There was a depressing inevitability to the terrorist attack outside Heaton Park synagogue last Thursday that claimed the lives of two worshippers, Adrian Daulby and Melvin Cravitz. For much of the past two years, Jewish communal groups, activists and public figures have warned about rising anti-Semitism, and cautioned that the atmosphere of febrile hostility would eventually manifest in real-world harm. Those fears were realised during Manchester’s Jewish community observed Judaism’s most holy day, Yom Kippur, a day of fasting, prayer, and penance, when Jihad al-Shamie launched his attack. “This is what you get for killing our children,” he shouted, according to Alan Levy, an eyewitness who recounted his experience to ITV News.
The threat to Jewish communities across the West has increased since Hamas’s terrorist attack on 7 October 2023. Since the war in Gaza, Islamic State (IS) has called for its supporters to launch “revenge” attacks. “Strike the gatherings of the Christians and the Jews,” the group wrote in September in its long-running periodical, al-Naba, “especially where they gather in churches, synagogues, and public events, and make their assemblies unsafe for them.” It continued, “You are the hand of the Islamic State today, striking at the heart of the infidels, and avenging Muslims in Palestine.”
Given the privations of that conflict, it can be tempting to characterise Al-Shamie’s attack as an aberration: the terrible actions of a hothead who got carried away at a time of heightened emotions. Yet Al-Shamie’s own history could undermine this suggestion. In 2012 the former MP for Henley, John Howell, was sent a series of threatening emails after he had spoken in parliament of Israel’s right to defend itself against rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip by a man who used the same name. “It is people like you who deserve to die,” read the message. Counter-terrorism police are actively investigating whether it was the same Al-Shamie who carried out last week’s attack in Manchester, though, given his uncommon name and the topic, it seems likely it was.
Information is emerging about Al-Shamie’s family, too. His father praised Hamas on Facebook hours after the 7 October attacks. “A group of fighters storming an occupation army camp with simple means, balloons and motorcycles, prove beyond any doubt that Israel is not here to stay,” he said. “Men like these prove that they are Allah’s men on earth, regardless of who leads them, they are the true compass for men.” The post has since been taken down.
Howell was far from the first Member of Parliament to be singled out for threats over their defence of Israel. A year before he was targeted, Mike Freer, a public supporter of Jewish communities, found himself being abused by a group calling itself “Muslims Against Crusades” (MAC) as he attended a meeting with constituents at a local mosque. Things became so heated after 12 men associated with the group barged in, with one calling Freer a “Jewish homosexual pig”, that he was eventually moved to a secure room and held there until the police arrived.
After David Amess MP was killed by Ali Harbi Ali in 2021, a subsequent police investigation found that he had also monitored Freer’s constituency office as part of his planning. “I was very lucky that actually on the day [of Amess’s murder] I was due to be in Finchley, I happened to change my plans and came into Whitehall,” Freer noted. Those events prompted him to start wearing a stab vest during constituency surgeries. By the time last year’s general election was called, Freer had understandably had enough and announced his decision to retire from parliament. “There comes a point when the threats to your personal safety become too much,” he said. This damning indictment of just how bad things had become – that a sitting Member of Parliament would vacate their position due to threats and intimidation – was only made worse by the largely muted response to his announcement.
The group that first targeted Freer, MAC, around the time Al-Shamie appears to have been emailing death threats to Howell, was the direct product of Britain’s long accommodation of hostile Islamist groups. MAC was a front organisation created by disciples of Omar Bakri Muhammad, a Syrian Islamist leader who resided in the UK for just under two decades. His British protégé, Anjem Choudary, managed MAC and a network of other closely interlinked groups after their original organisation, al-Muhajiroun (meaning “the emigrants”) was banned in 2005 in the aftermath of the 7/7 terrorist attacks.
Yet, the group had already been tied to a deadly attack two years earlier. Omar Sharif and Asif Hanif were radicalised by al-Muhajiroun after first encountering the group as students at university. They travelled to Gaza in 2003, where they joined the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the same faction of Hamas responsible for the 7 October atrocities. In the event, both men became suicide bombers, wearing explosive vests while entering a bar called Mike’s Place in Tel Aviv. Their attack killed three people and wounded more than 50. A suicide video featuring both men revealed just how deep their indoctrination went. “The Jew man – the dirty Jew, he raised his gun and said get back in your house,” Hanif said, while brandishing an AK-47 and recounting a video he had watched. “It’s a great honour to kill one of these people.”
