Islamic antisemitism is fuelling attacks in Britain. Leaders must confront it or risk more violence

They deserve honesty and for antisemitism to be rooted out.

The uncomfortable truth is that Britain is still failing to understand the primary drivers of contemporary antisemitism. We continue to speak about the threat almost exclusively through outdated frameworks: the far right, with its racial supremacism, and the far left, with its conspiracies about power and colonialism. Both matter. Both remain dangerous. But neither fully explains the wave of violent antisemitism Britain has experienced in recent years.

As a former Prevent practitioner and counter-extremism coordinator, and now a researcher who completed a PhD on intra-minority conflict in the UK, I have watched the same mistake repeated time and again: a refusal to name Islamist antisemitism as a central contemporary threat.

The statistics alone should shake us out of complacency. In 2023, the UK recorded the worst year on record for antisemitic incidents: more than 4,000 cases, including 266 assaults. In 2025, incidents rose again, making it the second worst year on record. These are not abstract numbers. They represent Jews harassed in the street, children intimidated on the way to school, synagogues targeted, ambulances torched, and families wondering whether public visibility has become too dangerous.

In the last 12 months alone, we have seen the attack on a Manchester synagogue, the setting fire to Hatzola ambulances, multiple arson attacks, and now the Golders Green stabbing. This is not random disorder. It is part of a pattern.

Even Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley recently warned that hostile states and foreign organisations are encouraging and funding attacks in the UK, but then went on to name the drivers as the far right and far left. This reflects a strategic crisis in Britain’s response. Whether through ignorance or fear, the dominant motivating ideology behind much recent antisemitic hostility is too often omitted.

Islamist antisemitism is not simply criticism of Israel, nor is it reducible to ordinary sectarian prejudice. It is a religio-political worldview that casts Jews as permanent enemies of Islam, frames world events as a civilisational struggle between Muslims and the West, and sees Israel not as one state among many but as an intolerable affront to be removed.

This ideology has deep roots. The Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-e-Islami have, for decades, disseminated antisemitic narratives through literature, sermons and political activism. Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, fused violent jihadism with classic antisemitic conspiracy theories and genocidal religious language in its founding charter. Iran’s revolutionary ideology likewise frames Israel’s destruction as both strategic and theological.

These ideas do not stay overseas. They travel through transnational networks, online influencers, conferences, activist ecosystems and, in some cases, institutions inside Britain. They are laundered into softer language for Western audiences, then mainstreamed through grievance politics.

This is why antisemitism so often spikes when conflict erupts in the Middle East. Events abroad become catalysts for hatred at home because existing ideological networks are ready to mobilise them. Jewish communities in London, Manchester or Leeds are treated as proxies for events thousands of miles away.

What makes this threat especially dangerous is its ability to build alliances of convenience. Islamists frequently borrow the language of anti-racism, decolonisation and human rights while promoting deeply illiberal aims. They also exploit anti-liberal currents on the right. In effect, they can amplify antisemitism across ideological divides.

Parts of the progressive left have been particularly vulnerable to this manipulation. Too many activists who would instantly recognise racism, sexism or homophobia in other forms have excused or minimised Islamist reactionary politics when wrapped in the language of anti-imperialism. Movements committed to equality have sometimes marched alongside those who reject equality altogether.

Britain needs a reset.

First, the Charity Commission must take far tougher action where mosques or charities are found platforming speakers who call for violence against Jews or spread overt antisemitism. There cannot be one rule for some extremists and another for others.

Second, the Government should revisit the case for proscribing the Muslim Brotherhood or, at a minimum, imposing far stricter scrutiny on organisations tied to its ideology, financing or networks. Several states across the Middle East and beyond have already recognised the threat such movements pose.

Third, any individual or organisation linked to Hamas or other terrorist entities should face the full force of the law. Britain must not be a permissive operating environment for those who celebrate or facilitate extremism.

Fourth, schools need to teach contemporary antisemitism, not just Holocaust history. Students should understand how anti-Jewish hatred mutates across time: from medieval theology, to fascist race science, to Soviet anti-Zionism, to modern Islamist extremism.

Fifth, the democratic left must rediscover confidence in its own principles: secularism, equality before the law, women’s rights, LGBT rights, freedom of conscience, and opposition to theocracy. It must stop treating alliances with reactionary movements as morally sophisticated.

None of this means ignoring the far right. That threat is real and persistent. But Britain has developed clearer instincts for recognising neo-Nazism and white supremacism. The greater blind spot today lies elsewhere: in the failure to confront Islamist antisemitism with equal seriousness.

Golders Green should be a line in the sand. If we continue to misdiagnose the problem, we will continue to fail those under attack.

British Jews should not have to live behind bollards, security guards and police patrols while the country avoids difficult truths. Courage in public policy begins with clarity. And clarity begins by naming the ideology driving so much of the hatred we see today.

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Dr Charlotte Littlewood is a former Prevent practitioner and Counter Extremism Coordinator for the UK government.

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