Jews are victimised twice: once by those who hate them, and again by a law enforcement model that rewards their civility with indifference
November 25, 2025 10:38
The spectacle at St John’s Wood Synagogue was not an aberration. It was the latest entry in a now-familiar pattern: a police culture that has quietly redefined success as the absence of physical violence – even if that requires sacrificing the rights of the very people the law is meant to protect.
The Public Order Act was invoked; maps were drawn; stern warnings issued not to protest near the synagogue. And then – having done the easy part – the police let protesters walk straight through. Officers looked on for far too long as anti-Zionist protestors assembled in front of the synagogue, muttering about not wanting to “antagonise the situation further”. Chants of “from the river to the sea” – a slogan the Prime Minister himself has told this newspaper is antisemitic – were allowed to ring out in the vicinity of the doors of a Jewish house of worship. All this at a moment when British Jews are the most targeted minority in the country, and only weeks after two congregants were murdered in a synagogue. That is not public order. It is capitulation.
The very community that already has to live behind steel gates, reinforced glass and private security is told, implicitly, that it must simply endure. They are victimised twice: once by those who hate them, and again by a policing model that rewards their civility with indifference.
Let us be frank. Had there been a risk of aggressive counter-protest, those conditions would have been enforced with an iron zeal.
This cannot continue. If operational independence allows police forces to decide, case by case, whether the law is actually worth enforcing, then operational independence becomes an alibi for inaction, and inaction becomes a threat to our democracy. If existing legislation gives them too much discretion to avoid “antagonising” those most willing to cause trouble, then that legislation must be tightened.
This risk-averse model of policing, in which Jewish restraint becomes a convenient safety valve, has already produced a series of grotesque consequences. It led London officers to tell an “openly Jewish” man not to cross a public street and to question another for wearing a Star of David – both, they said, might provoke anti-Israel protesters. The fact that such lines of inquiry are entertained in 2025, in an era drowning in sensitivity training and diversity protocols, is astonishing. One struggles to imagine any other minority being interrogated in this fashion.
But the most egregious episode came in the Maccabi case, where West Midlands Police now stand accused of misleading the public: exaggerating supposed threats from Israeli fans to justify banning them altogether, thereby sidestepping the real problem – the fear of anti-Zionist and Islamist thugs causing trouble.
Yet we should also acknowledge an uncomfortable truth: the police are the final link in a chain of failure forged by political negligence and institutional decay. For years, successive governments allowed Islamist radicalisation and anti-Israeli extremism to fester. Radical ideologies have penetrated our universities, unions, and professional bodies. We are now reaping the consequences. When 100,000 people fill London’s streets, it is not fanciful to suggest that police may find themselves genuinely overwhelmed enforcing the law even-handedly even if only a tiny minority of these marchers are considered violent. Ministers must finally confront the underlying extremism rather than outsource Britain’s problems to front-line officers.
Equal application of the law is not a luxury. It is the foundation of democratic policing and must not be replaced by mob rule. Unless government and police act, the scenes at St John’s Wood will not be the exception. They will be the template.
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