If you were a British Jew observing Yom Kippur, consider yourself lucky. You will not have switched on any "mainstream" media until after sunset, so you will have missed all the usual bollocks that infests the first hours of coverage. By 12.31pm the BBC had crack reporter Anna Jameson on the scene:
I'm currently standing at the police cordon just on the edge of Middleton Road, where the incident has taken place.
Hold the front page! An "incident" has "taken place"!
There are eight million incidents in the Naked City: This has been the place-taking of one of them. Any clues? Well, it's a vehicular attack in which, after ploughing into the crowd, the driver leaps out and starts stabbing people while wearing what appears to be a suicide belt. As your highly credentialed BBC expert knows, that's the modus operandi of every Nigel Farage voter who doesn't want Jews joining the golf club - or at least not being eligible for the Executive Committee:
This is insane. There's a video of the attacker!! He's a million percent not far right https://t.co/974IPaCpkS
— leilani dowding 🌸🚜 ☮️ (@LeilaniDowding) October 2, 2025
Me over thirteen sod-bollocking years ago:
Stage One: The strange compulsion to assure us that the killer is a 'right wing conservative extremist...' Up north, this view was shared by Canada's most prominent establishment Jew and the Liberal Party attack poodle Warren Kinsella...
Alas:
The insistence that the killer was emblematic of an epidemic of right-wing hate sweeping the planet is, regrettably, no longer operative. Instead, the killer isn't representative of anything at all.
So on to Stage Two: Okay, he may be called Mohammed but he's a 'lone wolf.' Sure, he says he was trained by al-Qaeda, but what does he know? Don't worry, folks, he's just a lone wolf like Major Hasan and Faisal Shahzad and all the other card-carrying members of the Amalgamated Union of Lone Wolves. All jihad is local.
On to Stage Three: Okay, even if there are enough lone wolves around to form their own Radio City Rockette line, it's still nothing to do with Islam.
By the time any UK Jews were listening, we were at Stage Two. The Welsh Choirboy of the Week - after the usual delays from officialdom - had been identified as "35-year-old Jihad al-Shamie, a British citizen of Syrian descent". This striking formulation came from what are laughably known as "the authorities" and was presumably approved by the Home Office, possibly after one of those super-butch-sounding COBRA briefings Sir Keir Starmer flew back from Twinks R Us in Kiev to be briefly briefed on.
So, by "Syrian descent", you mean, like, young Jihad's great-grandpa came from Aleppo? Er, no: Mr al-Shamie was born in Syria, all the way back in the mists of time in the 1990s, so that's quite the rapid descent. He was, as a matter of fact, a Syrian citizen, right at the moment he killed his Jews. Oh, but don't worry: he "became" British in 2006, the name Jihad apparently being no obstacle to the acquisition of UK citizenship. Was he in the "Prevent" database? Are you kidding? With a name like Jihad rather than, say, Nigel?
The only thing that's surprising is how many people are still surprised: Jews being targeted at a Jewish place of worship on the holiest day in the Jewish calendar? Wow! I didn't see that coming.
Really? This very website in January 2015 - the clue is in the headline:
A Judenrein Europe
From the opening paragraph:
Over the last decade, the Continent seems to have developed a certain psychological ease with the routine murder of Jews. What remains of Jewish communal life in Europe now takes place behind reinforced doors and barbed wire, and the actual extinction of an entire identity group's presence is discussed as calmly as the long-range weather. Forty-five per cent of British Jews say Jews have no future in Britain, and 58 per cent say Jews have no future in Europe.
Stage Three? The insistence that it's "nothing to do with Islam"? We don't even need to bother with that anymore. Because in Starmestan any Tweeter who even suggests that it might have something to do with Islam is going to have a half-dozen Brit Wanker Coppers at his door ready to bang him up for a Non-Crime Hate Incident. Twenty years ago, my compatriot Colby Cosh wrote a column with a headline along the lines of "Freedom is the freedom to say 'F**k Islam' or it is nothing": it seems to have vanished from the Internet. Now, as Richard North's son learned, saying "F**k Islam" will get you arrested - even though, for non-Islamic types, the f**king of Islam is devoutly to be wished, or at any rate the f**king off. So Islam is free to stab you and rape your daughters, but you can't express mild misgivings about it.
Now we're moving to the next stage: Increasingly, the persons charged with keeping Jews "safe" are themselves Muslim, starting at the top with Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, likely to be prime minister well before Nigel Farage and widely admired by the supposedly "conservative" Spectator. Post-Christian Europe Islamises remorselessly. Here is the scene at Downing Street last night:
So, to recap: today a man carried out a terrorist attack on a synagogue, murdering two people and injuring several others. And, as ever, the Pally lot's response is to throw a celebration. This footage is from London, but the same thing is happening right now in Manchester.
