After two years of ongoing genocide in Gaza, two Jewish Britons—Adrian Daulby and Melvin Cravitz—were killed on 2 October 2025 at the entrance to the Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester, following a knife attack. The news media immediately leaped into action to treat this as unprecedented (in terms of sensationalist heightening of the story, the press chose to use variants of the phrase ‘deaths from the attack’ to playdown the fact that one of the two fatalities was caused by the shooting error of an armed UK policeman). While a tragedy for the victims and their families, in the history of Western Imperialism and its colonialisms such brutal retaliation tactics are certainly not unprecedented. The historian Amaresh Mishra noted that the British in India presided over ‘an “untold holocaust” which caused the deaths of almost 10 million people over 10 years beginning in 1857’(Mishra 2007: War of Civilisations: India AD 1857). Clearly despite the enormous indigenous losses, as the colonist Margaret Chambers’ murder demonstrated, some locals kept fighting, simply to get their hands on their white racist oppressors, logistically including soft targets. This is not to celebrate the targeting of the vulnerable, just acknowledging the historical statistical inevitability of these retaliations, and how they have been later narrativised to the advantage of the Western/colonial forces which brought them into being.

Postwar Africa provides a detailed example. In 1953, the white settler Ruck family were hacked to death by some of the indigenous Kikuyu people of Kenya, who in revolt were pejoratively described as ‘Mau Mau’ in much the same way the word Hamas is pejoratively spat out in relation to Palestinians. The home British and colonial establishment media similarly treated it as an unprecedented outrage, with sensationalised coverage privileging the ‘feelings’ of the white colonisers (British state authoritarian censorship of the period even reached beyond news media into fiction film and theatre). Conveniently eliminating colonialism as a causality, the movie Safari (1956), exploiting the tragedy, would feature a fictionalised ‘Great white hunter’ pursuing with lethal intent the ‘Mau, Mau’ who killed his son. Self-righteous colonial vengeance grievance dramas, with their inverted causal logic, are fairly common—see The Searchers (1956)—and by the 1970s had morphed into stories where heroes are given ‘revenge’ reasons for exterminating society’s least liked ethnic groups—Dirty Harry (1971), Death Wish (1974) etc. In our era, news media would similarly invoke events at Sukkot as causal grievance for a genocide it refuses to name or recognise, rather than Palestine’s history under racial oppression.

The realities of British atrocities were occasionally hinted at in what was at the time, and sadly no longer, a liberal part of the media—the Guardian and Observer. Labour MP, future Cabinet Minister, Democratic-Socialist Barbara Castle more directly attempted to expose the crimes of empire in Kenya in a 1955 edition of Tribune, the Party’s inhouse magazine (the fictional anti-colonial MP that appeared in Guns at Batasi—1964—is alleged to be based on Castle).

Finally in 2013, after many decades, in seemingly an attempt to dodge the embarrassment of a figure multiple tens of millions in compensation, the figure of £19.9 mill was offered to those, incredibly still surviving Kenyan victims of British atrocities—accompanied by the following official admission. ‘The British Government recognises that Kenyans were subject to torture and other forms of ill treatment at the hands of the colonial administration’. This was putting it mildly.

Historian Caroline Elkins unearthed much of the Pulitzer Prize winning research material of British crimes:

‘Men were castrated, women raped and sodomised with broken bottles and vermin. This atrocity was not contained to the authorities in Kenya, knowledge of it went right up to the very top of British governance with notes found within Cabinet meeting minutes’.

Indicative of the criminality’s scale, Ch4 News further reported, ‘The Kenyan Human Rights commission has said that 90,000 Kenyans were executed or tortured and 160,000 people detained in all during the lengthy quashing of the uprising’. In simple terms, the original prioritised positioning of the Ruck family story, would make the three white victims each worth 30,000 of the dead, castrated or tortured and equate to 50,000+ of those held in concentration camps. Similarly, as far as the British news media is concerned, the two white lives in Manchester outscore the 68,000 dead in Gaza—1 to 34,000. We can only hope it doesn’t similarly take Kenya’s 60yrs, or India’s 150yrs, for the Gaza genocide to be recognised, along with 70yrs of Nakba ethnic cleansing and the mal-treated child and adult hostages in Israeli jails.

‘Self-Righteous’ Establishment Push-Back

Current Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer is indicative—as the moral and ideological opposite of Barbara Castle—of the neoliberal corruption of the Party, that has inverted its political function. His lies and infamous violation of his Labour leadership and General Election manifesto oaths, has probably destroyed the basic premise of the Party offering a believable manifesto to electorate for the foreseeable future (Politico). As the genocide unfolded, Starmer told LBC Radio Israel ‘has the right to withhold power and water from Gaza’. In 2024, Tribune—which had published Castle’s 1955 critique—noted ‘Starmer Is Still Arming Genocide’. In 2025, Middle East Monitor reported on ‘How British arms and intelligence fuelled Israel’s Gaza genocide’. Also in 2025, Declassified reported ‘Britain sent over 500 spy flights to Gaza’. Starmer’s government’s 2025 decision to ban the non-violent, anti-racist campaign group Palestine Action, was described by the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights as a ‘disturbing’ misuse of UK counter-terrorism legislation.

