After Preston, UK can no longer shy away: Islamist extremism fuelling Jew-hate terror in northwest must be stopped

The revelation in court that Saadaoui had been gathering intelligence about last January’s March Against Antisemitism in Manchester will make for particularly painful reading. So too will the fact that he used a fake account to join the Facebook group of the Jewish Representative Council of Greater Manchester and conducted surveillance of Jewish schools, nurseries and synagogues around Prestwich.

Saadaoui boasted to an undercover police officer that he viewed Jews as “pigs and monkeys”. This language reflects a selective and extremist twisting of the Qur’an, deliberately favoured and propagated by Hamas and similar Islamist movements to dehumanise Jews and sanctify violence against them. It is not theology; it is incitement.

We also need to be clear about motivation. Manchester’s Jewish community was not targeted simply because of events in the Middle East. The truth runs deeper — and darker. These men did not hate Jews because of Israel; they hated Israel because they hate Jews. Antisemitism and anti-Zionism here feed each other in a vicious, self-reinforcing circle. Hussein told investigators that “your government, your Prime Minister has sent weapons to kill our children”. That grievance was used to justify the targeting of Jews in Britain, thousands of miles from any battlefield.

This may be obvious to readers of the JC, but it is still too often missed or downplayed elsewhere. The failure to recognise how obsessive hostility towards Israel can slide rapidly into violent antisemitism has been conspicuous in much of the reporting of this case.

That matters, because the broader atmosphere does real harm. Repeated exposure to violent and absolutist rhetoric — chants such as “globalise the intifada” or “from the river to the sea” — has empowered extremists by blurring moral and legal boundaries. This is not always because people intend violence, but because violent language becomes normalised.

There is a genuine and difficult challenge here for the police and prosecutors. Defendants may claim metaphor, political speech, or protection under free expression, and juries can be reluctant to convict where intent appears contested. But the status quo is plainly not working. When slogans with long and bloody histories are repeatedly shouted in public, yet rarely tested robustly in court, the message received by extremists is that the risk is low.

It should not have taken years of pleading from the Jewish community — or murderous attacks overseas — for authorities to begin acknowledging that some of this rhetoric may cross into criminality. Nor should public broadcasters continue to dismiss concerns about imbalance or context in coverage that fuels grievance narratives. A clear-eyed reassessment is overdue.

This case also sits within a wider and troubling pattern. The North West of England has seen three serious terrorist incidents involving Jewish targets in as many years. The perpetrators of this foiled plot and the Heaton Park attack came from Wigan and Prestwich, while another Islamist extremist from Blackburn carried out an armed siege at a synagogue near Dallas, Texas in 2022.

Something has gone wrong. Local and national authorities must urgently examine whether recruitment or radicalisation networks are operating in the region and address long-standing concerns about extremist rhetoric in certain religious settings.

I therefore welcome the Charity Commission’s recent decision to open a compliance case into Fountains of Knowledge, the charity that runs Masjid Sunnah Nelson mosque near Burnley, following concerns about sermons delivered there. The mosque, reportedly visited in the past by the Heaton Park attacker, has previously been scrutinised after its imam described Jews as “treacherous”. At the time, Lancashire Constabulary said it found “no evidence” of hate speech.

That judgment, like others, now demands re-examination. Public confidence depends on police and regulators demonstrating that they take Islamist ideology and antisemitic rhetoric seriously, wherever it appears.

While the terror threat across the UK from Islamist extremism remains high, it is Britain’s Jewish community that faces the most immediate and targeted danger.

Our authorities deserve credit for foiling this appalling plot. But praise alone is not enough. If we are serious about protecting British Jews, we must confront — rather than euphemise — the pernicious ideology that drives such hatred, before more lives are placed at risk.