Farrukh Dhondy | Will UK’s Muslims & Asylum-Seekers Get Targeted After ‘Hit’ at Synagogue?

“I gave up jealousy long ago

It’s a waste of emotion destroying your peace

Individuals love whom they want to and so

The ground-springs of karma, beg for release

Recalling is futile, the moment has passed

Whatever they contrive is as nothing to me

The heart-sting of jealousy for some are bound to last

But from this waste of life, I’m finally free…”

From The Delusions of Mary Warner, by Bachchoo

A Syrian immigrant to Britain called Jihad al-Shamie drove a car into a crowd of worshippers outside a synagogue in Manchester on Thursday, October 2, the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur. He then stepped out of his vehicle wielding a knife, attempting to stab the worshippers.

The police were very promptly on the scene and shot him dead. Unfortunately, they tragically also shot two people in the crowd, one fatally and the other who suffered serious injuries.

The final toll in the incident was three in hospital and two dead.

The police investigated Jihad’s house and spoke to a former girlfriend and released a statement saying he was a follower of the death-cult Islamic State (ISIS) and was going to live up to his name -- Jihad, which didn’t mean as in Sufi interpretations a unity with God. To him it meant terrorist murder.

Subsequently, the police released details about Jihad and his family, including the fact that on that date he was out on bail after being charged with rape.

After this anti-Semitic terrorist attack, Jihad’s father issued a statement to the press regretting in profound terms his son’s act and conveying his sympathies to the families of the dead and wounded.

This was a strange, perhaps self-preservative and certainly insincere response, as two days later the national newspapers authoritatively published the fact that this father of Jihad al–Shamie had posted social media messages in full support of the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israeli citizens, killing and capturing hostages. Daddy clearly wanted to send some contrary signal, very possibly to fend off retaliation, from Jewish militants or sympathisers, on him and his family.

Following this antisemitic act, the newly-appointed home secretary, the severely-determined (I await her future actions to perhaps use other adjectival descriptions) Shabana Mahmood, asked potential pro-Palestine demonstrators to postpone their plans to demonstrate on the Saturday after the Manchester attack.

They didn’t. A pro-Palestine group, which even supported a proscribed outfit labelled “terrorist” by the Labour government, Palestine Action, gathered to demonstrate in London’s Trafalgar Square. Some of them carried pro-Palestine Action slogans, a determined and principled defiance of the current “terrorist” classification. Five hundred of these demonstrators were arrested and will be charged in due course.

One of the demonstrators, a Jewish woman called Zoe Cohen, expressed her deep condemnation of the anti-Semitic terror attack in Manchester, sent her sympathies to the families of the dead but expressly insisted that she would continue to protest against the genocide perpetrated by the Benjamin Netanyahu government on innocent civilians in Gaza.

As soon as the police released the name of the perpetrator of the attack, gentle reader, I confess, a convincing apprehension haunted my days and nights -- and no doubt those of a few million others. The spectre stalking recent (I won’t dignify it with the term “contemporary”) Britain is that of extreme right-wing rabble-rousers and demagogues. Their targets have been asylum-seekers who land in overcrowded, precarious rubber dinghies from coastal France on southern British shores and are then accommodated in cheap hotels and hostels in cities to which they are sent.

Nigel Farage, the leader of the party Reform, recently making large gains in public opinion polls, has announced his party’s intention, if elected, to deny them asylum and deport the lot. Last week he roused his rabble with the lie that they are invaders who kill and eat British swans.

Others of his inclination encourage mobs to gather outside the shabby hotels where the asylum seekers have been lodged by past and present governments while their claims to stay are processed, with threatening slogans and in some past cases intent to attack the premises and occupants.

The most violent of these mobs say they are there because Johnny foreigner, the targets of their protest, are rapists and terrorists and they want to protect Britain and the women of Britain from them.

Yes, gentle reader, Jihad al-Shamie was both -- a rapist and an anti-Semitic terrorist. Would a storm of attacks on Muslims, on asylum-seeker refugees, on any immigrant going about his or her business follow?

At the time of writing, there has been a single reported attempt by masked individuals to set fire to a mosque. Damage, but no casualties. Even so, the right-wing press, reflecting or providing a provocative perspective on “immigration”, have begun to expose what they call “the lack of ‘integration” of non-white people into the “culture” of Britain (such as it is?)

Robert Jenrick, the leading challenger of Kemi Badenoch as the leader of the Tory Party, said that while he was with a documentary crew in Birmingham, spending hours in an area called Handsworth he “didn’t see a single white face” apart from his own -- he presumably, narcissistically, must have seen a reflection in a shop front window?

Judging “integration” by skin colour must be listed as a new cultural discovery, though I doubt if it will win Mr Jenrick the Nobel Prize in Sociology!