Yom Kippur this year, the Jewish day of atonement. While on a driving holiday through the Kentish countryside, news of the Manchester Synagogue attack came over the radio. In the crisp, autumnal days that followed, a surreal element crept into my tour of England’s historic castles and stately manor houses. I was seeing old England: enduring stone and brick edifices set in ordered gardens, testaments to a nation’s long history; yet back in the car in the rending talkback radio commentary, I was listening to a nation reckoning with the new.
The first night of Chanukah this same year, the Jewish festival of lights. While enjoying a roseate sunset on my verandah, the sirens started. Growing then receding as emergency vehicles sped eastwards towards Bondi Beach in Sydney. The wailing continued incessantly for the next three hours, dozens of ambulances taking the wounded to hospitals from the worst terrorist attack in Australia’s history. In the warm summer days that followed, over the thrumming of police helicopters flying circuits above, another nation was going through a similar reckoning.
Both were lone-wolf, Islamist terrorist attacks directed against Jews participating in their religious rites. But there was a different valence to the tone and content, not just reflective of differing national psyches and the scale of the two atrocities. The Manchester attack was perpetrated directly on a Jewish establishment involving a car ramming and stabbing – in other words it was contained, only Jews were at risk. The government announcements and related commentary was mainly around measures to further enhance security at Jewish institutions further vague measures will be considered to combat anti-semitism (given that the government already provides £18 million annually help fund Jewish communal security, that the police arrived within minutes and that the attacker was prevented from gaining entry to the synagogue, it is difficult to see what more could have been done other than posting armed police at every Jewish institution in the country. And, in search of motive, the hackneyed claim that it was an intended to divide society, to dismantle the delicately multicultural structure that is so fragile that a a concept framework so brittle that it requires …….