I am an immigrant. I moved with my family to London, the capital of Great Britain, in 1997. I was just four years old—that is to say, far too young to have a say in the matter. I was also far too young to realize that Tony Blair’s election as Prime Minister in that very same year would have dramatic consequences for the long-term future of the West London neighbourhood we moved into. My parents, who were ardent lefties and Blair supporters, didn’t seem to realize either.
The Blair government, established on the back of a strong electoral victory for Britain’s left-wing Labour Party, had many goals in mind when they came into office. Some of the goals on the Labour agenda were items that had never been explicitly articulated to the voting British public; they were not part of the programme, at least in the eyes of British voters.
Perhaps the most important, or at least the most permanent, of these goals was the goal to reshape British demography via the introduction of a new immigration policy.
The impact of the Blairite immigration reform is far too heavy for an article of this length. Better writers than myself such as Douglas Murray[1] have already discussed it at length in books and articles far exceeding my pay grade.
What I can talk about, however, is the impact of mass immigration that I saw in my own life, having started out my immigrant experience as a child in an affluent West London neighbourhood with a historical Jewish presence, then watching as my home transformed into a violent and thuggish Muslim ghetto by the time I reached adulthood.
It is because of this background I hold, and because of the terrible experiences I endured as a consequence, that I was able to witness the abhorrent terrorist attacks—no, the terrorist invasions—of Israel, knowing full well that by the end of the day, there would be open-street parties and celebrations on my very own street back in West London, where I grew up.
And so there were.
On Saturday, October 7, 2023, an attack unprecedented in recent history was launched upon the sovereign state of Israel. The attackers, invading by land, sea, and air, selected their victims indiscriminately. Any Israelis they crossed paths with, civilian or military, old or young, male or female, atheist or religious, were considered to be legitimate targets. From the very moment this attack began on Saturday morning, well before the Netanyahu government declared the state of Israel to be in a state of war, I followed the violence on social media and mainstream news.
I saw pictures of dead Israeli soldiers—youngsters fulfilling their mandatory military service, most likely—with their eyes gouged out. I saw images of dead civilians littering the ground at bus stops in Sderot and inside bomb shelters in Ashkelon. I saw video footage, proudly watermarked with the Telegram channels of the perpetrators, showing corpses of men and women being dragged around Israeli town centres by Islamic terrorists loudly yelling the characteristic phrase of their creed (that is to say, Allahu Akbar, of course), as well as other videos more chilling yet depicting female captives being dragged into vehicles or brigaded around in front of young military-aged males who no doubt saw themselves as heroes, facing down an enemy humiliated in defeat.
These images, videos, and clips—all callously engineered for maximal virality on social media, so as to terrorize the greatest number of people possible—are too egregiously vile to share here. What is perhaps even more egregious, however, is the joyous euphoria expressed by certain communities around the world in celebration of these wicked, illegal, and inhumane terroristic attacks.
In the United Kingdom, a country where hate speech is formally criminalized and carries a prison sentence,
the Metropolitan Police reportedly increased patrols across London after multiple reports of street celebrations over the terrorist attacks that have claimed the lives of at least 300 Israelis
—with over 1,500 more allegedly wounded or critically injured, according to The Times of Israel. In Berlin, terrorism supporters reportedly took to the streets to hand out candy in celebration of the murderous assault on Israeli civilians in their homes and workplaces.
What is perhaps most disturbing, or most pathetic of all, is the report from Israel National News, alleging that German reporters with the Bild and the Welt TV channel who went out to meet the celebrators were demanded, under threat of physical violence, to delete the video footage of the interviews they recorded with the pro-terrorist partygoers. It is nothing short of remarkable that, in the capital of Germany, so many years after the demise of Nazi ideology, one can witness street parties celebrating the murder, rape, and kidnapping of Jewish Israelis, while the journalists who are professionally obliged to document this are forced into meek submission, deleting their own recordings and video footage on demand of the terrorist supporters they sought to speak with.
The picture of the global support for the terrorist side was in full colour before Saturday was even over. By the end of the night, videos filmed in practically every Muslim country around the world flooded Twitter, showing pro-terrorist celebrations in Tunisia, in Istanbul, in Tehran, and of course, in London. The rest of the Anglosphere was not exempt, either; celebrations in Toronto, Canada were recorded, and an 'emergency rally for Gaza' is now being organized for 'Indigenous People’s Day' in New York City.
While many of these developments have received attention within the mainstream media, the most obvious and critical feature of the celebratory phenomenon is, for whatever reason, being emphasized the least.
It is not Germans that are celebrating the deaths of Israeli civilians in Berlin, and it is not Englishmen who are cheering over the rape of kidnapped Israelis in London.
The people who took to the streets to cheer and jeer over the atrocious and criminal terroristic crimes committed by Hamas-aligned forces today were, almost exclusively, linked to a specific religious community. And even if the mainstream media forces dare not identify this group by name, we all know fully well that it was not the Buddhists out on the streets of Tehran celebrating death on Saturday night, nor was it Christians in Berlin delighting over the same.
Having grown up in West London, on the boundary of Ealing and Acton, I am well accustomed to such expressions of abject hate. Politicians and academics, pressured by the consensus around acceptable speech upheld by social liberalism, tend to use different language to describe this phenomenon. Some say 'ethnic tensions' while others prefer 'religious extremism'. For me personally, the choice of words matters not; it is the phenomenon itself that concerns me.
Growing up in West London, I witnessed a demographic shift that left the white English locals reduced to a tiny minority in what later became one of London’s most heavily Islamized boroughs. As a child, I remember people joking about religion and ethnicity often, even in public. By the time I reached the age of 18, making light of Islam in any sense was something that only those with a serious death wish would even consider doing.
When the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq (later known as simply the Islamic State) was declared in the early-mid 2010s,
I remember vividly seeing men I had known in school as boys being listed on terror watchlists,
after they had taken their flights to Syria to join the jihad. I remember seeing a documentary of an Islamist activist, being interviewed by the BBC in the park where I used to play with my schoolmates as a child, calling for homosexuals to be thrown off buildings in that very spot. My childhood was characterized by a transition between the Britain that was, and the Britain that is now.
And in the Britain that is now, just like in every other Western country that has accepted indiscriminate mass immigration from countries with Islamic values, it has become normal to celebrate murder, rape, and terrorism, so long as Israeli Jews are the ones being terrorized.
[1]: C.F. Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe, wherein: 'From the period of the Blair government onwards Britain has seen an equal number of immigrants to that one-off number of Huguenots arriving not once in the nation’s history, but every couple of months.'
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