Britain faces a catastrophic epidemic of Hamas-style Islamist terror

If you want to see what brainwashing really looks like, it’s worth checking out the videos currently circulating on social media of Gazan parents dressing up their babies in Hamas “merch”. 

In one, a father is holding a toddler in his arms dressed in a green Hamas overall and matching headband. 

The young dad is asked: “If you will lose your beloved, cute daughter, if she decides she wants to be a suicide bomber, will you be happy about that?” He replies: “Yes, I will help her and encourage her,” adding: “We are all Hamas.” 

Then there’s the mother who describes her 17-month-old daughter as “Hamas from birth,” adding: “Her blood is green.”

Another woman is asked: “Do you think we will see more Farj-5 rockets hitting Tel Aviv?” to which she replies: “I wish, in the name of Allah.” 

As with the radicalisation that took place during the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, it is all too easy to dismiss terrorist sympathisers and glorifiers as a danger only to themselves and their children. But news of a Hamas plot to kill Jews in Europe brings the threat much closer to home. 

Seven suspected Hamas operatives were arrested in Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands, with the Danish prime minister describing the plot as “as serious as it gets”. According to German prosecutors, the Hamas operatives were under orders to bring a cache of weapons from an undisclosed location in Europe to Berlin to attack Jewish institutions. 

The suspects were allegedly planning attacks across Europe, officials said, without giving further details. Israeli officials have suggested the arrests are linked to a single, cross-border European terror plot. 

While there was no immediate suggestion of a British link to this Hamas plot, the threat to British Jews is very real. It extends beyond the placards and anti-Semitic slogans we have witnessed on our streets already, and puts us all in danger.

Historically, Hamas hasn’t shown much of an interest in carrying out terrorist attacks outside of Israel. But if this position is now changing, how many sympathisers in Europe, and indeed Britain, would act on its call to arms? 

The Community Security Trust (CST) provides security advice and protection to synagogues, Jewish schools and other sites in Britain. As its spokesman pointed out, such a shift in policy to “carry out attacks on Jewish communities outside the region, in line with Iran and Hezbollah ... would be extremely concerning. It represents a significant shift in the threat posed to Jewish communities. There is a big concern if Hamas HQ is ordering Hamas people in Europe to carry out an attack.” 

If recent protests are anything to go by, then we may be uniquely vulnerable to this terrorist threat. If calls for “jihad” are taken literally, with young men believing they should fight a holy war on our streets, then we may face the worst terrorist threat since al-Qaeda or Isis. 

Sir Alex Younger, the former head of MI6, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Thursday that the intelligence community will be fearful of a glidepath towards radicalisation in the UK. “It is a dangerous moment but let me be clear, the danger is within,” he said. “The world’s always been a dangerous place, the thing that keeps us safe is faith in our alliances, faith in our values, faith in the things that make our country strong. 

“Where we wobble on that, yes it puts us in serious danger.” 

Admitting the West had approached recent years with a degree of hubris, he added: “Speaking domestically, my understanding is while we don’t see a serious uptick now, what really worries my former colleagues is a scale of radicalisation as a result of what is happening in the Middle East which is pretty unparalleled.”

In the past, we saw radicalisation as something that happened in the shadows. Now, however, it appears to be taking place before our very eyes on mainstream social media and, as we have witnessed since the October 7 attacks, on the streets of our capital. 

While I am not for one minute suggesting that all pro-Palestinian marchers are wannabe terrorists, or even Hamas supporters, we simply cannot turn a blind eye to the Jew hate being spouted by the anti-Semites in their midst. If you ever needed proof that such fundamentalists have no respect for Western values, just look at the brazen way in which they wear their celebration of medieval hate like a badge of honour. 

They are seemingly so beguiled by the murderers, rapists and hostage takers of Hamas that they actually consider them freedom fighters. It hasn’t once crossed their hoodwinked minds that the people the Palestinians really need to be freed from is their terrorist, Jew-hating overlords – not Israel. And that makes them very dangerous indeed. 

They may be the extreme end of the wedge but also consider the frightening ease with which so-called “peaceful” protesters have been willing to chant “from the river to the sea”, without actually knowing which river or sea they are referring to or how offensive that phrase is to Jews. 

The slur that Israel is a “genocidal” state has been repeated so often that it has become normalised. Indeed, we have now reached the abhorrent point of casualised anti-Semitism that primary school children have been happily declaring that they “hate all Jews” in playground rows, according to the CST. Amanda Bomsztyk, its northern regional director, said other young people were being “abused on the streets” including with “Nazi salutes” in harassment that is “the worst we’ve ever seen”. 

Even among highly educated university staff and students, Jew hate appears to have become second nature. Institutions like University College London, the first in Britain to admit Jews in the 19th century, have felt the need to write letters of support for Jewish students. Elsewhere, we have witnessed young adults tearing down the posters of Hamas victims.

Combined with this heady mix of virtue-signalling ignorance are the useful idiots on social media, unwittingly egging on Hamas, taking their propaganda as gospel. It is all a recipe for disaster. 

If we cannot do anything to stop imams preaching in Britain’s mosques from a Hamas-sympathetic script, and if we cannot ban Islamist groups who chant for jihad, then how on earth are we going to blunt the threat of radicalisation leading to violence on our streets?