It's... https://t.co/Ymafm0ejtH
— Aja ♀️🇬🇧 (@AjaTheEmpress) October 2, 2025
That's the English capital. Here's the Scottish capital:
The celebrations of the Manchester synagogue murders spreads to many U.K. cities this evening. The dead Jews are not even cold yet and they celebrate. They know they are untouchable and the government fear them. pic.twitter.com/GBcjZzTXi7
— Nick Buckley MBE (@NickBuckleyMBE) October 2, 2025
For the above crowd, the point is, even - especially - on Yom Kippur, to demonstrate Islam's dominance of the public square. Dead Jews are mere bonus: wow, that totally made my Yom Kippur! To be sure, there are plenty of pasty Anglo-Celts among the delirious mob. The Daily Mail reported the views of Fiona Smith:
I don't give a f*** about the Jewish community right now.
Well, at least she's not "hard right", as the BBC would say. So she won't have to worry about getting the Lisa Connolly treatment. Thanks to the industrial-scale bleepwittery of the ADL, the Canadian Jewish Congress and other "Official Jews", Jews have ever fewer friends among young westerners, who are, consciously or otherwise, assimilating with their future. There is a ruthless demographic logic to it: Dead Jews are, ever and always, merely the warm-up act for dead infidels more generally. Islam prefers to be king on a field of corpses.
Me again thirteen muthableepin' years ago:
Look, pace Ed West, isn't it just a teensy-weensy little bit to do with Islam? Or at any rate the internal contradictions of one-way multiculturalism? No, it's not a competition. Most times in today's Europe, the guys beating, burning and killing Jews will be Muslims. Once in a while, it will be somebody else killing the schoolkids. But is it so hard to acknowledge that rapid, transformative, mass Muslim immigration might not be the most obvious aid to social tranquility? That it might possibly pose challenges that would otherwise not have existed — for uncovered women in Oslo, for gays in Amsterdam, for Jews everywhere? Is it so difficult to wonder if, for these and other groups living in a long-shot social experiment devised by their rulers, the price of putting an Islamic crescent in the diversity quilt might be too high? What's left of Jewish life in Europe is being extinguished remorselessly, one vandalized cemetery, one subway attack at a time. How many Jewish children will be at that school in Toulouse a decade hence? A society that becomes more Muslim eventually becomes less everything else. What is happening on the Continent is tragic, in part because it was entirely unnecessary.
I know, I know... I have nothing new to say. Only ancient lines from the turn of the century, back when it would still have been possible to rescue our societies within accepted political norms. But instead everybody stampeded to vote for Merkel, Trudeau, Macron, Johnson, Starmer ...the last generation of "western" "leaders". A couple of years back, I had dinner with a beloved British actress, as famous as anyone in her profession, Jewish and a longtime Labour luvvie, until an election cycle or two back. We didn't talk about politics, until right at the end, when it raised its malign head. "It's our children who'll have to live with this," she said bleakly.
"No," I said. "Unless you're a centenarian with an advanced case of the monkeypox, we'll all live to see it."
Almost two decades ago, in my book Lights Out: Islam, Free Speech and the Twlight of the West, I put it this way:
A couple of years ago, an Australian reader wrote to say he was beginning to feel as Robert Frost did in 'A Minor Bird':
I have wished a bird would fly away
And not sing by my house all day.My correspondent's unceasingly cheeping bird was Islam.
But Islam cheeps on, while the BBC and the Official Jews and the UK political class are still auditioning to be its prison bitches. The cheeping of Islam will be all that's left - unless ordinary citizens are willing to push back in sufficient Unite-the-Kingdom-size numbers not just at rallies every now and then but against the daily provocations of the Beeb and the coppers and all the rest. Right now, forty-four per cent of the public profess to be in favour of mass deportations - and yet the publicly-funded BBC will not entertain any honest discussion of it. Right now, the Home Office is rubber-stamping the citizenship application of tomorrow's Jihad al-Sharmi.
I'm like Robert Frost re that bird: I'm Islamed out. As his poem continues:
The fault must partly have been in me.
The bird was not to blame for his key.And of course there must be something wrong
In wanting to silence any song.
Too many of our friends and neighbours are still at the stage of that last couplet. As for the preceding lines, in the case of an enfeebled west at twilight, the fault is wholly in us. We chose to do this to ourselves.
~On Sunday, Mark will be here in audio, with Part Five of the new serialisation of his highly prescient bestseller, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It.
