Three years on from the 7 October attacks, antisemitism has taken hold in Britain: Jews aren’t safe
On another anniversary of the 7 October attacks, the lasting impact on Britain’s Jews is found in the essential daily decisions we now have to make. Beyond the simple fear that you or your children might get killed the next time you go to synagogue or visit your local kosher shop, Jews are hiding the fact they are Jewish.
This has gone beyond the choice of whether to wear your Star of David necklace inside or outside your shirt. It is found in the job applicants who remove their Jewish community volunteering from their CV; the people who use false names when ordering an Uber; the parents who move their children from mainstream schools to Jewish ones.
The danger for Britain runs deep, for if Jews cannot live an open Jewish life here, then modern Britain as a cohesive, diverse liberal democracy will have failed.
This didn’t begin with Jews. The murder of Terence Carney, a 70-year-old man from Hartlepool, County Durham, may not seem an obvious starting point when trying to understand the impact the Hamas attack and what followed has had on Britain, but it has proved to be a chilling portent of much of what has followed since.
Carney had gone for his regular morning walk in October 2023 when he was fatally stabbed by Ahmed Alid, an Islamist extremist who had arrived in the UK illegally three years earlier. Alid had already tried to kill his Iranian housemate Javed Nouri, who had converted to Christianity and whom he regarded to be an “apostate”. Nouri managed to fight him off, but Carney was not so lucky.
When police asked Alid why he had committed these appalling acts, he said he wanted “Palestine to be free from the Zionists” and that he had murdered Carney, a random passerby with no connection to the Middle East, “because Israel was killing children”. This was just eight days after the 7 October attack on southern Israel – the day on which about 1,200 people, mostly........
