09.10.2025
Uses and abuses of murder
As Israel’s popularity in the west craters, Sir Keir Starmer and the entire establishment cynically use the attack on Manchester synagogue to abuse and further criminalise protest against genocide, argues Paul Demarty
Last week’s assault on a Manchester synagogue - timed to coincide with the Yom Kippur holy day - quite understandably led to a shocked public reaction.
A man of Syrian origin - Jihad al-Shamie - drove his car into a crowd of worshippers, and then began stabbing people. Several were injured, and one was killed. Police shot al-Shamie dead, along with one other worshipper.
The format of the attack is familiar. Vehicular attacks on crowds are now a popular means of such mass violence, and indeed this is not the first time such means have been employed in attacks on religious worshippers: in 2017, Darren Osborne - a Welsh Tommy Robinson fanboy - drove his van into a crowd at Finsbury Park mosque, killing one man. Islamist terror attacks have also taken this form, and on at least one occasion (the London Bridge rampage, also in 2017) Islamists have used mass stabbings.
This is one story you can tell about the Manchester attack: it fits into a pattern of spectacular, but basically small-scale, political violence - most notoriously employed by Islamists, but also by the extreme right. (I can think of no equivalent crimes committed by leftwingers in this country’s recent history.) It is a picture, perhaps, of the failure of the various ‘anti-terrorist’, ‘deradicalisation’ efforts on the part of the British state in the last 25 years; but equally, it could be a picture of the inherent limits of these kinds of measures as such. That would be an interesting conversation to have.
Hate marches?
The conversation we are in fact having is about the identity of the victims, who were, of course, Jews. Nothing is confirmed, as I write, about the actual motive of the attacker, and there are dangers in making assumptions too readily (the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida was initially widely assumed to be an anti-gay hate crime, but it turned out that the killer simply wanted to shoot up a crowded place, and had failed to get into any other club). It seems pretty likely, however, that the motive will turn out to be anti-Semitic.
In this respect, the synagogue attack is pretty unusual, in this day and age. In terms of direct threat to life and limb, it is certainly more dangerous to be in a mosque than a synagogue (indeed, there was an arson attack at a Brighton mosque this week); and Islamist outrages in this country have been notably indiscriminate in their targets (compared to, say, France, where synagogues have been targeted more often). That is, naturally, not the story we are being told in extremely shrill tones across the media.
An op-ed by Dave Rich of the Community Security Trust for The Guardian is typical - a long list of violent attacks on synagogues is adduced, but the attentive reader will notice that not a single one of them took place in Britain, apart from last week in Manchester. Nonetheless, Mr Rich is quite clear where the blame for this recent, entirely phantasmatic existential threat to British Jewry lies: “the rise in global anti-Semitism since the October 7 attack … there is no doubt this threat to Jews has become much more acute since then”.1 No doubt, indeed!
Or, alternatively, take Labour peer Ian Austin in The Sun: unlike Rich, under no obligation to appeal to progressive sentiments in Rupert Murdoch’s gutter rag, he offered readers a long and entirely unhinged rant. A representative sample: “I’ve been to watch the hate marches. You don’t see banners calling for peace, for hostages to be released or for a ‘two-state solution’. Jewish people were attacked because they are Jews. Brutal, murderous racism.”
It would be beside the point to indicate that - at least until the ‘I support Palestine Action’ protests began, and apart from those - the number of arrests on these marches have been trivial; that there have been basically no social disturbances associated with them, despite frequent Zionist provocations; that a curiously large number of people on these ‘anti-Jewish hate marches’ are Jewish, and often take pains to advertise the fact that they are; in short, that the “brutal, murderous racism” has resulted in nothing in the way of actual brutality and murder. (Did al-Shamie actually ever attend such a march? Nobody knows - certainly not Ian Austin.) His solution is to “curb” the “hate marches” - “change the law if necessary”.2
Repression
As the old saying goes, one must never let a crisis go to waste. British support for Israel has survived largely because of the iron uniformity of the political class in subservience to the United States, which has chosen not to restrain Israel from its genocidal assault on Gaza and apparently universal war against its neighbours. British public opinion is wildly out of step with this consensus. It is perfectly clear, despite the best efforts of a pliant and cowardly bourgeois media, that Israel has been near-continuously involved in indiscriminate mass murder for two years. It is the protestors, not the likes of Rich and Austin, who are representative of feeling in the country.
