British Prime Minister Keir Starmer got it right.

“There’s no getting away from the fact that this was not a one-off,” he said shortly after two Jewish men were stabbed in broad daylight in London’s heavily Jewish Golders Green district on April 28. “There has been a series of attacks on our Jewish community, particularly in recent weeks, and there is a very deep sense of anxiety, of concern about security, about safety …”

Essa Suleiman, a 45-year-old British citizen of Somali Muslim descent, is regarded as the chief suspect. Arrested and charged with two counts of attempted murder, he is suspected of attacking Shloime Rand, 34, and Moishe Shine, 76.

Suleiman, who has a record of mental problems, is known to police. In 2008, he was imprisoned for stabbing a police officer during a violent altercation.

Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamiyya, a shadowy Islamist group known as the Islamic Movement of the Companions of the Right, claims it orchestrated the London stabbings. In addition, it has taken responsibility for about a dozen antisemitic attacks across Europe, including Greece, Belgium and the Netherlands. Closely aligned with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, it emerged this past March.

At present, London’s Metropolitan Police Service and counterterrorism officials are investigating whether it is linked to Iran, or whether these criminal acts were carried out by malign forces using crude, low-cost methods to sow fear in European Jewish communities.

The police commissioner, Mark Rowley, said that “some individuals are being encouraged, persuaded, or paid to commit acts of violence on behalf of foreign........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)