Those calling to ‘globalize the intifada’ have more blood on their hands

Jonathan S. Tobin

Members of the community comfort each other near Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation in Manchester, England, following domestic terror attack at the synagogue that resulted in the deaths of two people Yom Kippur, Oct. 2, 2025, Photo by Paul Currie/AFP via Getty Images.

Don’t expect the latest incident of antisemitic violence to wake the world up to the incitement against Jews that has swept across the globe in the last two years since Oct. 7. The attack on Yom Kippur at the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation in Manchester, England, that cost the lives of two Jews rightly provoked condemnations from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and other politicians in the United Kingdom, as well as shocked headlines around the world.

Still, there is something important lacking in the responses to the coverage of this tragedy on the part of those in the media, global organizations like the United Nations, or those who have joined in, supported, justified and rationalized pro-Hamas demonstrations and activism throughout the West. Their willingness to spread the anti-Israel propaganda put out by terrorists who led the Palestinian Arab assault across the Gaza border on Oct. 7, 2023 has helped mainstream and normalize blood libels about the Jewish state and the Jews. And that has contributed to an atmosphere of hate that makes atrocities like the one committed at the British synagogue not merely possible but inevitable.

Threats against Jews

Though they were willing to admit the obvious and declare the attack an act of domestic terrorism, British authorities say they are still working to discover the motive of Jihad al-Shamie, the assailant who was killed at the scene by police. He has been identified as a 35-year-old British citizen of Syrian descent. Three other people who have, at press time, not yet been identified are reported to have assisted him in carrying out the assault, which involved a car being driven into the crowd of Jewish worshippers outside the synagogue and a knife attack. But you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to realize that the current atmosphere, where threats against Jews are constantly heard at mass demonstrations in London and other British cities in support of Palestinian terrorism, is part of the equation.

We’ve seen a string of violent attacks during the past year in the United States, including the shooting deaths of two young Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, D.C.; the firebombing of a march for Israeli hostages in Boulder, where an 82-year-old Holocaust survivor was killed; and an overnight arson attack on the Harrisburg residence of Gov. Josh Shapiro during Passover. All were committed in the name of “Free Palestine, “a slogan whose meaning is the erasure of Israel, not the creation of an Arab state alongside it, which the Palestinians have repeatedly demonstrated that they don’t want.

Yet when pro-Hamas mobs on college campuses and city streets chant “From the river to the sea,” and especially, “globalize the intifada,” those aren’t phrases consistent with the concern for human rights or the plight of Palestinians in the current war. They are a demand for the genocide of Jews and terrorism against them everywhere. And that’s exactly what happened in Manchester—the English city with the largest concentration of Jews outside of metropolitan London—and in those attacks in America.

It’s true that only Jihad al-Shamie and his accomplices are directly responsible for the Manchester crime, as it is equally true that only the assailants who proclaimed that they killed in the name of “Free Palestine” should be held accountable for those crimes.

The ‘genocide’ blood libel

Even if these are all so-called “lone wolf” attacks, they point to how the demonization of Jews has been legitimized in public discourse. Those who have taken sides against Israel in the war that followed the Oct. 7 massacre of 1,200 people in southern Israel haven’t just expressed sympathy for the people who participated in and cheered for those unspeakable atrocities. They’ve claimed that the just war Israel is fighting against Hamas is a crime and falsely asserted that its purpose is the annihilation of Palestinians. That’s despite the care that the Israel Defense Forces takes to avoid civilian casualties, while Hamas is deliberately seeking to endanger and even starve their own people.

As a result of this, the charge that Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza—a preposterous and libelous falsehood that is an attempt to redefine the word in a way that would encompass virtually any armed conflict—is now routinely published or broadcast in legacy corporate press outlets, even in offhand references as if it were a historic and unchallenged fact.

This is not merely biased journalism. Rather, it’s a talking point for delegitimizing Israel’s right of self-defense against a genocidal terrorist movement. It is also shorthand for smearing all Israelis and Jews as the moral equivalent of the Nazis, an antisemitic trope. The point is not just to deflect attention from the goals of the Palestinians, whose national identity is inextricably linked with their century-old war against the right of Jews to live in their ancient homeland. By labeling Israelis and those who support them—as is true for the overwhelming majority of Jews—in this manner, those who employ these canards are implicitly legitimizing violence against them.

The Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation in Manchester, England, in 2015. Credit: David Dixon via Wikimedia Commons.

That’s the context for attacks such as the Manchester synagogue murders.

Israel’s foes claim that linking their libelous rhetoric to antisemitism and violence is unfair. The liberal media that both defend their efforts and help mainstream their talking points generally agree. They assert that noting the way their advocacy and actions legitimize murderous attacks is unmerited since all they are doing is “criticizing” Israel.

Of course, Israel shouldn’t be exempt from “criticism.” However, individuals who chant for its destruction aren’t “criticizing” it. They are cheering on those who work for that genocidal goal. Criticism is about changing actual policy. What those who scream “From the river to the sea” are endorsing is the position held by most Palestinians in which the one Jewish state on the planet is considered illegitimate and therefore worthy of destruction.

Starmer’s responsibility

That is also why the condemnations of the Manchester attack coming from leaders like Starmer ring hollow.

By recognizing Palestinian statehood unilaterally, along with France, Canada and Australia, without Hamas releasing the hostages it took on Oct. 7, or a commitment on their part to disarm and end their war to destroy Israel, Starmer’s government was rewarding the terrorists for their barbarous actions.

This was an outrageously ill-timed and irresponsible effort to undermine both Israel’s campaign to defeat Hamas and American diplomatic efforts to end the war. It sent a signal to the terrorists—and their foreign enablers and supporters—that destroying the group responsible for the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust was not as important as appeasing domestic constituencies of leftist and Muslim voters who hate Israel and the Jews.

The idea that you can separate loathing for the Jewish state and the loathing of Jews is a myth that has been debunked by the violence that Israel-haters have employed against Jewish communities around the world. So, too, is the notion that policies that reward violence against Jews don’t validate and ultimately encourage those who want to translate their Jew-hatred into crimes such as the one in Manchester.

There, as was the case in the U.S. capital, Colorado and Pennsylvania, we saw the “Globalize the intifada” slogan at work. As long as most of the media continues to spread blood libels about Israel and politicians either endorse them or are pressured into discriminatory and harmful policies because of them, the flood of Jewish blood spilled by these “Free Palestine” antisemites will only continue to increase.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Syndicate, a senior contributor for The Federalist, a columnist for Newsweek and a contributor to many other publications. He covers the American political scene, foreign policy, the U.S.-Israel relationship, Middle East diplomacy, the Jewish world and the arts. He hosts the JNS “Think Twice” podcast, both the weekly video program and the “Jonathan Tobin Daily” program, which are available on all major audio platforms and YouTube. Previously, he was executive editor, then senior online editor and chief political blogger, for Commentary magazine. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of The Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia and editor of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger. He has won more than 60 awards for commentary, art criticism and other writing. He appears regularly on television, commenting on politics and foreign policy. Born in New York City, he studied history at Columbia University.

British Authorities Allowed Antisemitism to Fester. Now Two Jews Are Dead in Manchester.

Jonathan Sacerdoti

People react near the scene, after an attack in which a car was driven at pedestrians and stabbings were reported at a synagogue in north Manchester, Britain, on Yom Kippur, Oct. 2, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Phil Noble

As Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, draws to its close, we Jews plead: “Open the gates for us, even as they close.” It is the cry of a people who know that time is short, that chances to change are finite. And as I joined in that call myself, surrounded by those I’ve known my whole life at synagogue in London, I thought how Britain too should act before it is too late — to repent, to rectify, to make good — before the closing of the gate. For Britain has had a decade or more of warnings about jihadist terror and rising antisemitism.

And yet, on the morning of Yom Kippur on Thursday, two Jews were killed outside their synagogue in Manchester, and the gates are fast closing on illusion and denial.

A decade ago, in the aftermath of the Hypercacher supermarket massacre in Paris, I said what should have been obvious: the ideology that sent Amedy Coulibaly to murder Jews in cold blood would not remain contained to France. I warned then, in a Sky News interview, that Islamic extremists who had returned from Syria with training, weapons, and a genocidal worldview posed a direct and specific threat to Jewish communities in Britain. That warning was not cryptic, nor was it speculative. It was grounded in fact and in history. But it was dismissed.

Now, in Manchester, it has come to pass again.

On Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, worshippers at Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation were attacked in a manner grimly familiar to anyone who has studied Islamist terror. At 9:31 in the morning, a man rammed his vehicle into congregants before attacking with a knife. Two men, Adrian Daulby, 53, and Melvin Cravitz, 66, were killed. Three others remain in hospital with serious injuries. The suspect, named by police as Jihad Al-Shamie, a 35-year-old British citizen of Syrian descent, was shot dead by armed officers.

We should dwell on the symbolism. A synagogue targeted on Yom Kippur. British Jews once again forced to barricade their sanctuary. A suspect literally named Jihad, when only a year ago Londoners watched Hizb ut-Tahrir demonstrators chanting that very word in open calls for holy war. Then, the Metropolitan Police reassured us that “jihad has a number of meanings.” Today, two Jews lie dead.

This was foreseeable. British Jews have lived under extraordinary security for years. Synagogues, schools, and communal centers rely on cameras, fences, guards, and the vigilance of CST volunteers. Families tell their children not to wear uniforms on buses, not to speak Hebrew in public, not to appear recognizably Jewish. We knew something like this would happen. The only surprise is that it has taken until 2025 for such a day to arrive in Britain.

And yet, the official response has been one of ritual platitudes. The Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, has spoken of deploying more police to synagogues and expressed his horror that Jews were attacked at prayer. Words are necessary, but words cannot obscure reality. His government, like its predecessors, has chosen to ignore warning after warning. It emboldened extremism with the hasty recognition of a Palestinian state, long before any credible peace plan existed. It indulged weekly marches in central London where chants about the “army of Muhammad” killing Jews were not fringe but center-stage. It failed to act against hate preachers, failed to prosecute violent demonstrators, failed to confront the hostility to Jews that has bled into British institutions and media.

The BBC and other broadcasters have, for years, twisted their reporting on Israel to such an extent that Jewish safety in Britain has become collateral damage in the narrative war. When synagogues were daubed with “Free Gaza” graffiti, when schoolgirls were struck with bottles, when buildings in Golders Green were smeared with feces, when radical clerics called for Jews to be killed, the media’s instinct was to frame Jewish alarm as a lobbying effort, as if security itself were a political demand.

But this is not political. It is existential. And it is not only a Jewish problem. Britain has already bled from the hands of Islamist terrorism at Westminster Bridge, at London Bridge, in the Tube, in Manchester Arena. MPs have been murdered, commuters blown apart, children incinerated at a concert. The ideology is not selective. It does not merely menace Jews, though Jews remain its perennial and symbolic target. It menaces the fabric of our entire civic life.

That is why the protests that followed the Manchester killings were so grotesque. Hours after two Jews were murdered outside their synagogue, thousands gathered in central London waving Palestinian flags, clashing with police, chanting slogans, some dismissing the attack altogether. One campaigner told a journalist she did not “care about the Jewish community.” This is the climate we have allowed to fester. When hatred marches so brazenly, it ceases to be protest and becomes license.

The historical parallels are not abstract. England was the cradle of the first blood libel in Norwich in 1144, where Jews were accused of murdering a Christian boy for ritual purposes. By 1290, Edward I expelled the entire Jewish population. Centuries later, Kristallnacht in Germany turned synagogues into smouldering ruins. Each time, antisemitism was permitted to grow, ignored by authorities, rationalized by elites, until violence erupted. What happened in Manchester is not the same in scale, but it is the same in kind.

Two men from Crumpsall are now dead. Their synagogue, where generations have gathered in faith, is a crime scene. Rabbi Daniel Walker had to barricade his congregants inside and continue leading Yom Kippur prayers in bloodstained robes. This is Britain in 2025.

The lesson is not complicated. Where Jew-hatred is tolerated, civilization is corroded. A society that cannot keep its synagogues safe cannot keep itself safe. The victims are Jewish today, but the target is Britain itself.

On Yom Kippur, Jews confess: “For the sin we have committed by silence … by cowardice … by hardening the heart.” These are not only our sins; they are Britain’s. For years, leaders silenced themselves in the face of hate, institutions cowered before extremists, and the media hardened its heart against Jewish suffering. Adrian Daulby and Melvin Cravitz are dead at least in part because this nation’s guardians chose inaction when it could have chosen to prevent the climate of Jew-hatred from growing. If Britain does not confront this hatred with justice and resolve, then it is complicit in its return.

