Orphan Plants

Golders Green Is Not a Coincidence. It Is a Consequence. A man in his seventies was waiting at a bus stop on Golders Green Road this morning when a 45 year old male pulled a knife from his jacket and stabbed him repeatedly in the face. A second Jewish man was stabbed outside Hager's Shul synagogue on the same road. Shomrim, the Jewish neighbourhood watch, detained the suspect before police arrived and deployed a taser. Counter terror police are leading the investigation. The suspect's nationality and background are still being established. This is the third major attack on the Jewish community in Golders Green in five weeks. In late March four Hatzola Northwest ambulances were firebombed outside Machzike Hadath Synagogue by a group linked to Iranian proxy networks. On Monday an arson attack was reported at a memorial wall commemorating Iranian victims of the regime and the dead of October 7th. And this morning a man ran along Golders Green Road with a knife attempting to stab every Jewish person he could find. Counter terror police are leading all three investigations. The IRGC remains unproscribed. The government that knows all of this attended an Iranian embassy party and called it diplomacy. Keir Starmer has called this morning's attack appalling. He is right. But appalling is what you call something that surprises you. Nothing about this should surprise anyone. The Chief Rabbi stood at the scene of burning ambulances five weeks ago and said his community did not feel safe. He has been saying it for two and a half years. Danny Cohen wrote that British Jews are sensing frightening echoes of 1930s Germany. Jewish students are being chased home on university campuses. Jewish families are changing their names and making plans to leave. One in five students would refuse to house share with a Jewish person. The atmosphere in which a man feels emboldened to run along a public street stabbing elderly Jewish men in the face was not created by accident. Zarah Sultana declared Zionism one of the greatest threats to humanity from a parliamentary platform. The Green Party is preparing to pass a motion declaring Jewish self determination racist while its activists describe Jews as an abomination to this planet in WhatsApp groups. The Together Alliance marched through central London carrying Iranian regime flags days after the ambulance firebombing. Thirty six Labour MPs mobilised parliamentary machinery to silence Nick Timothy the man who named what was building. The IHRC led chants of death to Israel on the Embankment. Bobby Vylan led chants of death to the IDF on a London stage and the CPS cleared him. Slogan becomes atmosphere. Atmosphere becomes permission. Permission becomes action. Ed Davey has said the government must do more to keep Jewish communities safe. This from the leader of a party whose instinct on every question that led to this morning has been accommodation, whose policies protect the legal framework that blocks the deportation of those with no right to be here. The audacity of that response is itself a measure of how completely the political class has failed to understand what it has allowed to happen. The state is not short of intelligence. MI5 has thwarted twenty Iranian plots. The warning signs have been visible and documented for two and a half years. What the state has been short of is the political will to name what is happening, proscribe the organisations responsible and hold to account those whose words and marches provided the permission structure within which this violence operates. Call it terrorism. Proscribe the IRGC. Stop the marches. Hold those who created this atmosphere to account. Or keep explaining to a man in his seventies why he was stabbed in the face at a bus stop on his way home from synagogue.