Jewish Breaking News‘Appalling State of Affairs’: Top U.K. Police Chief Sounds Alarm on Rising Attacks Against Jews
In an interview with The Times Friday, the chief of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Mark Rowley, described what he termed “an appalling state of affairs” regarding the spike in attacks targeting the London Jewish community.
Blaming social media for driving the increase in Jew hatred, he said that British Jews are now facing their greatest threat during a time when violent actors on the extremes of the right and the left, including even state-backed violent-actors, are targeting them.
“If you overlay three things now — hate crime, terrorism and hostile state activity — you add all that together, that combined effect with that building of ideology online, that is really dangerous and troubling,” he said. “And Jewish communities feel that, and you can see that in how they talk, how it’s making them change their lives.”
Rowley called for funding to deploy 300 police officers to neighborhoods like Golders Green, which is densely populated with visibly Jewish people, making them particularly vulnerable to attack. He praised the cops who caught the attacker in last week’s stabbing, a 45-year-old Somali-born man who has been identified as Essa Suleiman. According to the Metropolitan Police, he has been charged with two counts of attempted murder and one count of carrying a bladed weapon in public.
When asked if the level of antisemitism is unprecedented, he pointed to polling that shows about 15 percent of youth engage in Holocaust denial to support that idea. He also warned that social media was normalizing antisemitism.
“What troubles me is that this isn’t just about a few racist idiots, this is standing on something that is more embedded in society that isn’t being challenged. There’s too much licensing of it in public debate,” he said.
He also criticized politicians for their cowardice in refusing to openly confront antisemitism.
“You can go back to lots of reports over time saying to successive governments over 10, 20 years there are some issues that need paying attention to,” he said. “They haven’t really had that attention.”