How Terror and Fear Are Testing Britain’s Social Fabric

As Manchester’s Jewish community mourns the victims of a Yom Kippur terror attack, Britain is forced to confront uncomfortable truths about hate, belonging, and safety.

Yehudis Fletcher’s voice is low and heavy with grief, as she recalls the moment she learned about the terrorist attack in her home city on Thursday.

The mother of three was attending a Yom Kippur service out of town, and her phone was switched off for the sacred Jewish holiday. By the afternoon, rumors began circulating. There’d been an incident outside a synagogue in Manchester.

“My first thoughts were: what kind of attack? Which shul? Where in Manchester? There’s terror, but there’s logistics of terror,” says Fletcher. “Part of the terror, as well as injury, is the chaos you inflict.”

When she found out it had happened in Crumpsall, where she lives, Fletcher panicked.

Her 17-year-old son’s usual route would have taken him past Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation—the very synagogue now cordoned off by police tape and crawling with armed officers.

Fletcher eventually managed to get through to her ex-husband, who, to her relief, had been with her two boys. They were safe.

“I keep saying we’re okay physically. It means we’re alive and uninjured, but you can also be injured emotionally,” says Fletcher. “It doesn’t go through your mind, Iram; it goes through your body. It’s like an immediate heaving sensation in your stomach. And it comes out like a weird animal sob.”

Like Fletcher, Manchester is also my home city. And when something like this happens in a place where you grew up, it hits differently.

The last terrorist attack was at Manchester Arena in 2017, when 22 people were killed and over 1,000 were injured at an Ariana Grande concert.

We hoped that it was a one-off and it would never happen again. But perhaps it was only a matter of when and not if another atrocity would occur.

Thursday’s attack took place on Yom Kippur, the most solemn and holiest of Jewish holidays. Meaning the Day of Atonement, it is a time for Jews to reflect on the past year and ask God’s forgiveness for any sins.

Instead of working or attending school, many Jews fast and attend synagogue, where they pray throughout the day. Most religious Jews also switch their phones off before sunset when Yom Kippur begins, and only switch them back on after the fast ends the following day.

As a result, many didn’t grasp the full horrors of what happened until that evening.

It was just after 9:30am when worshippers reported a car driving into pedestrians outside the synagogue, followed by a stabbing. The police arrived within minutes. The attacker, later identified as 35-year-old Jihad Al-Shamie—a British citizen of Syrian descent—was shot dead at the scene.

Two Jewish men, Adrian Daulby, 53, and Melvin Cravitz, 66, were killed in the attack. Three others were seriously injured, including Yoni Finlay, who was accidentally shot by police while helping hold the synagogue doors shut to stop the attacker from entering.

Had it not been for the quick thinking of Rabbi Daniel Walker and other congregants, it could have been far more deadly.

A bomb disposal unit later determined that a suspicious device on al-Shamie’s body was non-viable. But the fear it instilled was real.

The attack prompted a heightened police presence at synagogues across the country, announced by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer.

Counter-terror police and security services believe the attack on the synagogue may have been motivated by Israel’s war in Gaza. Six people have since been arrested.

While no organization has claimed responsibility, security analysts say the method—car ramming and stabbing—bears the hallmarks of tactics historically promoted by ISIS.

“ISIS propaganda since October 7 has urged supporters to carry out attacks on Jews worldwide. They don’t distinguish between Jews and the Israeli state,” says

Ghaffar Hussain

, a former Prevent Officer and counter-extremism expert. “We’ve been lucky we haven’t seen something like this before now. But it was always going to happen.”

Like previous terrorist suspects, Al-Shamie was known to the authorities. He had been arrested for rape earlier this year and was on police bail at the time of the attack.

But Hussain warns that even when people show early warning signs, law enforcement may be powerless to intervene:

“This is the thing people don’t realize. There’s not a lot you can do about people like this. There has to be reasonable suspicion to act, and it has to hold up under the law. With a lot of cases that fall through the gaps, there’s usually no grounds for intervention. It’s not whether the police know. It’s about whether they have enough evidence to act on it.”

Still, the broader national conversation often misses the point. After the attack, social media was flooded with outrage and solidarity, but also with silence.

