the sentencing. ‘Good’, he said, this was a ‘horrifying case’. Then he went right back to ranting about Sir Jim Ratcliffe and his apparently scandalous claim that Britain has been ‘colonised’ by immigrants. Let this be the political epithet of this thin-gruel technocrat we have the misfortune to be ruled by – in the week when two men were jailed for planning a barbarous assault on Jews, he busied himself with pompous homilies about the ‘bigotry’ of a billionaire. A word seemed to shake our PM’s moral conscience more than a plot to slay Jews.

He wasn’t alone. All last week the media elites were frothing about Sir Jim. His use of that C-word is proof the ‘far right’ is surging, they squealed. It’s proof of the rise of ‘race-baiting bigotry’. These are Kafkaesque levels of moral blindness. The true bigotry of murderous Islamists is overlooked in favour of obsessing over a ‘misspeaking’ rich bloke. The sentencing of two fascistic haters of our Jewish compatriots barely pricks the hollow hearts of the turbo-smug opinion-forming classes, as instead they wring their manicured hands over a word in an interview. Future historians will study this. They will marvel, in horror, at this era in which more purple prose was spaffed on a football boss who’s worried about mass immigration than on two ISIS devotees who almost managed to massacre Jews.

Then there’s the left. ‘Fascist!’, these people cry at everyone from the mums in pink tracksuits who protest outside migrant hotels to those northern communities that are planning to vote for Reform UK. Yet when two men are jailed for an advanced plot to carry out the bloodiest of pogroms, they go schtum. For the first time ever the word ‘fascist’ clogs in their throats. We need a franker verison of that Martin Niemöller poem to describe such rank cowardice and snivelling silence in the face of true racism: ‘When they came for the Jews, I said fuck all.’

We need a reckoning with this culture of chilling indifference to Islamo-fascism. With the failure of our self-styled moral leaders to speak clearly about the surging poison of anti-Semitism. Last year there were 3,700 anti-Semitic hate incidents in the UK, the second-highest annual total ever. Sickeningly, 80 of those incidents were recorded in the 48 hours after the terrorist assault on the Heaton Park Synagogue, also in Manchester, on Yom Kippur in October, when two Jews were killed. Some of those incidents involved ‘face-to-face taunting’ of Jews and ‘celebration’ of the Heaton Park attack. It’s the 21st century and people are responding to the murder of Jews by jeering at Jews. Where are the anti-racists? Their silence indicts them in ways they cannot fathom.

To watch the clip of Amar Hussein in his police interview coldly saying ‘Yes’ when asked if he supports ISIS is to look into the face of evil. His arms crossed, his demeanour arrogant, he announces with nauseating pride his allegiance to the sworn enemies of Western civilisation. The questions pile up. Hussein is from Kuwait and Saadaoui is from Tunisia – what were they doing here? Were they emboldened in their Jew hate by the Israelophobic mania that swept Britain after 7 October 2023? It is undeniable now: our broken immigration system, our failure to tame the anti-Semitism of the post-7 October moment and officialdom’s dread of calling out Islamism for fear of being called ‘Islamophobic’ – these craven trends have mingled to create fertile territory for the violent rebirth of the world’s oldest racism.

There are 40,000 suspected jihadists on Britain’s terror watchlist. Hundreds of young men from anti-Semitic cultures arrive illegally on our shores every week. Venomous hatred for the world’s only Jewish nation has become the moral glue of the chattering classes. Anti-Semitic attacks are spiking. Jews are being murdered, or mercifully saved from murder. What signal does it send to Jew-haters when we fail as a society to speak out about these horrors? The elites’ yellow-bellied nonchalance on the Islamist threat doesn’t only betray Britain’s Jews – it also emboldens those who loathe them.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book, Vibe Shift: The Revolt Against Wokeness, Greenism and Technocracy, is out now. Find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.