The Golders Green ambulance attack reveals the depths of the new Jew hatred

Ambulances set on fire because they are run by a Jewish charity. The anti-Semites aren’t even trying to hide behind Gaza anymore. Truly, theirs is a movement that loathes Jews just as much as it loathes life.

Around 1.30am this morning, four ambulances were set ablaze in Golders Green, the heart of Jewish north London. They belonged to the Hatzola charity, which has been helping the ill and injured residents of the area, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, since 1979.

CCTV footage shows three suspects, clad head to toe in black, approaching the ambulances. They were parked next to a synagogue. Cylinders on the vehicles exploded, shattering the windows of nearby flats.

Right now, all we have is this grainy video footage to go on – motives are too early to establish. But I dare say we can make some educated guesses.

The Golders Green fire attacks come after a man named Jihad al-Shamie slashed at worshippers at a Heaton Park synagogue during Yom Kippur last October; after two foreign-born ISIS fanatics were locked up last month for plotting to gun down as many of Manchester’s Jews as they could; and after two Iranian men were charged a few days ago with spying on London’s Jewish communities on behalf of the Islamic Republic.

The butchers of Tehran were sending their henchmen after Jews in Britain – and across Europe – long before American and Israeli bombs began falling on the Ayatollah, his missile sites and the IRGC earlier this month. More than 20 potentially Iran-linked plots have been disrupted in Britain over the past two years.

A new Islamist group calling itself Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia, apparently spawned from the Islamic Republic’s terror networks, has also entered the stage. Last week, it claimed responsibility for explosives attacks on a synagogue in Belgium, a Jewish school in Amsterdam and a synagogue in Rotterdam.

Meanwhile, an ambient Jew hatred fouls the air everywhere. Anti-Semitic incidents in Britain, as recorded each month by the Community Security Trust, are double where they were before Hamas’s pogrom in 2023 emboldened the nation’s Jew-hating scumbags.

It’s in our schools, where Jewish MPs are having visits cancelled due to the fury of the ‘pro-Palestine’ mob. It’s in our universities, where ‘Put the Zios in the ground’ has replaced ‘Be Kind’ as the slogan du jour. It’s on our streets, where Islamists glorify Israel’s jihadist enemies while know-nothing progressives giggle with titillation.

There’s almost a grim division of labour. While radical Islamic mobs threaten, maim and take Jewish life, activists, students and perma-students launch Jew hunts on university campuses – targeting Israeli academics – or smash up Jewish-owned businesses, using bogus connections to Israeli defence firms as a pretext.

The sewers may have burst in Britain after October 7. But anyone who had been paying attention could see this coming. The Kent synagogue smashed up eight times in 10 years. The random attacks on doddery Jewish men. That convoy that drove around Finchley Road in north-west London in 2021, shouting ‘Fuck the Jews’ and ‘Rape their daughters’ from loud-hailers.

We’ve been told since Brexit that a new 1930s is upon us. Apparently, British voters politely asking for more democratic clout and better border control constituted a terrifying descent into Nazism. All the while, those menacing Britain’s tiny Jewish community – smaller in number than British Sikhs – were rendered invisible.

Smashed shops, firebombings, murder – purely because they are Jews. I don’t know how many echoes of history need to ring out, how much broken glass needs to rattle on the ground, before the anti-fascists rouse from their slumber. Or realise they’ve slipped on to the other side.

Muslim anti-Semitism, in particular, has been lent cover by all the usual idiots and cowards. Despite anti-Semitic attitudes being stubbornly higher among British Muslims, despite Islamic extremism being the biggest terror threat we face by a country mile, every political discussion must at some point pivot to the spectre of the ‘far right’.

Given you could now fit the actual far right in the back of an Uber XL, this requires smear tactics and spectacular mental gymnastics – like when Gary Neville responded to the Heaton Park killings by bemoaning the blokes putting Union flags on lampposts, or when Green MP Hannah Spencer blamed the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing on the ‘division’ generated by Reform UK.

The arguments are almost too stupid to rebut. Apparently, Jihad al-Shamie only decided to lunge at Jews with a knife because he was made to feel ‘unwelcome’ by the sight of our national flag, and Salman Abedi only blew up girls at a pop concert because he stumbled across one of Nigel Farage’s old speeches to the European Parliament.

These are just the more low-wattage attempts to defend the indefensible. Jew hatred is back. But our rulers cannot compute it, let alone fight it. For that would require ditching their comforting ideologies, their identitarian blinkers, their deranged Israelophobia. It would mean accepting that they are part of the problem.

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