Upon this platform of practices, Starmer’s government cynically appropriated the synagogue deaths for a further self-righteous grievance public campaign in defence of Israel. ‘Keir Starmer tells students not to protest on October 7 anniversary’ (The National), which he branded ‘Un-British’ (The Independent). Immediately afterwards, The International Business Times noted ‘Starmer Accused Of Stifling Dissent With Pro-Palestine Chant Restrictions’ after the PM announced a call for a police crackdown on chants heard at pro-Palestine protests.

After West Midlands Police announced a safety ban on visiting Maccabi Tel Aviv football fans, due to play Aston Villa in Birmingham—because of a history of violent racism—Starmer called it ‘the wrong decision… We will not tolerate antisemitism on our streets’. The Press was then told Starmer is doing “everything in his power” to ensure supporters of Israel’s Maccabi Tel Aviv can support their team (Independent, BBC). Peter Oborne, whose book ‘Complicit—Britain’s role in Israel’s genocide’ (2025) is due out, offers some useful background on the racist violence of Maccabi fans—actually at-risk in Birmingham are one of the largest combined local Asian and Muslim populations in the UK. Revealingly, Police Intelligence leaked to the Guardian included ‘Dutch police told their British counterparts that the Maccabi fans had instigated trouble in Amsterdam at a game last year…A huge Dutch police effort, involving 5,000 officers across three days, was needed to quell the trouble’. Two days after Starmer’s ‘everything in his power’ statement Maccabi’s local derby game in Israel had to be called off due to rioting (Independent, Times of Israel). Many North-African Mediterranean counties enjoy relative geographic proximity to Europe. But the ethnocentricity of European elite cultural politics is such, that football authorities choose to reach beyond those, to include clubs of settler project Israel. Turkey has been boycotting the Eurovision Song Contest because of Israel’s presence, which now includes Australia. Indicative of the extremism of Starmer and UK media’s traditional colonial grievance narrative; misrepresenting Maccabi Tel Aviv as part of the respectable European/Global family, also supports and covers-up the worst of the city’s local practices. In 2017 The Daily Beast reported Tel Aviv had racially segregated kindergartens. This was confirmed in 2018 by Israel’s Haaretz news outlet. In 2022 Haaretz reported Tel Aviv also had racially segregated schools. Again, as in historical colonialisms, deaths of the vulnerable yet privileged are used to defend the indefensible.

British Monarchs rarely make public appearances without co-ordination with government, and in sympathy King Charles visited the Manchester synagogue promptly within the same month of the attack. International news consumers may well be aware of the synagogue attack, and even the visit of Charles. They probably won’t have heard of Black-British teenager Marcus Fakana who was chased to his death by police two days—4 October—after the Manchester attack. Ironically, young Marcus had recently returned after surviving 6 cause célèbre months in a Dubai jail—his consummated romance with a holidaying compatriot British girl of 17, having violated local laws. Political and media elite lesser priorities mean the arson attack on Peacehaven Mosque, Sussex, also two days after Manchester, is probably similarly, less well known.

It has been repeatedly cited on Arena pages, that despite BLM protests, Black deaths at the hands of the police, disproportionate incarceration, strip-searching Black schoolchildren, failings in housing, education and health provision for people of colour, are treated as business as usual. Attacks on Muslims such as Peacehaven Mosque, are neither isolated, nor prioritised as systemic in reports. Yet in the years since Tony Blair’s New Labour Cabinet lowered the status of their Middle-Eastern victims and their diasporas by invoking notions of ‘Militant Islam’ collective guilt, worshippers at Finsbury Park Mosque suffered a van attack killing one, and injuring 11 others, it was previously subjected to attempted arson, as was Bishopbriggs Glasgow Mosque. Grandfather Muhammad Saleem 82 was stabbed to death; his killer further targeted three mosques with bombs. Attacks on Muslims, including on countless hijab wearing women, are too numerous to detail. Finsbury Park Mosque was at least visited post-attack, by Charles Windsor in his lesser role as Prince. But Dr Sarandev Bhambra victim of a life altering attempted beheading attack, sent out is own message on prevailing, racial double standards ‘We are in no doubt that had the racial disposition been reversed this would have been reported as an act of terror with a wider media coverage’. Dr Bhambra is a Sikh, tragically, merely mistaken for Muslim.

