Our MPs must finally wake up to the Islamist threat – both here and in the Middle East
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Mike Freer will stand down as MP for Finchley and Golders Green at the next election. He says the strain on his husband and wider family is too great. For years, he has had social-media abuse, death threats, hostile graffiti, mock-Molotov cocktails left as his door, an attempt to prise open the windows of his constituency office and a rude note stuck to the windscreen of his car – some of which proved that hostile people knew his whereabouts.
Other attacks were much worse. Mr Freer occasionally held constituency surgeries in a friendly mosque. One day, the self-appointed “Muslims against Crusades” forced their way in and abused him as a “Jewish homosexual pig” (“They were right about only one of those three words!” he tells me) He had to be ushered away for protection.
More recently, it emerged that the Islamist Ali Harbi Ali had visited his surgery several times and eventually came to his office armed. By good fortune, Mr Freer had been summoned back to Parliament for a whipped vote. Ali went on to murder another MP, Sir David Amess.
On Christmas Eve last year, Mr Freer’s constituency office was broken into and set on fire. Two people were charged and are currently awaiting trial.
Although Mr Freer praises the local police in Finchley, he believes the level of threat can only get worse. He feels it is time to retire.
Who can blame him? Yet his decision shows how much the situation has worsened. His seat is roughly the same as that held by Margaret Thatcher until she left for the Lords in 1992. Then, as now, it had a high Jewish population. As its MP, Mrs Thatcher campaigned against local anti-Semitism, but the worst she had to deal with was the exclusion of Jews from the golf club.
Nowadays, the situation is quantitively and qualitatively different. The anti-Semitism in her time was social, a racist version of snobbery. Though highly unpleasant, it was a curled lip, not a raised fist. Today it is intense, intensely political, sometimes violent.
BBC reports of Mr Freer’s decision avoided this point. They spoke of anti-Semitism, but did not explain whose anti-Semitism. Yet Mr Freer is unequivocal that all the menace he has confronted has come from Islamists. (He makes one qualification: in the case of the arson attack, the accused are awaiting trial, and so nothing is yet known about the motives involved.) His resignation story did not appear on the front page of the BBC News website on the morning after the announcement. The story on page 2 made no mention of Islamism.
If we cannot name the cause, we cannot address the problem. It is not only a matter of asking who, after all this, will be the next MP for Finchley and Golders Green and whether he or she will dare to take the same pro-Israel stand that Freer has taken. The fact that Islamism is central to these actions and threats shows they pervade wide areas of urban Britain.
Ali Harbi Ali picked on Conservative MPs. Another whom he carefully targeted but did not manage to attack was Michael Gove. But it is, on average, Labour MPs, who are under more Islamist pressure than Conservatives, because they often sit for constituencies with large numbers of Muslim voters.
It cannot be said too often that most Muslims are not Islamist extremists, but it must also be said that, unsurprisingly, Islamists have better cover and bigger recruiting pools in Muslim areas. Therefore those Labour MPs who stoutly resist Islamism tend to receive the largest amount of grief.
That is one reason why Sir Keir Starmer’s firm reaction to the Hamas massacres of October 7 and his support for Israel’s right of self-defence were so important. If he had gone the other way – as the party would have done under Jeremy Corbyn – Labour would have been caught in the Islamist trap. Brave Labour MPs would have been picked off by the noxious coalition of Islamists and the mainly-white hard-Left.
Regardless of strong feelings about “foreign policy” (a euphemism, in this context, for the Israel/Palestine conflict), domestic peace must be preserved. This is not happening. Having praised Finchley police, Mr Freer is less laudatory about the Met in general.
Given the level of fear generated by the Hamas massacres and their supporters, the police must be seen to arrest people who stir up such support in demonstrations. He remembers the years of the IRA bombings in London: “If their supporters had marched down our streets dressed as IRA bombers, the police would never have tolerated them.” But that is what they appear to do with masked, Hamas-backing equivalents.
For Gentile or Jew (Mr Freer is the former), it is grim for parliamentary democracy if being pro-Israel becomes a bad career move, even a fatal decision, and constituency offices become guarded fortresses.
Look also at the drift of politics at a higher level. The rewards seem to accrue to those whose talk of peace is unanchored by the reality of brutal war. This week, Lord Cameron, the Foreign Secretary, said it was Britain’s “responsibility” to start “to set out what a Palestinian state would look like… and, crucially… that, as it happens, we with allies will look at the issue of recognising a Palestinian state.”
His remarks were glossed as merely repeating Britain’s traditional policy of a “two-state solution”, but they added two things. One was their implication that the Hamas massacres should accelerate the arrival of the new state. The other was to hint that recognition of such a state could be prospective, legitimising it in advance. This, Lord Cameron thinks, would make a Palestinian state “irreversible”.
President Biden’s people are saying something similar, if in even more opaque language. The attempt is to make support for “a two-state solution” a kitemark of respectability and opposition to it a disqualification for immigrant entry into the United States.
A two-state solution might, in principle, be nice, but it would depend on several things that have probably never been more distant since the state of Israel was created. The most obvious is that there is no likely Palestinian entity that Israel could trust not to murder its citizens and take its territory.
It would seem that Lord Cameron who, as prime minister, was robust about the dangerous link between domestic terrorism and Middle East politics and religion, is now getting all dreamy about peace. I even wonder if he wants to model himself on another British prime minister who later became foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour.
In 1917, the famous Balfour Declaration said that Britain would “view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine...”
Does Lord Cameron fancy himself – now as Foreign Secretary, later, perhaps, as some international Middle East envoy – as the Balfour of the Palestinians? Will he use his “best endeavours” to help the Palestinians win, in the wake of extreme and atrocious Pro-Palestinian violence, the national home they have always repudiated when offered it by negotiation?
If so, he needs reminding that, unlike in Balfour’s case, the Government in which he serves is not in charge of the future of Palestine. The Cameron Declaration, if such he hopes it to be, will offer not peace, but appeasement.
