Extraordinary scenes from across the pond: Some on the British left wing are upset that Metropolitan Police officers kicked a knife-wielding man several times in the head in an attempt to disarm him.
This was after the man had apparently stabbed two Jewish men in Golders Green, North London, which is one of the best-known Jewish neighbourhoods in the British capital.
The head-kicking also came after the officers — who were unarmed, as the vast majority are in London — had deployed a Taser on the alleged attacker. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Mark Rowley says the officers feared the suspect was carrying explosives as well.
The stabbings of the two Jewish men come just weeks after some cretins in the same neighbourhood torched four volunteer ambulances serving the Jewish community. And seven months after another British citizen used his automobile to attack Jews outside a synagogue in Manchester, then tried to go on his own stabbing spree. “This is what they get for killing our children!” the attacker reportedly screamed as he tried and thankfully failed to get inside the synagogue itself. Two innocent people perished, along with the attacker, who was shot dead by police. It was Yom Kippur.
King Charles visited that synagogue a few weeks later, donned a kippah, commiserated informally as well as formally with community members and seemed to inspire at least some sense that Britain has the Jewish community’s back, or at least cares.
“I think it really sends out a message. It shows a lot of support from the very top of the country,” Yoni Finlay, congregant and father of four who was accidentally shot by police responding to the incident, told BBC. “Three weeks ago I saw the worst of humanity, but since then you do absolutely see the best, and there’s a lot of good people out there.”
And people are actually worrying about some horrible oik getting a few tactical (and well-deserved) boots to the coconut. Police procedure absolutely matters — abandoning it gets cases thrown out of court, most trenchantly — but that’s clearly not what this is about.
Zack Polanski, the Jewish leader of the Green Party of England and Wales — which holds five seats in the House of Commons and three of 25 seats on London’s equivalent of a city council — shared the following moronic post on X: “So essentially (police) officers were repeatedly and violently kicking a mentally ill man in the head when he was already incapacitated by Taser.”
Polanski’s diagnostic powers aside, anyone who watched the video would be able to see that the man, whatever his mental state might have been — and mental illness is hardly incompatible with terrorism — had not been incapacitated by anything.
Owen Jones, one of the most insufferable columnists ever to infest the British media — and that’s a high bar — has been doubling, tripling and quadrupling down on his initial ever-so-fancy reaction to the Golders Green attack.
“I’d like an expert to explain this to me,” he said. “This is a dangerous would-be murderer with a knife who needed to be apprehended. He’s been Tasered, but still has the knife. He’s repeatedly kicked in the head. I’d just like that explained.”
You just explained it, Jonesy. Well done. No edits.
He later retweeted some other moron who had offered the following: “It would make no sense at all to kick someone in the head if you genuinely thought they were carrying a bomb. In fact, it would be the exact opposite of what you should do, because impact can detonate some explosives.”
Right. His head was a landmine, maybe.
Amidst all this, it obviously fell to Prime Minister Keir Starmer to say something.
Starmer does not cut a hugely impressive figure at Westminster in any sense. Politico’s polling aggregator has his Labour Party neck and neck with the Conservatives and Greens in nationwide support at 17 per cent, only five points up on the Liberal Democrats, and eight points below Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.
And Starmer has faced criticism for his reaction to the Golders Green attack, including in National Post. “Enough words, enough blame. Let’s see some real action,” Avi Benlolo wrote this week.
I would never tell any Jew how to feel about any of this. But by the standards of Canadian politicians, at least — and that’s a low bar, admittedly — I thought Starmer did rather well in his speech on Thursday at 10 Downing Street. I would like to hear more of the same here.
“People are … scared to show who they are in their community, scared to go to synagogue and practise their religion, scared to go to university as a Jew, to send their children to school as a Jew, to tell their colleagues that they are Jewish,” Starmer said. “Nobody should live like that in Britain, but Jews do.”
This is such a basic point, but it too often goes unsaid: Whatever you think about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or protest rights, or free speech, it is absolutely intolerable in a country like the United Kingdom or Canada that anyone of any race or religion should live in fear because of their faith.
“If you stand alongside people who say ‘globalize the intifada’,” Starmer said, “you are calling for terrorism against Jews.”
Obviously correct.
“While we can and we will bring the full power of the state to bear on this, this is about society every bit as much as it is about security,” said Starmer.
And that, ultimately, is the rub. One might reasonably ask the prime minister what he intends to do to fix society. But flat platitudes like “there is no place for this in the United Kingdom,” “there is no place for this in Canada,” are demonstrably not getting the job done.
National Post
cselley@postmedia.com