British police pledge £25m for Jewish security in wake of Golders Green stabbing

JTA – British police have allocated £25 million (R566 million) in new funding to keep Jewish communities safe. 

The announcement came a day after a stabbing in the Orthodox neighbourhood of Golders Green left two men wounded and a community reeling. The stabbing has been declared a terrorist attack. 

“There’s no getting away from the fact that this was not a one-off,” Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who visited the neighbourhood on Thursday, said during a press conference. “This has been a series of attacks on our Jewish community, particularly in recent weeks, and there is a very deep sense of anxiety, of concern about security, about safety, about identity frankly.” 

A new group called Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamiya, or the Islamic Movement of the People of the Right Hand ‒ which has claimed attacks on Jewish targets across Europe ‒ said it was responsible for the stabbing. British officials said they were investigating that claim. 

They disclosed that the 45-year-old man arrested in the stabbing, who was first subdued by Jewish security forces, was a British national who had come to the country “lawfully” from Somalia as a child. 

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, who joined Starmer in Golders Green, told the BBC that she was treating the spree of antisemitic incidents as “absolutely an emergency”, though she declined to adopt language used by Starmer’s terrorism advisor that there was a “national security emergency” because of its implications on civil liberties. 

Still, she said, she believed that frequent pro-Palestinian protests in London contained “far too many instances” of hate crimes, and she spoke of her opposition to antisemitism in terms of her own religious identity. 

“When I take the stand that I am taking against antisemitism, I am doing so as a practising Muslim. It is absolutely in line with my faith,” Mahmood said. She added about British Jews, “This land is their land. It is my land too. We share this land and we must all work together to keep each other safe.” 

The stabbing, which followed arson at synagogues and of ambulances owned by a Jewish emergency service as well as a deadly attack on a Manchester synagogue last year, has prompted an escalation of fear among British Jews. Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis warned that visibly Jewish people, those wearing symbols of their Jewish identity, were “not always safe” in England.