The Golders Green attack was sickeningly predictable

Jews have been stabbed in Golders Green. Are you sickened, horrified, appalled? I should hope so. The more troubling question is: are you surprised? To our eternal shame, I don’t think anyone can claim to be.

Just after 11am this morning, British Jews had their worst fears realised. Again. A little more than six months after Jihad al-Shamie slashed at worshippers at the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation in Manchester, an attack of savagery that left two dead, Jewish blood has now been spilled on the streets of Jewish north London.

The suspect reportedly slashed at someone outside the synagogue on Highfield Avenue, before turning down Golders Green Road and stabbing a ‘visibly Jewish man’. A man in his 70s and another in his 30s are in hospital. The alleged knifeman, 45, was tasered and arrested. It’s now been declared a ‘terrorist incident’.

The usual caveats, legal backcovering and journalistic restraint apply. The police are trying to ascertain whether Jews were ‘deliberately’ targeted in Golders Green. But we need not wait on the drip-feed of official announcements to conclude that something sickening, and sickeningly predictable, has taken place here.

Here, in Britain – the nation that likes to warm its hands on the stand our forefathers took against Nazism. Here, in London – the city that our mayor never tires of telling us is an oasis of multicultural harmony. Here, Jews are left wondering whether their fathers and grandfathers are safe to walk the streets, whether their sons should remove their kippahs before going to school tomorrow.

Worse, they have been left wondering if anyone actually cares. A ‘terrorist incident’ may have been declared today, but the Jews of north-west London have been subjected to a campaign of terror for weeks now. There was the alleged arson attack on a synagogue in Kenton. Another on a synagogue in nearby Finchley. Another on a business in Hendon, which used to be the head office of a Jewish charity, and still bore its ‘Jewish Futures’ logo. All of this has been in the space of two weeks.

It was only last month that four ambulances, operated by the Jewish Hatzola charity, were set ablaze in Golders Green. One of the more slyly heartbreaking details to emerge from the horror in Golders Green this morning is that Hatzola volunteers treated the stabbing victims at the scene. One of their surviving ambulances spirited one of the bloodied men to hospital. You could not find a grimmer metaphor for the threat to life and limb that is now faced by Britain’s tiny, embattled Jewish community.

It is now impossible to ignore. Back in 2024, were it not for a successful operation by undercover officers from Greater Manchester Police, British Jews would have suffered a massacre on the scale of Bondi Beach. In February this year, two foreign-born ISIS fanatics were locked up for plotting to gun down Jews in Manchester. Porous borders, homegrown Islamic extremism, and leftist useful idiocy have put a target on Jews’ backs.

While the Labour government has offered little more than a tepid bath of thoughts and prayers, the leaders of the ‘anti-racist’ left have basically told Jews to relax. Last week, Green Party leader Zack Polanski, having been asked about the spate of anti-Semitic attacks, said ‘there’s a conversation to be had about whether it’s a perception of unsafety or whether it’s actual unsafety’. Meanwhile, Green local-election candidates continue to be outed as pond-scum Jew haters, calling the recent firebombings ‘false flags’ and openly saying things like, ‘it takes serious effort not to be a tiny bit anti-Semitic’.

How long are Jews supposed to put up with this? Long before October 7, and the carnivals of anti-Semitism posing as ‘pro-Palestine’ demos, they suffered a level of menace no other community would be expected to tolerate. Long before Hamas’s butchers and rapists ploughed into Israel, and Islamists and leftists took to our city centres to celebrate, British Jews made up 0.5 per cent of the population and a quarter of the victims of religious hate crimes. They sent their kids to schools behind high fences, with security guards and routine police patrols. Their elders were suckerpunched in the streets. Their cemeteries were routinely desecrated.

Now the sewers have well and truly burst. This is a national emergency. It requires action, not mere words. If we do not stand with British Jews now, then we can no longer claim to be a civilised nation. Certainly, we cannot claim to be surprised when the next attack rolls around.

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