Editor’s note: British police said on Friday they may have accidentally shot a victim who died in the Manchester attack, as well as one of the survivors, as they attempted to stop the perpetrator. Greater Manchester Police chief constable Steve Watson said in a statement that one of those killed suffered a gunshot wound but that the assailant, shot dead by officers at the scene, was not carrying a firearm.

Pozbawiona rozumu debata o Żydach

Joshua Hoffman

Link do oryginału: https://www.futureofjewish.com/p/the-jewish-debate-has-lost-its-mind

Future of Jewish, 19 września 2025

Iran, China, Russia Pledge Coordinated Action Against European Efforts to Reinstate UN Sanctions on Tehran

Ailin Vilches Arguello

Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian addresses the 80th United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) at the UN headquarters in New York, US, Sept. 24, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Jeenah Moon

Iran, China, and Russia have pledged coordinated action against European efforts to reinstate United Nations sanctions on Tehran, denouncing them as “illegal” after repeated negotiations failed to reach an agreement over the Iranian nuclear program.

On the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister for Legal and International Affairs Kazem Gharibabadi met with his Chinese and Russian counterparts to explore deeper diplomatic collaboration amid escalating tensions with the West.

“We agreed on coordinated action against the unlawful efforts of Germany, France, and the UK to bring back sanctions that had been lifted,” the Iranian diplomat said.

Last month, Britain, France, and Germany formally initiated the 30-day process to activate the snapback mechanism, accusing Tehran of violating the 2015 nuclear deal meant to curb its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief — a move Iran condemned as “unjustified and unlawful.”

Russia and China, both signatories to the 2015 nuclear deal, have backed the Islamist regime in Tehran while firmly opposing Europe’s efforts to reinstate UN sanctions.

Facing the looming threat of economic sanctions and still reeling from its 12-day war with Israel, Iran is seeking support from its allies to restore and strengthen its defense capabilities.

On Wednesday, meanwhile, Mohammad Eslami, head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization (AEOI), announced that Tehran signed an agreement with Moscow to build more nuclear power plants in the country, further deepening their ties.

Earlier this year, Russia pledged to build eight nuclear power plants in Iran, including four in the southern province of Bushehr.

According to a press release from the AEOI, the newly signed deal aims to expand bilateral cooperation on the “peaceful use of nuclear energy,” with the goal of strengthening energy security, advancing technology, and promoting sustainable development.

This week, Iran also received Russian MiG-29 fighter jets, while the country awaits delivery of more advanced Sukhoi Su-35s, emphasizing the regime’s latest push to rebuild its military capabilities.

“Once these systems are fully in place, our enemies will understand the language of power,” Abolfazl Zohrevand, a member of the Iranian parliament’s National Security Committee, told local media.

The Iranian lawmaker also claimed that Tehran is receiving China’s HQ-9 and Russia’s S-400 air defense systems “in significant numbers.”

According to the Associated Press, Iran has also started rebuilding several ballistic missile facilities as part of a wider effort to restore its missile program, which was significantly damaged during its war with Israel.

The United Kingdom, France, and Germany — collectively known as the E3 — have offered to delay the reimposition of UN sanctions for up to six months to allow more time for negotiations on a long-term agreement over Iran’s nuclear program.

However, the offer depends on Tehran restoring access for UN inspectors, addressing concerns about its enriched uranium stockpile, and engaging in talks with Washington.

Unless Iran and the European powers reach a deal to postpone the reimposition of sanctions within the next few days, the snapback process will move forward.

Speaking at the UN General Assembly on Wednesday, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian vowed that the country would withstand any renewed sanctions and continue pursuing its national interests, emphasizing that Tehran would “never bow before aggressors.”

Iran has long maintained that its nuclear program is solely for peaceful civilian purposes. However, Western countries have accused Tehran of seeking the capability to develop nuclear weapons.

Canada Issues First-Ever Jail Sentence for Holocaust Denial

David Swindle

A drone view of the “Arbeit macht frei” gate at the former Auschwitz concentration camp ahead of the 80th anniversary of its liberation, Oswiecim, Poland, Jan. 10, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Kacper Pempel