Ambulances Set on Fire in Suspected Anti Jewish Attack

[StartingStar]

Horrible news that ambulances run by a Jewish charity have been set on fire in Golders Green today.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyj1p49gdpo

AIBU to feel it's got to to with the rise in anti Jewish hate since the allowance of horrible slogans on the weekly marches and in everyday society? What on earth makes people commit such a horrible attack.

I'm 100% with the Jewish community and pray for peace.

The police are treating the arson attack as an antisemitic hate crime - which of course it is.

Maybe you should apologise for constantly trying to divert a discussion on an attack in the UK to the ‘international situation’, flat out lying by saying you don’t have an opinion on Israel and generally arguing in bad faith.

But you won’t.

"brutally murdered by the IDF?"

Has this been proved and what was the outcome?

Please include a link to the Court transcript in your answer. Thank you.

PP just explained what Zionism is: a belief that Jewish people have a right to self-determination in their own country.
Why should Jews denounce it just because some Rabbis or Holocaust survivors might choose to do so?
And why shouldn’t a Christian believe in the right of Jewish people to self-determination in their own land?

Today are reporting on investigations into whether this is an incident of Iran state sponsored terrorism. I’m sure there will be more and more of this kind of incident and over the coming years Jewish institutions will face fear of reprisal all around the world, but it is wrong to ascribe this attack to a rise in pro Palestine demonstrations. That is precisely the sort of response that Iran wants - sowing dissent against western institutions such as the freedom to protest. This morning Today were reporting on Iran’s habit of paying organised criminals to carry out their attacks across the world. It was an inevitable consequence of this war.

Not an "inevitable consequence of the war" to have Jewish charities attacked.
You'd think Iranians would focus on Iranian pro monarchy groups, or US targets. Jewish ambulances?

@PurpleThistle7was referring to there being no invasion of the UK.

As for your recap of 1930s German aggressive territorial expansion and the reaction of other countries such as the UK, it's just a simple list of events.

I presume that you took GCSE history which teaches you how to interpret historical events - the "why" - for example why did France and the UK do nothing to halt Germany's earlier territorial expansions.

The answer was that in 1933 both France and the UK were woefully unprepared for a conflict with Germany and "appeased" Germany to buy time in order to rearm.

Only if people do it. They can decide to not attack Jewish people in this country.

Yes. Nothing is "inevitable". It is entirely choice. However, some people seem determined to blame Jewish people for attacks on their own community. We've seen it throughout this thread.

Yep it’s awful to see.

So do you think that having Labour councillors threatening to "slit people's throats " or protests calling for a global intifada or "from the river to the sea" or Bob Vylan calling for death to the IDF or students chanting about "putting another Zio in the ground" then maybe just maybe these actions do lead to a rise in anti semitism and a rise in violence.

I see Golders Green is being given an extra 250 police officers to help protect the Jewish community in the UK. I'm disgusted that this is needed in the UK, indicating how bad anti semitism has become.

Antisemitism, and the attacks on Jewish people are even defended on here, a site primarily for mothers, where antisemitism pops up all the time. The 'but Gaza' line is often used. People wave away attacks on Jewish people here. It's frankly disgusting hatred. Shocking.

What is inevitable is a rise in state sponsored terrorism. One imagines the targets will be chosen to achieve maximum anxiety and to spread maximum distrust and division. This morning’s report talked about the deployment not just of sleeper cells but more alarmingly, organised criminals who carry out targeted attacks in return for for money. Crypto presumably makes this even easier so yes, inevitable.

The Met police say that they have disrupted 20 serious plots recently. These people only need to be lucky once, and there will be a terrible tragedy. Just think about those men who plotted to gun down a peaceful Jewish march in Manchester with automatic weapons. It's an ongoing and critical issue.

@1dayatatime So you never heard of the Battle of Britain ?

"for example why did France and the UK do nothing to halt Germany's earlier territorial expansions."

I have no idea, but it seems UK hasn't learned from this lesson in history 🙄

The synagogue supporting Israel is because it's the Jewish state and half the world's Jews live there, most of whom were exiled or fled from surrounding countries after its formation...I know you say it doesn't make it ok, but it's not any kind of justified explanation either. Israel is constantly targeted because it is the Jewish state, it's not a random coincidence.

A lot to do with losing masses of people in the 1914-18 'war to end all wars' and the 1918 pandemic. The epic loss & devastation made many politicians reluctant to do it again.

