Why Does a Suspected Anti-Muslim Attack Barely Make the News?
The political and media reaction to a knife-wielding man allegedly attacking Muslims in Edinburgh raises uncomfortable questions about whose safety Britain takes seriously.
It is frankly an appalling and frightening scene. Video footage has been circulating on social media of a bare-chested man with a blade on the day he allegedly attacked five people in Edinburgh.
“I’m protecting the country,” he is heard shouting in the video.
It reportedly began near a mosque on Friday evening, and the video footage shows him appearing to carry a weapon and battering the door of a pizzeria. The man has been arrested and charged, and counter-terrorism officers have joined Police Scotland’s investigation. The Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, posted on X that it “appears to be motivated by anti-Muslim hatred” but that is pretty much all he has done. In total, 53 words have gone up on X from the Prime Minister, and the story, which has left the British Muslim community in shock, is barely being covered by the media in any prominent way.
It is a stark difference to what we saw less than two months ago, on April 29, when two Jewish men were stabbed in broad daylight in Golders Green, London. An emergency Cobra meeting was convened that same day and the terror threat level was upgraded. The Prime Minister and King Charles visited the scene. The attack ran across nearly every front page in the country.
By the time Sir Keir delivered his statement from Downing Street, it was not just a tweet but an address: a list of promises — visible police presence, investment in Jewish security to the tune of £25 million — built on a passage of real moral force.
“Nobody should live like that in Britain,” he said of Jewish fear, “but Jews do.”
He was right.
That response to Golders Green was correct. Antisemitism is, as the Prime Minister said, an old hatred with deep roots, and the fear it produces is real. A government that mobilises the full machinery of the state to protect a terrified minority is a government doing its job.
The scandal is not that the Jewish community received solidarity. It is that the same instinct simply has not been extended to Britain’s Muslims.
There has been no Cobra meeting. There has been a short post on X from the Prime Minister. As of this weekend, not a single newspaper outside Scotland has carried the Edinburgh attacks on its front page. The government machinery that can move within a few hours has remained largely stationary.