The 'Scourge' of Anti-Anti-Semitism

As seen in Sydney, Manchester and Golders Green, Diaspora Jews are increasingly in danger of random, anti-Semitic violence. Yet, the establishment anti-anti-Semitism is doing us more harm than good.

Jun 06, 2026

Part 1

Anti-antisemitism has become the anti-racism of the establishment. The adoption of the defence of the Jews by right-wing politicians and mainstream media has done a lot to damage community relations. It has spread some unpleasant ripples across those parts of society where people have reason to feel that government pronouncements are suspicious or humbug.

In recent weeks, this fervour of powerful actors ‘defending the Jews’ has turned into a witch-hunt targeting photographer and chairman of the Southbank Centre, Misan Harriman. Chief inquisitor was The Daily Telegraph’s Art Correspondent, Craig Simpson. In a particularly lazy and disingenuous piece of journalism, Simpson decided to do a hatchet job on Harriman. His ‘research’ consisted of trawling through Harriman’s social media to find any posts that could act as dog-whistles to the racist right. His conclusion was to forget his libertarian opposition to ‘cancel culture’ and demand that Harriman get cancelled.1

Harriman’s initial ‘anti-Semitic’ act was to retweet independent MP for Birmingham East, Ayoub Khan’s claim in a video after the stabbings of two Jewish people in Golders Green, that “the media [is] ignoring the attack on the Muslim victim”. Harriman added his own comment “Wait, so there was a third victim on the same day who was Muslim?! And our press isn’t reporting it?” MP Khan labelled the attack on the first victim, Ishmail Hussein, as ‘Islamophobic’, no doubt (as he says in a video in another X post) because of his feeling that there is a lack of ‘fairness’ in the reporting of hate crimes and racist attacks. Others who have leapt to Harriman’s defence have done the same. New World magazine,2 for example, also call the first stabbing ‘Islamophobic’. The feeling of a lack of ‘fairness’ is absolutely justified, but it has led people to make a bizarre claim, which surely can’t be supported. Does that matter? I think it does, because it shows how the discourse is working to prevent even decent, reasonable and intelligent people from thinking rationally.

A little bit of research will tell you that the first man Essa Suleiman stabbed on 28^th April 2026 was a man whom he had known for 20 years, Ishmail Hussein. Suleiman then got on the tube to Brent Cross and went down to Golders Green and stabbed two strangers.

Harriman, Khan, and New World magazine were right. The attack on Hussein made fewer headlines than the Golders Green stabbings. Yes, as Simpson smugly pointed out, there is information out there about the first stabbing, but it is clearly not front and centre of the reporting. The reason that this and so many other incidents don’t receive as much attention is because they are not considered ‘newsworthy’, i.e. they do not fit contemporary media or bourgeois narratives. Understandably, people want fairness in reporting. Anti-Muslim racism is played down again and again. Yet, how can we say that him attacking a fellow-Muslim friend/acquaintance is Islamophobic? The debate around this absence of reporting has epitomised the problems of talking about anti-Semitism in the current climate.

This abuse of the term ‘anti-Semitism’ leads some people to feel (quite reasonably) that you can’t say anything about Jewish people while other racisms get ignored or overlooked. Sick of double-standards and the crying of the anti-Semitic wolf, they might even start saying (quite unreasonably) that we ‘can’t be sure’ whether Suleiman was actually targeting Jewish people. Maybe he just randomly chose Golders Green as an area to take his knife to, and randomly chose Shloime Rand, 34, and Norman Shine, 76, who were wearing obviously identifiable Jewish clothing, as his second and third victims of the day with no anti-Jewish motivation. Or they say, if one was a racist stabbing, so must the other one have been. Either they have not managed to research the facts or they have forgotten that it is possible to stab one person for one reason (e.g. you’ve got in an argument with him) and another for another (e.g., you think Jews are killing your people).

Let us state this clearly, anti-Semitism is rife, and like other racisms, is rising. It is also true that anti-anti-Semitism has been used repeatedly in the last 10 years to attack left-wing, anti-racist and anti-imperialist movements. This co-option of our struggle has not ‘helped the Jews’. In fact, as the Harriman witch-hunt shows, the more the Zionist bourgeoisie and establishment ‘Friends of the Jews’ exploit anti-Semitism for their own purposes, the more they fan the flames of conspiracy theories against us.