It's an interlinked ecosystem.

The war with Iran is Israel's response to a) Iran's incessant threats over the decades to expunge the Jewish state from the fate of the earth, b) Iran's efforts to develop long-range missiles and a nuclear arsenal and c) Iran's decades of sponsoring anti-Israel and outright antisemitic actors in the region (Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis - an evil trinity if ever there was one).

To go back a step, Israel was attacked in October 2023 by Hamas-led militants who broke through the border and carried out a pogrom of a type not seen since the Holocaust, culminating in carrying 250 hostages into Gaza (where 85 of them were killed).

The response to that pogrom in the West was quite incredible to many people. Even before the pogrom had finished, even before Israel had responded with an attack on Gaza, pro-Palestine organisations were planning a march, and these marches took place every week for months. During them, and in public discourse and journalism, Israel was routinely monstered:
Accused of genocide when the ratio of civilian: combatant deaths was one of the lowest on record, if not the lowest, despite the fact that Egypt closed its border against refugees (an over-looked little detail) and despite the other awkward fact that Hamas had used concrete coming into Gaza over the decades to build terror tunnels, but no bomb shelters for the civilian population;
Accused of doing things it didn't do, like hitting the Al-Aqli hospital (just one example of bias by the BBC);
Accused of being a white settler colonial state, despite the fact that most Israelis aren't, in fact, white, and the other fact that many Jews entered the country as refugees from Arab states that had driven them out;
Focused on Israel/Gaza to the almost complete exclusion of other awful things going on in the world - the persecution and murder of Christians in northern Nigeria, for example, or of those in the Sudan.
And so on.

ALL of that has fed into the current atmosphere in the UK. Yes, it's quite possible that if it turns out to be an Iranian cell that firebombed the ambulances and damaged the nearby synagogue, this is something that they would have done anyway - but this act tells you that it's not just Israel that Iran has a problem with, it's Jews anywhere.

And the response to that firebombing has everything to do with latent and not-so-latent antisemitism becoming more open as a direct result of those marches and the skewed reporting. We can see it all over this thread: 'But Gaza!!'

FWIW, yes, Israel has at times done bad things. Yes, I know the roots of this conflict go back for a century or more. I also know that the Palestinians have turned down the offer of a state on several occasions. They could have made a functional state in Gaza, but they voted in Hamas.

I'm not Jewish, but I lived for a time in north London. I got to know a Jewish family very well, though we have since lost touch. Their synagogue was Machzike Hadath, the one that had its windows blown out. This feels very close, and I cannot tell you how much I despise the men that carried out the attack.

Thanks for that info.

I do remember from history books that on top of the terrible losses of young men suffered by the UK, there was the "Spanish Flu" Epidemic that further reduced the population.
Many young women at the time could not find husbands because of fewer young men being available and this reduced the population still further.

More people died of the 'Spanish Flu' than in the war. 'The Great Influenza' is an absolutely fascinating read about it if youre interested.

@EdithStourton thank you for your post. It's very true, and I think it's a tragedy that it's come to this. To think that Jewish people are living in fear in the diverse UK in 2026 is unacceptable and a line has to be drawn.

Well yes. But all I meant was that Germany just threatened to invade the UK and the UK responded with intensity. If Germany had actually invaded and kidnapped and raped a bunch of British women in London then I would guess their response would have been even more so. People do not like being invaded and I'm not sure why Israel should be held to a higher standard than you'd hold another country. War isn't fair, it's not nice, there are really very few rules, and the actual goal in any war is to be stronger than your opponent. Every point in history has massacres and bombings and various forms of concentration camps and it's all terrible.

But if you're fighting an enemy whose one and only goal is to kill you and your entire family and your extended family and any person who shares your religion what exactly are you meant to do except stop them? There's no peaceful resolution on the table here, Hamas isn't going to suddenly focus on educating their population and increasing women's rights while drawing up trade agreements with Israel. They are not interested in any of that, they just want lots and lots of violence. So what do you do with that?

I see that emergency legislation is being rushed through to deal with anti-Semitic (and other racist) doctors. Although the Green Party are -unsurprisingly - in favour of not sanctioning doctors who trumpet anti-Semitism. As I said earlier, they are also against holding terror suspects for more than the regular maximum for ordinary crimes.

What is emerging from the Green Party of late is very concerning.

I have run out of options of people to vote for in the coming elections. Genuinely bewildered.