The instrumentalisation of the Golders Green stabbings

Essa Suleiman has been charged with attempted murder after two Jewish men were stabbed in Golders Green, north-west London. As has become typical after attacks in Britain, the airwaves quickly filled with bad-faith actors exploiting tragedy to divide communities and drive their own agenda.

Sky News made two questionable bookings. First up they allowed Dame Louise Ellman to link the attack to“Islamic incitement within mosques.” She also accused pro-Palestinian activists of “screaming hatred towards Jewish people”. Ellman did not substantiate these claims and Sky didn’t ask her to.

Ellman was previously involved in a controversy over a series of articles that cited her as a source. The UK’s press regulator found the articles contained “significantly misleading” claims about pro-Palestinian activists. Sky didn’t inform their viewers about Ellman’s unreliability.

Sky also platformed Jake Wallis Simons, who used to edit the very same newspaper that was reprimanded in the above scandal. Booking Simons in the aftermath of an attack is a particularly odd choice, given he famously made up a terrorist attack that never happened in order to smear Palestinian Muslims.

Britain’s leading politicians also got in on the fun. Nigel Farage insinuated that the attacker was both an illegal immigrant and an Iranian operative, while Prime Minister Keir Starmer baselessly linked the attack to people chanting “globalise the intifada.”

Intifada is an Arabic word for a rebellion or uprising. It’s been used, correctly and uncontroversially, for centuries. Even the US Holocaust Museum translated the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as “intifada” until bad-faith agitators kicked up a fuss.

The phrase “globalise the intifada” is used to highlight how Israel’s ongoing genocide is funded, armed, and politically shielded by Global North countries. It’s a call for the kind of global resistance that ended South African apartheid. Once you understand this, you understand why Israel and its allies are trying to ban the phrase.

Essa Suleiman left a psychiatric hospital in the days before the attack. He had a history of violence. He was known to police. And he had previously been referred to the government’s deeply flawed counter-extremism programme, which failed to act. A serious country would interrogate the state failings that allowed a preventable attack to take place. Instead, the government is twisting the attack to their own cynical political ends.

Suleiman also allegedly tried to murder a Muslim friend of his on the day of the Golders Green attack but, in a stark illustration of the hierarchy of racism in British society, that attack hasn’t made headlines. In some instances the third murder charge has been entirely omitted from reporting.

Hierarchies aren’t helpful. Neither is the insistence that isolation should the default mode of Jewish being. What we need is safety through solidarity: an anti-racism based on mutual self-interest and collective liberation. We can defeat bigotry together.