A terrorist killed two Jewish worshippers in a car-ramming and stabbing attack outside the Heaton Park Hebrew synagogue in Manchester, England, on Thursday. The attack came on the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur.
The response of the synagogue’s security team in preventing the terrorist from accessing the facility and the swift response of armed police eight minutes after the attack began (most police in Britain are unarmed) appears to have prevented a far greater loss of life. Video shows the responding officers shoot the attacker dead after he refused to surrender. The attacker is believed to have carried a fake explosives belt, a tactic previously employed by the 2017 London Bridge terrorist perpetrators.
While the immediate threat appears to have passed — U.K. authorities say they have no knowledge of further immediate threats to the Jewish community but are bolstering security measures regardless — this attack is a reminder of the significant Islamist terrorist threat faced by European nations.
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That broad threat was further emphasized earlier this week when German authorities arrested three suspected Hamas terrorists who were said to be plotting a firearms attack on synagogues or other Jewish cultural targets. And as the Washington Examiner reported in May, U.K. authorities arrested members of two Iran-linked terrorist cells suspected of plotting major attacks on Jewish targets.
The question now is whether we will see more changes to counterterrorism policing in relation to threats to the Jewish community. The speedy response of Manchester authorities to Thursday’s attack notwithstanding, we must ask why armed police were not deployed outside the synagogue in anticipation of any threats. Considering the swift response time, it may be that the responding armed police were nearby but attempting to cover the numerous synagogues in this area of northern Manchester. Considering the sustained threat of antisemitic violence, however, authorities will face questions over whether their precautions on this holiest Jewish day were sufficient. Plots against Jewish targets have been a sustained theme in U.K. and European terrorist efforts.
Antisemitic criminality skyrocketed in the U.K. following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel. While it subsequently dropped slightly in 2024 and dropped further in 2025, rates of this crime remain historically high. A similar situation applies across much of Europe. There is a casual dynamic in play with far too much of this crime, wherein Jews will be targeted simply because an antisemite passes by them at random and notices their Jewish garb.
It will be tempting to blame this attack partly on Keir Starmer’s government over its absurd reward to Hamas in recently recognizing a Palestinian state. Yet, the key cause of attacks such as this one is the potency of extremist Islamist propaganda, which leads young men to identify Jews as responsible for what they regard as Israel’s crimes against Muslims. This offers fanatics a way to recruit disillusioned fools into what they regard as a moral cause of defending Palestinian lives. How then to reduce this threat?
First, to robustly enforce laws related to criminal threats and attacks on Jews. Second, to hold Imams and other influential Muslim figures accountable to public scrutiny when they advance extremist viewpoints. Third, to proactively pursue terrorist suspects and intercept them before they can attack. While the U.K. is very effective at this third line of effort, benefitting from its excellent MI5 domestic intelligence service, it has too many terrorist suspects to contain fully at all times.
But it should also be noted that restricting the rights of free speech on topics such as those involving Israel, as the Trump administration has sometimes done, is wrong. Censorship only fuels resentment and drives extremist viewpoints toward more dangerous fringes, free of the cooling potential of the public square. In the longer term, the far better way to protect Jewish security and associated rights to the pursuit of happiness is to enforce rules (such as on college campuses), civil rights law, and to emphasize the extraordinary contribution the Jewish community makes to our way of life.
Consider that the global population is estimated to stand at 8.14 billion, with the global Jewish population estimated at only 16 million. Still, Jews have extraordinary representation at the heights of science, medicine, law, business, and academia.
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Out of a global population of 8.14 billion, 16 million is far too small a number to allow for the kind of Jewish global conspiracy of power that Hitler and other antisemitic zealots fetishize over. Jewish success rather shows that Jews must be doing something right. In so doing, they’re providing an extraordinarily outsize positive contribution to the general benefit of the rest of us. Jews emphasize a culture that prioritizes community, hard work, education, and the pursuit of socially beneficial excellence. Fanatics such as the one we saw today in Manchester?
They emphasize only the fleeting celebration of a cult of bigotry and violence in pursuit of a warped medieval authoritarianism.