RUTHFULLY YOURS

‘My own personal October 7.’ That is how Itay Kashti describes his violent ordeal at the hands of three Jew-hating kidnappers in Wales last year. In a crowded field, Kashti’s kidnapping is easily among the most chilling acts of anti-Semitic violence we’ve seen perpetrated on these isles since Hamas’s pogrom in Israel 18 months ago.

This grotesque tale begins last August. Kashti, an Israeli Jewish music producer based in London, received an email from a man claiming to be a Polydor Records executive, inviting him to a songwriting retreat in Carmarthenshire. Kashti did a bit of due diligence, even speaking to the organisers, but didn’t notice anything unusual. An Airbnb was booked for him, along with a taxi to drive him there from his London home.

When he arrived at the rural cottage, he was jumped by three men wearing rubber masks and armed with an imitation pistol. The cabbie, who had helped Kashti in with his bags, was also attacked but managed to run away and call the police. Kashti, meanwhile, was handcuffed to a radiator, beaten and bloodied. Thankfully, his kidnappers’ amateurishness would save his life. They left him alone, and Kashti noticed he was chained to an unconnected pipe. He slipped free, found his phone and escaped into the shrubbery outside. He called his wife, and then the cops, who descended on the cottage and apprehended his tormentors.

Last week, the kidnappers were sentenced to eight years apiece at Swansea Crown Court. During their trial, the full, calculated horror of what had taken place was unfurled. Faiz Shah, 23, Mohammad Comrie, 23, and Elijah Ogunnubi-Sime, 20, were trying to extort money. But they also saw this as their ‘jihad’. ‘Each one of us has 100 per cent faith in Allah, so we cannot fail’, said Ogunnubi-Sime, in the days before the kidnapping, on encrypted app Telegram. They speculated Kashti may have profitted from West Bank settlements and noted that he had attended some pro-Israel marches: ‘No remorse for a man like this, he ain’t just some Jew doing it for the bag [money], he actually loves this shit.’ Shah, Comrie and Ogunnubi-Sime hailed from Leeds, Bradford and London respectively. They met online – coming together, seemingly, out of a shared interest in extortion, thuggery and the world’s oldest hatred. They warned each other to conceal the ‘Islamic angle’ of their plot against Kashti. And Shah said they should kill him if necessary: ‘I am not going to pen [jail] without his bread [money] or his soul.’ ‘I have no doubt that the victim was targeted due to his Jewish heritage’, said the judge.

Kashti’s mind couldn’t help but turn to 7 October 2023, when Israeli Jews were butchered and kidnapped for the crime of being Israeli Jews. ‘I’m not suggesting [what I went through] was anything as remotely horrific’, he says in an interview with the Jewish Chronicle. ‘But it’s interesting to see what the weight of national trauma can have [on a person].’ Our visceral disgust with the perpetrators should be mixed with a dose of shame that this mini pogrom was attempted in supposedly safe, tolerant Britain.

There will always be sadistic scumbags with disgusting beliefs, willing to act on them for kicks (and cash). But we cannot ignore the context here. For a year and a half, Jew hatred has poured forth on our streets. There was a 96 per cent rise in anti-Semitic assaults following 7 October. Activists have walked around with paraglider stickers – celebrating the Hamas fighters who descended on the Nova music festival, shooting and raping their way through the crowd. Supposed leftists have waved placards showing a swastika embedded in the Star of David. Islamic extremists have chanted Arabic war slogans about the 7th-century murder of Jews. Jew hatred in its purest form has been unleashed.

And yet there has been no real, sustained outrage about any of this. It’s as if the Great and Good simply can’t compute this evil. And of course sections of the Great and Good are also, essentially, complicit in it – burnishing the anti-Semites’ narrative about Israel being a uniquely barbarous, child-killing state committing ‘genocide’, rather than defending itself from genocidal Islamists. All this is resuscitating age-old tropes about bloodthirsty Jews. Even those who do not share these prejudices tend to look away, mentally filing the endless incidents we’ve witnessed under ‘Israel – complicated’. If Kashti were a member of another minority, I’m certain this story would have made more headlines than it has.

Well, to those who have been struggling to summon the minerals to condemn what has been happening, this is where the new Jew hatred leads. Violent, brazen anti-Semites revelling in the kidnap and brutalisation of a man because he is Jewish and Israeli. Because they hold him personally responsible for the alleged crimes – real and imagined – of the Israeli state. Because he comes from a nation which has had the temerity to defend itself against the kind of anti-Semitism that came raining down on his head in that Welsh cottage last summer. We cannot continue to turn away.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater