Do you know these men? Britain’s ‘most wanted’ Jew-hate suspects revealed
THE COMMUNITY Security Trust has released a “most wanted” list of suspects as its published a disturbing new report revealing that violence against Jews reached record highs in 2021.
The men who spat at and abused Jewish teenagers celebrating Chanukah in London’s West End in November, and a thug who punched a Jewish man in the head in West Hampstead a month later after saying he was “looking for a Jew to kill”, are among those the CST is seeking to identify.
The report concludes that May’s conflict between Israel and Hamas provoked a fierce backlash that helped fuel a 76 per cent rise in violent antisemitic assaults across the 12 months.
There were 176 physical attacks, including three cases of grievous bodily harm, amid thousands of incidents of antisemitic abuse aimed at Jewish men, women and children.
But few of the suspected perpetrators of 2021’s most notorious incidents have been bought to book — even though they were caught in the act on camera.
The CST is asking for help finding the men who spat, hurled abuse and made Nazi salutes at Jewish teenagers as they celebrated Chanukah in Oxford Street last November, and a man who chased a frightened Jewish commuter into a supermarket in West Hampstead in December after declaring he was “looking for a Jew to kill”.
The CST is also appealing for the identities of pro-Palestine protesters who made chilling threats to harm British Jews. These include a man filmed during a London demonstration last May saying he was looking to “spill Jewish blood”.
Mark Gardner, CST’s chief executive, said: “So far too many of the people responsible for this wave of hatred have got away with it. We are calling on everyone to help identify these racists, report them to the police and bring them to justice.”
The CST’s new report reveals how antisemitic hate crimes have been recorded in all but one police region in Britain in 2021.
Home Secretary Priti Patel vowed that perpetrators of this “shocking” anti-Jewish race hate would feel the “full force of the law”.
In 2021, the total level of antisemitic incidents rose by 34 per cent to 2,255, the
highest total ever recorded, with more than a third of all incidents occurring in May and June as violence between Gaza and Israel escalated.
Manchester and London alone saw 155 antisemitic incidents involving
people shouting abuse from passing vehicles at Jewish people, including the notorious convoy of cars that drove through north London in June bearing Palestinian flags while passengers bellowed antisemitic abuse through the
window using megaphones.
There was a threefold increase in antisemitic incidents at schools — including a sharp rise in cases at non-faith schools. Of the 182 incidents recorded, 99 were aimed at Jewish children and staff at non-faith schools. CST said these staff and pupils felt particularly isolated.
Universities also witnessed a record number of antisemitic incidents with 128 cases reported in 2021, compared to 44 the previous year.
There were 82 incidents of damage or desecration of Jewish property and 10 cases of mass-mailed leaflets or emails. CST also recorded 16 “Zoom-bombings” — video events hijacked with antisemitic material.
There were 78 incidents fuelled by conspiracy theories about the pandemic. These ranged from claims of Jewish involvement in creating and spreading the virus to wishes that Jewish people would die from it.
Holocaust imagery, such as the yellow Star of David, was also appropriated as part of anti-vaccine campaigns.
Online antisemitic incidents fell by 13 per cent, from 638 online incidents in 2020 to 552 in 2021, but the CST said this figure underestimated the true scale of the problem because targeted campaigns aimed at individual victims often included a bombardment of abuse from multiple accounts that was only recorded as a single incident.
Lord Mann, the government’s antisemitism adviser, said: “CST is a major and critical asset to the Jewish community. The understanding it has provided through these statistics underlines a requirement for us to reconsider our efforts to tackle antisemitism.”