What should Starmer do?
Jonathan Sacerdoti in The Spectator says it better than I could in the last paragraph of his article below ( in bold)
spectator.com/article/why-wont-starmer-take-the-safety-of-britains-jews-seriously/
” Another day, another attack on Jews. …..
Keir Starmer finds it ‘deeply concerning’ and ‘utterly appalling’. Like many Jewish Britons, I find him deeply concerning. I find Zack Polanski utterly appalling. I find the Palestine Solidarity Campaign reprehensible for its part in the climate of hate engulfing us all.
This comes after the Yom Kippur terror attack at Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation in Manchester in October, where a car was driven at people outside a synagogue and worshippers were stabbed. Adrian Daulby and Melvin Cravitz were killed and three others seriously injured. It comes after four Hatzola ambulances, run by a Jewish volunteer emergency service, were set alight in Golders Green last month, oxygen cylinders exploding and nearby windows shattering.
It comes after petrol bottles and a brick were thrown at Finchley Reform Synagogue two weeks ago. After an attempted firebombing at Kenton United Synagogue the week before last. After counter-terror police arrested eight people over suspected arson plots against Jewish-linked sites last week. After a suspected security incident near the Israeli embassy in Kensington Gardens two weeks ago.
It comes after an arson attack on a memorial wall in Golders Green yesterday. After Jewish schoolboys were assaulted at Belsize Park station two years ago. After a Jewish man was attacked by teenagers in Hendon. After a Jewish father was abused on the Northern line. After Israelis were attacked in Leicester Square for speaking Hebrew, also two years ago. After a man in Wembley was asked whether he was Jewish and then punched in the face three years ago. After Jews leaving a West London synagogue were abused and assaulted; and after Gail’s in Archway was daubed with red paint and anti-Israel slogans in February because a bakery had somehow become another acceptable proxy for Jewishness.
The list is ugly because the facts are ugly. Synagogues. Ambulances. Schoolboys. Restaurants. Shops. Tube stations. Memorial walls. Men in their seventies. Men wearing kippot. People speaking Hebrew in public.
The country has been given enough evidence to understand what is happening. It has chosen, far too often, to rename the evidence as ‘tension’.
Our prime minister chose to ‘recognise’ a Palestinian state in the middle of Israel’s war against Palestinians who had brutally invaded Israel and were still holding hostages in the Gaza Strip. Now this country is seeing the fruits of such encouragement and such reward for terror. These attacks are familiar to Jews who have seen Palestinian Arabs carry them out for decades in Israel: stabbings, car rammings, arson, suicide bombings. A repertoire of violence once treated as distant is now present here, in Britain.
Palestinian terror groups historically pioneered hijacking and suicide bombing as techniques of political violence, inspiring imitators far beyond the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They also refined the use of knives and vehicles as instruments of terror. The so-called Stabbing Intifada, or Knife Intifada, which erupted in autumn 2015, marked a grim tactical shift. Attacks no longer required a bomb-maker, a cell, a command structure, or even much planning. A kitchen knife, a screwdriver, a car, a bus stop, a checkpoint, a crowded Jerusalem street: these became the architecture of attack.
Between October 2015 and March 2016, the wave included more than 200 stabbings or attempted stabbings, dozens of shootings, and more than 40 car-ramming attacks. The pattern was deliberately primitive and therefore difficult to pre-empt: young assailants, often acting alone, using ordinary civilian tools against soldiers, police and civilians.
The ramming attacks followed the same logic. They turned the everyday vehicle into a weapon, collapsing the distance between civilian life and battlefield conduct. Jerusalem had already seen this method in 2014, when Palestinian attackers used cars and vans to plough into pedestrians and public-transport stops. By 2015, it had become part of a broader repertoire of low-tech violence alongside stabbings.
The stabbing and ramming intifadas have now been globalised. They are now in Britain.
It is open season on Jews, and Keir Starmer does not seem to care. Nobody in power does. Statements of concern trip off their tongues reflexively. Money is funnelled to Jewish security organisations as a perfunctory response and to feed the news cycle, as though the message is: here you go, sort it out yourselves, buy some more CCTV cameras.
A serious state protects its citizens before they are attacked, not merely after. We know the state can act fast when it wants to. After the protests following the Southport stabbings, ministers and police were swift to make examples of people who had expressed forbidden views. Yet calls for death to Jews, chants of ‘Intifada’, and television reports claiming that the Israeli army targeted medics in a hospital when the opposite was true, go effectively unpunished. They have consequences. They have produced violence and intimidation.…….
Mumbled regret after each attack is worthless. What is needed is remorse for having helped create the climate in which this is happening. What are needed are acknowledgement, apology and action.
What could they do? Arrest hate preachers who call for Jews to be killed. Investigate religious sermons that spread Jew-hatred or call for non-adherents to be killed. Overhaul systemic anti-Jewish bias in the national broadcaster. Establish proper inquiries to identify and root out extremist funding in universities and wider society. Counter every attempt to intimidate or dominate Jews, and others, by sectarian forces. Take every threat seriously. Ban Iranian regime-linked groups from operating in the UK. Investigate charities that raise money and then funnel it to terrorist or terrorist-sympathising causes.