Move 'comes not a moment too soon,' Jewish org says

UK police plan crackdown on antisemitic chants, including ‘Globalize the intifada’

London’s Metropolitan Police and Greater Manchester Police say decision comes after recent ‘violent acts’ in Manchester and Sydney, Australia, changed the ‘context’ of the chants

British police on Wednesday said they would take tougher action, including arrests, against people who use placards and chants to target the Jewish community, saying recent violent incidents had changed the context around such protests.

The move comes days after 15 people were killed in a terror attack at Australia’s Bondi Beach, which targeted an event for the Jewish festival of Hanukkah, and some two and a half months after a terror attack at a synagogue in Manchester, northern England, on Yom Kippur in October, in which two Jewish worshipers were killed.

“We know communities are concerned about placards and chants such as ‘globalize the intifada,’ and those using it at future protests or in a targeted way should expect the Met and GMP to take action,” London’s Metropolitan Police and Greater Manchester Police said in a joint statement.

“Violent acts have taken place, the context has changed — words have meaning and consequence,” the statement said. “We will act decisively and make arrests.”

Jewish groups have been calling for tougher action over the language used at pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel protests, while the Community Security Trust (CST), which works to provide security for British Jews, says antisemitic incidents have been soaring in Britain.

“Is there a connection between this embrace of a call for death in the name of Palestinian rights, and people inflicting actual death, apparently in the name of the same cause? As soon as you ask the question, the answer seems obvious,” Dave Rich, the CST’s director of policy, wrote this week.

CST welcomed the police announcement in a statement published Wednesday, saying the decision to clamp down on provocative chants “comes not a moment too soon.”

“For many years, CST has called for tougher action against hateful and violent chants and placards at protests and this announcement comes not a moment too soon,” it said.

Taking firmer action against these chants “is a necessary and important first step to turning back this tide of violent incitement and we hope that police across the country, and the CPS [Crown Prosecution Service] will follow suit,” it added.

Many British Jewish organizations have long been asking the country’s government and law enforcement to take more decisive steps against anti-Israel protesters, whom they say are fueling unchecked antisemitism across the UK.

This demand was amplified in the wake of the Manchester terror attack, when Jihad al-Shamie drove a car into pedestrians outside the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation synagogue before exiting the vehicle and attacking people with a knife.

Two men, Adrian Daulby, 53, and Melvin Cravitz, 66, were killed in the incident, Daulby by a gunshot fired by a police officer trying to take down al-Shamie.

Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis, the chief rabbi of the British Commonwealth, told the UK’s Press Association that week after week, the UK has seen “people out in the streets of cities in our country crying slogans which incite hatred — ‘from the river to the sea,’ ‘globalize the intifada.'”

“What does ‘globalize the intifada’ mean?” said Mirvis, who traveled to Sydney in the wake of the Bondi Beach terror attack. “Well, on Yom Kippur at the Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester, we discovered what it means. On Bondi Beach, Australians discovered what is meant by those words.”

“The time has come for us to make it absolutely clear that such speech is unlawful. It’s not going to be accepted,” Mirvis said. “So much of hate speech has the potential to become translated into hate action.”