In the face of the gruesome reality unfolding in Gaza, the ever-mounting death toll (in particular of children), the deliberate imposition of famine and the sick games of the Gaza Humanitarian Fund, Zionism has been on the back foot in the battle of ideas. It has only had the vague innuendoes of “Jews feeling unsafe” to go on. Al-Shamie’s crime gives them, at last, something concrete to hang their hat on.
So it is already proving. With another face-off between the Metropolitan Police and Defend Our Juries’ ‘arrestables’ planned for last Saturday, Met commissioner Mark Rowley wrote a letter imploring DOJ to suspend its action, in the name of sensitivity to Jewish sensibilities. DOJ publicly refused to do so, and another few hundred people were arrested for supporting Palestine Action in the event.
New home secretary Shabana Mahmood has used this as an excuse to ram through more police powers to interfere with the right to protest (although, given that these protests involve hundreds of people willingly putting themselves in danger of arrest anyway, it is not clear how much of an effect this will have in practice). Proscription of DOJ is a real possibility; and if them, why not the Socialist Workers Party? Why not us?
In the background here is a longer-term project to redefine anti-Semitism as consisting, substantially, of opposition to the state of Israel. That this is a replacement of the old definition rather than merely an expansion is more clear in the United States, where many of the most prominent people suppressing ‘anti-Semitism’ in the Palestinian movement are in fact straightforward Christian anti-Semites who support Israel so as to accelerate the return of Jesus Christ and the unfolding of the events in the Apocalypse of John (including the forcible conversion of some fraction of the Jewish people and the immediate condemnation of the rest to eternal hellfire).
This redefinition is a curious thing. On one level, it has been astonishingly successful - its conquest of the institutions of the state and civil society is all but complete, through the wide adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s ‘definition’ of anti-Semitism and similar things. Should a principled friend of the Palestinians be hauled up on anti-Semitic charges, appealing to common sense is unlikely to help.
On the other hand, the strength of the taboo on anti-Semitism is an inheritance of 20th century history - in particular the near-extermination of European Jews by the Nazi regime in World War II. The moral force is not derived from the specificity of Jewish people per se, let alone the state of Israel, but from their having been the victims of modern history’s most infamous crime, which right-thinking people do not wish to see repeated.
Zionism has always proposed Israel as the solution to this problem, and the idea is not wholly devoid of superficial plausibility. Yet, now that Israel is openly involved in genocidal conduct against the Palestinians, turning anti-Semitism into a question of support for Israel destroys that moral force. The prohibition on anti-Semitism becomes, instead, obviously a creature of morally scandalous decisions made by the state regimes that abet Israel, and only enforceable through direct repression by the state and the private bureaucracy. We are left with a sort of zombie taboo - the life has gone out of it, but it still shuffles around, biting people.
Real anti-Semitism
One of the more ironic consequences of this is that genuine anti-Semitism - the identification of Jews qua Jews as malevolent alien elements - is slowly making a comeback in its old haunts on the far right. This is, once more, clearer stateside, with the rise of alt-right media celebrities like Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens openly committed to anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, and the emergence of a radical, traditionalist, Catholic movement, riddled with holocaust denial and general Jew-hatred.
There is no reason to suppose that this will not be repeated in Britain, though the fact that the current extreme-right golden boy, Tommy Robinson, is a zealous Israel supporter is holding things back somewhat. (The propriety of linking up with Robinson’s crew is something of a delicate matter among the various self-appointed representatives of this country’s Jews, with the Board of Deputies condemning the Israeli government for inviting him on a jolly, but more ‘radical’ elements happy to cooperate with his army of coked-up football casuals.) The overall degradation of political culture in the west, based on post-neoliberal social atomisation, tends to promote conspiracy theories, and many of the best established are anti-Semitic in character. The revival of anti-Jewish prejudice, therefore, becomes a mere matter of statistical probabilities.
The only real opposition to this kind of ideological derangement is glimpsed - if no more - precisely in the movement against Israel’s genocide: the unity of Jews, Muslims, Christians, Hindus, atheists … and whoever else, on the basis of little more than a shared humanitarian instinct: that such a crime must not be allowed on our watch; that we will all be called to account for it if it is. In order to be victorious, more than that mere instinct is necessary: we must understand the history that brought us to this point, the strength of the forces against us, and indeed the sources of our own strength. Above all, we need not a movement, but a party.
If the last week’s events are any guide, the strength of the Palestine movement will face further tests. Meanwhile, the likelihood of outrages like the Manchester attack - directed at Jews, Muslims or anyone else - continues to escalate.