Want to know what kind of country you live in? You live in a country in which there are more than 300 antisemitic incidents a month. Three-hundred. Every month. Last year, there were 80 incidents on Yom Kippur alone, including the Islamist attack on Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester which resulted in the deaths of Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby.
Anyone who still needs a wake-up call about antisemitism is in a civilisational coma
On a day Jews spend in fasting and prayer to ask God’s forgiveness for their sins, a day when you would be hard-pressed to encounter a Jew, still the murder and the libels and the intimidation flow. Antisemites never take a day off; they are the most productive sector of the British economy.
Last year, there were 217 cases of property destruction, including damage to Jewish homes, synagogues, and businesses; the tearing down of posters and memorials to the hostages held by Hamas; and the desecration of Chanukah menorahs and even Jewish cemeteries. Desecration of cemeteries.
These figures come from the latest annual report by the Community Security Trust (CST), a charity which instals safety equipment like security doors, shatter-proof windows and advanced CCTV in Jewish schools and synagogues, because in Britain Jewish schools and synagogues need reinforced doors and windows. The CST also runs self-defence training for rabbis and Jewish schoolchildren because, again, they need to in this country.
One of the most valuable services it provides to the rest of us is its monitoring of the scale of antisemitism in Britain. Its new report documents 3,700 antisemitic incidents in 2025, the second-highest total since the CST began keeping records in 1984, though the actual figure will have been much higher because of the charity’s exacting methodology. While the criminal justice system defines an antisemitic incident based on perception, the CST only counts those where it has established evidence of anti-Jewish motivation.
Excluded from its 2025 report are 3,001 events, including attacks on Jews, property destruction, and suspected hostile reconnaissance activity at Jewish locations, where the charity was unable to establish proof to meet its evidence threshold. Similarly left out of the review are the regular activities of anti-Jewish organisations and while online content targeting Jews is counted if reported directly to the charity, the CST’s researchers do not proactively search websites or social media. (Given the sheer volume of antisemitic material out there, they hardly need to go looking for it.)
So while that 300-incidents-a-month figure is shocking, it is likely a very conservative estimate. It’s often said that Jews are the canary in the coal mine; when they are victimised, it is the sounding of an alarm for the rest of us. But Jews are more than a human early-warning system, they are our fellow Britons under siege in their own country for no reason other than their Jewishness. We can’t process that with dispassionate analysis and coolly think, ‘We’d better do something because our people might be next’. British Jews are our people. And, honestly, anyone who still needs a wake-up call about antisemitism is in a civilisational coma.
In recent years, talk of antisemitism has been on our tongues and in our ears more than we are used to in this country, but seldom have these discussions been about antisemitism itself. Antisemitism is treated as secondary to ideological warfare, acknowledged and prioritised only insofar as it serves the interests of one side or the other. When news breaks of an attack like Heaton Park, the left hopes for an Anders Breivik, the right for an Amedy Coulibaly. Not just the cranks or extremists, either: some of the most thoughtful, respectable, otherwise well-intentioned progressives and conservatives are more comfortable confronting this villainy if the villain can be tied to their political opponents.
Antisemitism must be fought. It is a moral essential, a civilisational imperative. It is never truly defeated but it can be suppressed for extended periods before its lies and prejudices and self-pities recrudesce as the circumstances allow. There can be no partial effort against it. Left or right, white or brown, Christian or Muslim, antisemitism is antisemitism and it is a threat to Jews and to us all.
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