‘Double standards’ resulting in a pro-Israel hierarchy of victimhood is clearly something its lobby has been trying generate. According to UN figures in 2014, Israel’s two month bombing of Gaza resulted in 551 children killed out of a total death toll of 2,252 Palestinians. The Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) was formed before the corpses of the killed Palestinian children had barely cooled in their graves. One of the more recent stunts of its Chief Executive Gideon Falter was, against police instructions, attempting to penetrate an anti-Gaza-genocide protest, accompanied by a video operator and ‘bouncers’, in order to pose as victim. The Officer at scene, who had initially been smeared by Falter, said ‘he had seen Falter acting in a way that led him to believe he was trying to provoke a confrontation with marchers’. See Guardian, Novara Media, Dorset Eye. This is not an isolated tactic—see Independent. Cases scrutinised in Arena’s Anti-Semitism Moral Panics (2017) include the Jewish Chronicle, running a story of a north Manchester gang fight injuring a Jewish youth, as drugs related, then taking it down, and republishing it as if an anti-Semitic attack. After countless self-contradictory press reports, the Police, the Prosecution Service, and the Judge confirmed that it was not. Rabbi Maurice Davis also had to deny media reports of an anti-Semitic attack on his Tottenham, London, synagogue. And the media reported ‘anti-Semitic vandalism’ on a Jewish cemetery did not convince its manager who pointed to ‘locals…drink cans (booze)’. Most Western countries have now experienced a similar pattern of democracy subverting, hysteria, hyperbole, manipulation and misreporting. After Maccabi fans racially and sexually assaulted residents in Amsterdam, pro-Israel PR manipulation smeared the victims. The result as Amsterdam Daily News, and Middle East Eye confirm is ‘Netherlands Categorizes Israel as Foreign Threat for First Time’.

There’s insufficient space here to deal with novelist Howard Jacobson’s countless and sometimes offensive defences of Israel—his Guardian article decrying reporting of Palestinian child deaths in Gaza as a 12^th C type anti-Semitic ‘Blood Libel’ being a case in point. For the Independent, he ‘pooh-poohed’ the idea that objections to Israel were traditional ‘settler colonialist’ critiques and instead invoked ‘Jew Hatred’. In the case of the specific synagogue attacker, who reportedly identified with ISIS and any co-conspirators, he may be right. But there are roughly 46 ant-Zionist Jewish communities/organisations in the world. It is hard to find any of them reporting a Heaton Park Synagogue type attack.

Jewish writer and Palestinian activist Tony Greenstein’s post on the Jewish Voice for Labour site directs readers to the synagogue’s webpage. Its concluding paragraph begins ‘In the months that have followed, our heroic IDF soldiers have done all they can to rescue the abducted and combat the terrorists’ (see also 5 Pilarz, and Norman Finkelstein Facebook). The page title is currently ‘Israel’ but this is a change. In the period leading to the attack, what the rest of the world was calling ‘genocide’ was here, page titled ‘Israel is at War’—it’s still in the URL—https://www.hphc.org.uk/templates/articlecco_cdo/aid/4932214/jewish/Israel-is-at-War.htm. This is a selection from the Heaton Park synagogue website gallery. 

This is not to say this sort of targeting can be supported—however strongly anti-genocide activists might feel about Israel’s enablers. Despite corrupt Western political and media elites, Palestinians are winning the hearts and minds of the global general public. On a practical level, the last thing Palestinians need is for Israel’s supporters to be handed the very martyrdom narrative they as a lobby have cynically spent years trying to generate.

Authors Personal Postscript

In my biographical article for Arena, ‘Pressure‘, I noted as part of pro-Israel anti-Semitism moral panics ‘the BBC covered a story of a Jewish Israel supporting student being squirted with brown sauce on a university campus. They gave this web article more length than any individual article covering 82yr old grandad Muhammad Saleem being murdered in a racist attack and his killer planting bombs at three different Mosques‘.

There were race-riots in Britain in the summer of 2024, which owed something of a debt to the notions of collective guilt generated years ago by Tony Blair’s New Labour.  Following these I was followed out of a small local mall by two men, who hurled racist slurs at me.  Thankfully this did not escalate as the build-up of traffic behind the men forced them on their way.  Friends asked me why I did not report this? Of the many police stops I’ve experienced, some, as I mentioned in the article, occurred around a university campus, one of which involved being pinned by my throat. Pranking as described by the Jewish student occurs frequently on campuses. I was hit with an egg hurled from the top the halls of residence, that nearly knocked me under a passing bus.  It didn’t occur to me that this and/or the police stops, could be used to market the notion, that I and those like me, were the most oppressed people in Britain.  Trust in the police, expectation of scandalised supportive media coverage is really only something, upon which ‘the lobby’ can strategically rely.

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