Truth is one of the victims. Let us start by looking at the case of Essa Suleiman. What we know is that Suleiman went to Hussein’s house, and left after stabbing him. According to the testimony of Scotland Yard in the pre-trial hearing, the police knew about this, and were “unable to find” a knife-wielding man before he could inflict more damage. We also learned that he had been referred to Prevent in 20203, so his details should have been in their database. This is not a great advert for the efficacy of the Met in keeping us safe. How did they know about him stabbing his friend/acquaintance? Someone (perhaps the victim himself?) must have seen it, said it and reported. But, as with many so-called terrorist attacks in this country, police or security services’ foreknowledge did nothing to ‘sort it’. The police did not ‘prevent’ more violence despite prior information about him and despite being informed about what he had just done. No wonder the police did not want to emphasise that part of the story.

This leads us to some conclusions. 1. We have to face the reality that if someone is determined to kill, they are likely to be able to do it, and that the security and intelligence services are neither making our society more secure or more intelligent. The one measure we need from the State is strict gun control (the gun attack in Sydney killed 15; Suleiman thankfully killed no one with his knife). Otherwise the best prevention comes from strong community-building and the removal of the causes of distress. 2. Most Muslim people do not think that the answer to Israel’s atrocities is to randomly attack Jewish people in your local area. Perhaps Hussein tried to discourage Suleiman from doing what he was going to do – hence the argument, hence his stabbing. He certainly did not agree to come with him on his quest for ‘justice’. 3. The police’s response is entirely inadequate if you want to feel ‘safe’ on the streets. What is often forgotten about the Manchester synagogue attack is that three of the four people killed at the Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur 2025, were killed by police bullets in their ‘counter-terrorist’ response.

Who is Golders Green terror attack suspect Essa Suleiman? — Police camera, appearing to show police officers tasering a prone Suleiman

This is not something the media wish to emphasise. Because of their ideological blinkers, they will not or cannot see the police as anything other than an institution designed to ‘protect society’. They also see the Muslim ‘other’ as a threat to bourgeois order. Thus, anything that looks like a Jihadist must be stamped out at all costs, regardless of the collateral damage. Police ‘mistakes’ in not caring enough about a Muslim victim of a Muslim attacker to find a man with a bloody knife; or having that Muslim attacker, “Tasered and repeatedly kicked in the head while being detained”; or being so determined to shoot to death the assailant in Manchester that they kill the people they are supposed to be defending, are instantly forgiven or forgotten as part of the necessary quest to maintain civilisation as we know it.

Perhaps even harder to acknowledge in any sensible way, is the uncomfortable fact that the attacks on Jewish people on Bondi beach, at Manchester Synagogue and Golders Green show the Israeli turn to ultra-violence has made the life of Jewish people in the diaspora more dangerous. It should be obvious that that is not a justification of attacking random civilians on the basis of their identity or heritage. Because Israel is bombing Gaza (and allowed to get away with it) is no justification to shoot 15 people at a Hanukah celebration in Sydney, or stab two people on the road in North-West London. But such tragic outcomes are the almost inevitable result of a few readily available causes: a simmering sense of injustice, inflammatory social media posts and mental illness. Thus, you have a tragic cause-and-effect that leads to two people stabbed on the street simply for being Jewish, and a mentally unwell man beaten by police officers and likely to spend the next few decades in high-security prison.

The first thing to be said is that actually Muslim-Jewish relations are considerably better than they might be. Despite the IDF’s flattening of Gaza, and the resultant 75,000 deaths of Palestinian people (so far), despite the assassinations, bombing and invasion of Lebanon and Iran, all of which done in the name of protecting the Jewish people; despite the silencing of protests and Western countries’ general support or blind-eye turning to genocide; despite the institutional Islamophobia that labels peaceful protestors and victims of violent settler-colonialism as ‘radicals’ and ‘Islamists’, most Muslim people are able to distinguish clearly between hating the actions of Israel and hating Jewish people. Secondly, it is obvious to anyone who has attended protests, or even followed them on social media, that a large proportion of Jewish people oppose Zionism and/or oppose the actions of Israel. Most people know this.