Many Jews don’t feel safe right now. Fletcher reflects on a moment that night, when her 14-year-old daughter turned to her and asked why someone would do such a thing. “I said, ‘I don’t know. But I think, in their mind, they believed it was the right thing to do. We know it’s not.’ What else can you say to a child after something like this?” says Fletcher. She personally knew one of the men who was injured in the attack—he is now stable after surgery.

Since the October 7 terrorist attack, British Jews report feeling less safe than before. Research conducted by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research found that 35 percent of Jews felt unsafe in Britain in 2025, compared with nine percent in 2023 before the Hamas attacks, and 32 percent of Jews reported experiencing at least one antisemitic incident in 2024.

At the pro-Palestine marches, which have been a regular feature on Britain’s streets, there have been some displays of anti-Jewish racism, dehumanizing slogans, and calls to “globalize the intifada”.

In fact, the blood was not yet dry on the steps of the synagogue as the marches erupted on the streets of Leeds, London, and even Manchester itself. Many Jews felt this was tone deaf and insensitive.

“We’re in a weird dystopia where the people who are deeply ideologically committed to ‘being kind’ don’t understand that ‘globalize the intifada’ means stabbing people outside their places of worship on Yom Kippur,” says Fletcher.

At a vigil in Manchester on Friday, Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy was met with boos and chants of “shame on you”. One man shouted: “You are all guilty. You have allowed Jew hatred in Manchester, on the streets.”

Lammy insisted, “Our country, those of all colors, all faiths and none, stand with you.”

But it might be a case of too little, too late.

Jews have often been called “the canary in the coal mine”, as antisemitic attacks can be a sign of a deeper malaise in society.

Sure enough, since October 7, anti-Muslim hate in the UK has also surged. Almost 6,000 reports were recorded by Tell Mama, a charity that records anti-Muslim attacks—more than double the number two years ago. This week, Callum Mcinally, from the city of Portsmouth, was jailed for attacking a worshipper praying outside a mosque in August.

While these incidents highlight the growing hostility faced by Muslims in the UK, the story of Jihad al-Shamie offers a more complex perspective on identity, radicalization, and belonging.

According to reports, Jihad al-Shamie had a seemingly “normal” childhood in Manchester in the 1990s.

In a statement online, his family said they were “shocked” and “distanced themselves entirely” from his actions.

However, it has since emerged that Jihad’s father, Faraj, praised Hamas terrorists days after their deadly attack on October 7, describing them as “Allah’s men on earth.”

How, then, do UK authorities strike the right balance between protecting the public and respecting civil liberties when it comes to counter-terrorism and surveillance?

“Britain has got some of the strictest counter-terrorism laws in the world,” says Hussain. “We’ve got far more legal architecture than almost any other Western country. Accessing extremist material online is illegal. Downloading them is illegal. Sharing them is illegal. We’ve already got super strict counterterrorism laws. The question is, what do you do with people who have never broken the law? The truth is that we can’t do more than what we’re already doing. Anything more would be draconian.”

The debate then shifts to multiculturalism, integration, and community cohesion—and whether the UK’s current approach is practical.

Fletcher is critical of gestures that appear inclusive but lack substance. In her view, real community cohesion isn’t about “hummus pitta gatherings” for photo opportunities, but rather about daily and meaningful interaction between different groups.

“Any changes need to be systemic, not to just make us feel better in the chaos,” she says.

Hussain believes it must start at an early age.

“Put Muslim and Jewish children in the same primary school, and by the time they’re 16 or 17, they won’t see each other as just Jews or Muslims. By then, they’ll just see each other as human,” he says. “We’re creating societies where people are supposed to live together and share the same geography, yet have almost nothing in common with each other. And we’re expecting them all to just get along.”

For now, police cordons remain in place around the Heaton Park synagogue. The funerals have yet to be held. The trauma—both individual and collective—has only begun to settle in.

In 2017, after the Manchester Arena bombing, the city came together with a powerful message of unity. But this time it’s different. The divisions in our country are far deeper. And neither vigils nor statements of solidarity are going to fix that overnight.

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