Four ambulances belonging to Hatzolah, a Jewish volunteer emergency medical service that gives fast first-response help to people who are sick or injured, were set alight in Golders Green in London yesterday, highlighting the extent to which immigration not matched by cultural assimilation is leading to violence on the streets of the global financial capital.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer condemned the attack as a “deeply shocking antisemitic arson attack” and said that “antisemitism has no place in our society”.

Those words may be cold comfort for London’s Jews, who have warned that a climate of opinion supportive of such attacks has been building for years.

The Common Sense has previously reported on rising hostility toward Jewish students on British campuses, growing fears over the safety of British Jews, and the exclusion of Jewish football fans from public spaces on security grounds

The Golders Green attack fits into that pattern.

One of the key contributors to antisemitic hate in London and across much of Europe is unchecked Islamist immigration that has been allowed to occur in the absence of cultural assimilation into Western liberal-democratic values.

Just last week The Common Sense reported on the consequences, citing data from Policy Exchange, a London-based think tank, on the different perceptions that British Muslims hold compared to the rest of the population on issues ranging from the autocratic theocracy of Iran to their views on Israel and the United States (US).

According to those data, “14% of the general population believe Iran was not a significant threat prior to the US-Israel airstrikes, that figure rises to 45% among British Muslims. British Muslims are also more likely to attribute the strikes to attempts to gain control of oil supplies, at 40%, compared to 15% of the general population, and are far more likely to regard the strikes as definitively wrong, at 50% versus 17%”.

“Thirty-nine percent of British Muslims hold a favourable view of Iran, compared to just 8% of the wider public. Attitudes towards the US remain relatively subdued across the board, with 23% of the general population expressing favourable views and 40% unfavourable, but British Muslims display comparatively warmer views towards Iran than towards the US, Israel, or Saudi Arabia.”

Critical to successful immigration schemes is that the immigrant community assimilates to the cultural norms of the receiving society. Where that occurs, immigration is a net benefit to the receiving society. But where that does not occur, let alone where cultural values are antagonistic, immigration leads to conflict and later violence.