“On Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, two Jewish worshippers were murdered in cold blood outside a synagogue in Manchester. Instead of finding peace and prayer, they were met with hatred and death. Once again, Jewish blood has been spilled on European soil.
After every attack, there is talk of more guards, more cameras, more fortified walls. Synagogues become fortresses, schools resemble garrisons. Security is necessary, but it will never be enough. You cannot defeat antisemitism with more locks, higher fences, and guards alone.
Antisemitism begins with words, and until we stop the words, we will never stop the violence.
No killer wakes up one morning and decides in isolation to murder Jews. He acts in an atmosphere already poisoned by lies and incitement, where Jews are vilified daily and the Jewish State is depicted as uniquely evil. The murder weapon is primed not by the act of pulling a trigger or turning a steering wheel, but by months and years of relentless indoctrination and hate.
Hate speech is not harmless; it is the gateway to violence. The Holocaust did not begin with the gas chambers; it began with words, propaganda, speeches, and slogans that dehumanised Jews until violence became not only acceptable but demanded and celebrated.
Today, social media amplifies the same old slanders with terrifying speed. Online abuse, conspiracy theories, chants on university campuses, distorted reporting in the media, and biased international condemnations, frequently by leaders who are looking to buy a few votes, all fuel a climate in which Jews are once again treated as targets.
This is why the Manchester murders should serve as a wake-up call. The perpetrator may have pulled the trigger or pressed the accelerator, but those who spread lies about Jews and Israel loaded the weapon.
Every journalist who repeats a blood libel, every politician who plays to the mob with anti-Israel rhetoric, every academic who legitimises hate, they all create the atmosphere in which violence flourishes.
Words from leaders matter most.
When a national leader chooses to recognise a Palestinian state after a massacre of Israelis and while hostages remain in captivity, they send a message that terror succeeds and that Jewish pain is secondary, that Jewish lives are negotiable. Extremists hear this, and they take it as encouragement.
When international bodies single out Israel for condemnation while ignoring far worse bloodshed and actual war crimes elsewhere, they legitimise the singling out of Jews everywhere. And when social media companies allow torrents of antisemitic abuse to spread unchecked, they provide the megaphone for radicalisation.
The response cannot be more of the same. We must move beyond the illusion that security alone can solve this crisis. Guards protect buildings; they do not protect ideas.
To protect Jewish life in Europe, we must delegitimise antisemitism at its source. Governments must treat incitement with the same seriousness as terrorism, because incitement is simply terrorism in its first stage. Schools must teach the history and reality of antisemitism with honesty and urgency. Media must adopt a single moral standard, refusing to tolerate antisemitic double-speak, and citizens must challenge antisemitic lies whenever they appear, in parliament, in classrooms, in newspapers, or online.
The murder of two Jews in Manchester is not only a Jewish tragedy, but also a European tragedy. It is the first time since the readmission of Jews to England in the 17th Century that Jews were murdered simply for being Jewish.
This is proof that when antisemitic words go unchallenged, they end in blood. Eighty years after the Holocaust, Europe’s promise of “Never again” is being tested not only by bullets and bombs but by rhetoric, slogans, and lies.
If Jewish children are to walk freely to school and Jews are to pray without fear, we must do more than guard our doors. We must root out the poison of antisemitism at its source. That poison is not hidden, it is spoken openly, daily, shamelessly.
None of this is new, except arguably the ferocity and the openness and mainstreaming of antisemitism. It has become acceptable, frequent, and holistic, appearing at all levels of society so as to become normative. Unless Europe finds the courage to confront hate at the level of words, we will see more funerals, more tears, more lives stolen.
The time to act is now. For the two murdered in Manchester. For every Jew in Europe, and for the very soul of Europe itself.”