[Further reading: Anjem Choudary: The rise and fall of Britain’s infamous preacher of hate]
Five years later, in 2009, another generation of would-be terrorists were emerging, again through anti-Israel activism. During angry demonstrations outside the Israeli embassy in London, a group of protesters tried to storm the building and attacked police in the process. A number of those involved were arrested, including Mohammed el-Araj and Mohammed Sakr, both from west London. Sakr later travelled to Somalia where he joined the al-Shabaab terrorist group before being killed in a drone strike. El-Araj, who had been studying for a degree in mechanical engineering until his arrest, headed to Syria a few years later and was killed fighting alongside groups thought to be affiliated with IS in 2013.
Demonstrations in 2021 resulted in further acts of criminality. A convoy of cars travelling from Bradford to London, ostensibly to protest, detoured into several Jewish areas of north London blasting highly inflammatory and offensive messages from megaphones. “Fuck the Jews, fuck all of them. Fuck their mothers, rape their daughters,” screamed one of the participants. Police eventually arrested four men in connection with the incident. An unrelated incident the same month showed how even Muslims are unsafe from this cauldron of anger, if perceived to be disloyal to the Palestinian cause. The family home of an Islamic scholar, known as Abu Layth, was targeted because he said Palestinians should prioritise the preservation of life by moving out of contentious areas of East Jerusalem and the West Bank (an idea first articulated by a prominent Saudi scholar several years earlier).
Accusing Abu Layth of “selling al-Aqsa to the Jews”, six men descended on his home after dark, using bricks to smash the windows and doors, before forcing their way inside. “Yo, this is for that dirty dog, Abu Layth, who disrespects our brothers and sisters of Palestine,” one of the men can be heard saying. “Where is Abu Layth?” they shout. “Come on you motherfucker.” Fortunately, he was not home at the time, but his wife and two children were – all of whose screams are audible throughout the ordeal.
British jihadists primarily operating online have also targeted Jews. Consider, for example, Husnain Rashid, perhaps the most prolific and high-profile online IS supporter from the UK. Operating under the name “Lone Mujahid”, he called for indiscriminate attacks against synagogues, Jewish businesses (such as bakeries and supermarkets), schools and communal events, before being arrested in 2017 and given a life sentence a year later. In one year alone, his jihadist channel is believed to have published more than 300,000 messages.
Despite the widespread revulsion at the attack in Manchester, it was not the first time a British jihadist has targeted a synagogue. That happened three years earlier, when Malik Faisal Akram travelled from his home in Blackburn to Texas, taking four hostages at the Congregation Beth Israel synagogue. Akram blamed the US for the detention of Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani national accused of ties to al-Qaeda. She is serving an 86-year sentence in Texas. Her case has become a cause célèbre among Islamists. Akram’s logic was that taking Jews hostage would compel the US government to release Siddiqui, as he prompted the rabbi to call other Jewish leaders and articulate his demands. “Maybe they’ll have compassion for fucking Jews,” he said, referring to the American government.
Akram’s thinking was typical of the anti-Semitic canards that underwrite violence against Jews and illustrate a peculiar kind of logical inversion which has become entrenched in political life. A much softer example of this muddled approach occurred two weeks ago. The MP for Perry Barr in Birmingham, Ayoub Khan, suggested Aston Villa refuse to host Maccabi Tel Aviv for their upcoming Europa League tie on 6 November. “Many residents have raised concerns about the football match,” he said. “We’ve all seen those harrowing images from Amsterdam,” referring to violent clashes which took place when Maccabi played a game in the Netherlands last year. But Khan’s proposed solution, bizarrely, is for Aston Villa to boycott the fixture rather than warn those intent on causing trouble not to do so. While there’s certainly no link between Khan and Islamic extremism, this episode neatly captures the moral inversion and indifference to threat or violence that Jews have warned about for so many years.
Over the weekend Keir Starmer said that “hatred is rising once again”. That is true, but accepting this formulation of the threat risks falling into the trap of seeing Al-Shamie’s attack as the anomalous aberration some would argue it is. When viewed in the context of the past two decades, we have a very different picture – that of a sustained and multifaceted war by Britain’s Islamists against the country’s Jews.
[Further reading: Can Shabana Mahmood win Jewish trust after Manchester?]
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