Manchester synagogue attacker is a new breed of jihadi

Yesterday’s attack outside Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation Synagogue in Manchester, which was rapidly declared a terrorist incident by the police, had all the outward signs of a jihadi attack. The perpetrator, Jihad Al-Shamie, rammed a vehicle into pedestrians before launching a marauding knife rampage. Two worshippers were killed, and three others were seriously injured, though the picture has now been complicated by reports that one of the victims died after being accidentally shot by armed police. Al-Shamie was wearing a fake suicide belt and very likely intended to die in the attack, knowing that the police wouldn’t take any chances once they saw it. As it happened, he was right.

Far-Right terrorists have launched ramming attacks before — most notably Darren Osborne near Finsbury Park Mosque in 2017 – but donning a fake suicide vest in the hope of “martyring” themselves isn’t usually part of their modus operandi. The last terrorist in Britain who wore a fake suicide belt and launched a stabbing attack was Sudesh Amman in February 2020, who non-fatally injured three people on Streatham High Road before being shot dead by police. He was being followed by undercover police at the time, having just been released from prison for terrorism offences. The same fate befell Usman Khan, who put on a fake suicide vest before fatally stabbing two people at Fishmongers’ Hall in November 2019.

Both were unrepentant jihadi fantasists who wanted to die with as much vehemence as they wanted to kill. Both also reviled infidels, who they thought could be justifiably slaughtered as part of a righteous defence of Islam — or, more specifically, to wreak vengeance for the final defeat of the Isis caliphate in March 2019.

But al-Shamie didn’t just target Western infidels in general yesterday: he targeted a synagogue and wanted to kill Jews. The driving grievance of the perpetrator may have had less to do with the greater transnational glory of Islam, as championed by al Qaeda or Isis, than a much broader sectarian hatred of Jews and Israel.

No doubt the attacker’s hatred of Jews was further inflamed by Israel’s ongoing war against Hamas and the destruction of Gaza, providing him with a warrant, in his mind, to act on that hatred. He would also have been further emboldened by the wave of antisemitism masquerading as humanitarian concern for Palestinians which has been a persistent feature in protests across cities in Britain, Europe and America since 7 October 2023. And perhaps, relatedly, in planning his attack he could have imagined that after his death his name and deeds would live on in glory among his fellow Jew-haters.

The closest analogue to yesterday’s attack is the murder of 70-year-old Terence Carney in Hartlepool in 2023 by a failed Moroccan asylum seeker called Ahmed Alid. After first attacking his Iraqi housemate, a Christian convert, Alid took to the street outside his house and randomly targeted Carney, shouting “Free Palestine” prior to repeatedly stabbing him. This happened a week after the Hamas attacks on Israel that October. Like Alid, al-Shamie is not British: he is of Syrian descent and was awarded citizenship in 2006 when he was in his teens. There will inevitably be questions about the circumstances in which he came to the UK, and even more uncomfortable questions about rates of antisemitism among the Muslim diaspora in this country.