Something is not adding up with the Golders Green attack

Widespread press coverage has been given to the attack in Golders Green, London, where arsonists set fire to four ambulances owned by Jewish charity Hatzola.

Golders Green attack

At around 1:45am on Monday 23 March, the London Fire Brigade contacted the Met Police with news of the arson. The Met issued a statement three hours later, confirming that they’re treating the attack as an antisemitic hate crime.

The BBC reported that

Met Police chief Sir Mark Rowley said officers were investigating whether a group with ‘potential Iranian state links’ could have been behind the attack. He stressed it was too early to attribute the attack to Iran but expressed concern at the “rapid growth in recent years of Iranian state threats” in the UK.

Others such as the Telegraph led with headlines such as “Counter-terror police investigating ‘Iran-backed firebombing’”. The Telegraph appear to have particularly good access to Israeli government information channels. Israeli Embassy sources told them that the firebombing had all the hallmarks of an Iran-backed attack. They additionally had this nugget of information:

An internal report by the Israeli government, seen by The Telegraph, claimed the group probably hired local criminals online to carry out the attacks.

Numerous politicians and public figures have come out to immediately condemn the attack and frame it as an antisemitic hate crime carried out by some sort of Islamic group linked to Iran. Mark Gardner of the Community Security Trust told the Telegraph:

Iranians have long used terrorism against Jewish communities around the world for decades.

So that’s the mainstream media narrative. Is that replicated on social media? Well, no.

Social media response

In a post on X gaining 1.2M views, Lowkey pointed out that:

It is worthy of note that the group which is claiming responsibility for the burning of ambulances last night refers to Palestine as “the land of Israel.” It does so in both English and Arabic, which is particularly unusual.

Lowkey was right to point this out, but he missed that the statement capitalised the ‘L’ in Land, even more clearly making it a term specifically used by pioneers of the current State of Israel such as David Ben-Gurion to describe historic Palestine, or the current State of Israel plus East Jerusalem, the Occupied West Bank, and Gaza.

The idea that a pro-Palestine and Iran-linked group would use this term rather than ‘the Zionist entity’ or simply ‘Palestine’ does not stand up to scrutiny. Aaron Bastani of Novara Media weighed in to support Lowkey, saying that “Iranian schoolbooks don’t even refer to Israel on a map.”

But there is more about the statement by Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamiya (HAYI) that deserves careful attention.

“A clear lack of fluency in Arabic”

Other attacks attributed to the group on Jewish targets have taken place in Europe in recent weeks, one of which was an explosion at an Orthodox Jewish School in Amsterdam, and a follow up one at an Amsterdam business premises. The attacks have been covered by Dutch News.

Younes Saramifar, a political Anthropologist at VU University Amsterdam, has posted in detail about HAYI’s online post on his LinkedIn profile, and is also quoted in the article in Dutch News. He makes numerous points which cast serious doubt on the Arabic language portion of the statement, including:

The language of announcements shows a clear lack of fluency in Arabic. The language is generated by an AI tool. Furthermore, the electronic device on which the new video was edited does not have Arabic or English as its native language in its operating system. This is clear from where the colon and the exclamation mark are placed in the sentence. This shows that the group is neither native Arabic nor English speakers. Native speakers are habituated to managing these technical glitches. Based on their language use, I don’t think they are a direct proxy or a sleeper cell associated with the Axis of Resistance.

Dutch News reported that five teenagers in total have been arrested in relation to the attacks, aged between 14 and 19, all from Tilburg in the Netherlands. But if this is an Iran-linked group then we would expect the young people to be members of the Tilburg Muslim minority, possibly Shia?

Sadly for the purveyors of the currently dominant narrative, no. Tilburg does have a Muslim minority, with around 7.6% of the citizens in 2024/2025 being of Turkish, Moroccan, or Syrian origin, but the five teenagers arrested were reported by Dutch News as all being of Antillean heritage. This refers to the overwhelmingly Christian Dutch Antilles islands in the Caribbean.

Along the right lines

It seems then that the author of the internal report by the Israeli government mentioned above (that the Telegraph mysteriously has access to) is thinking along the right lines.

A group that doesn’t know how to sound pro-Palestinian in English and needs to use Chat GPT to produce broken Arabic and still doesn’t get it right hires some young people, including children, of no particular faith background to carry out attacks on the Jewish community. These attacks are immediately propagated across the media and political system in a way which heightens fears of antisemitism and links it to Iran and the pro-Palestinian movement, without any supporting evidence.

When we are investigating a crime, it’s always good to look first for a motive and ask the question, ‘who benefits politically?’.

Do Iran or its proxies stand to benefit? It’s very obvious that they don’t. Not only could proof of Iran’s involvement be used to provide political justification for more UK involvement in the US and Israel’s illegal war, attacks on Synagogues and other Jewish community organisations have been used in the UK, Australia and other countries to give politicians cover to clamp down on protest and speech rights.

As Younes Saramifar points out:

The Axis of Resistance has shown consistent disinterest in antisemitic expressions and discourse that target Jewish faith and communities. They have focused on Zionism and Israel within their rhetoric.

But surely the suggestion that pro-Israel interests could be behind a so-called false flag incident in London is both shockingly antisemitic and completely fanciful? It is worth looking at just a few of many historical incidents to provide context on this subject.

A history

The eminent British-Israeli historian, Emeritus Fellow of St Anthony’s College Oxford and fellow of the British Academy Avi Shlaim, has written extensively on how he can demonstrate that Mossad carried out bombings to drive Jews out of Iraq and hasten their transfer to Israel during his childhood in Baghdad in the 1950’s. His book Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew, gives more detail and was Times Literary Supplement and New Statesman book of the year in 2023.

The Lavon Affair is one of the most famous Israeli false flag operations, in which a group of Egyptian Jews were recruited in 1954 by Israeli Military Intelligence to plant bombs inside Egyptian, American, and British-owned civilian targets: cinemas, libraries, and American educational centres.

The case of the 1994 London Embassy bombings was covered in detail by Skwawkbox in 2025.

More recently, in Australia and Canada there have been numerous cases which suggest that a pro-Israel motive is a rational thing for law enforcement to investigate when it comes to attacks on the Jewish community.

And now, as Skwawkbox recently reported for the Canary, there’s been another twist to the story. The Guardian noted that:

Two men arrested in connection with a suspected arson attack on four ambulances operated by a Jewish charity in north London have been released on bail.

The men, aged 47 and 45, who are both UK nationals, were arrested on Wednesday on suspicion of arson with intent to endanger life after the incident in Golders Green. On Thursday the Metropolitan police said the pair had been bailed until April while the investigation continues.

What really happened in Golders Green?

Bailed? Really? Well, as Skwawkbox concluded:

As Irish comedian and political activist Tadgh Hickey pointed out, this “weirdly lenient” decision doesn’t really fit with the idea of a ‘terror cell’.

We trust that the Metropolitan Police will leave no stone unturned in their zeal to follow up the points we have made in this article, and that all of the media organisations and politicians will retract statements which suggest that there is proof that Iran is behind the attack.

Featured image via the Canary

By The Canary

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