Three people were attacked after enjoying a night out in London’s West End “for being Jewish” by a gang of Arabic-speaking men in the early hours of Sunday morning, while the police took nearly a half-hour to come to the scene despite repeated calls from the victims.
A group of around 20 men, who were “swearing in Arabic”, allegedly attacked a group of three Jewish friends in Leicester Square in central London after they heard the friends “speaking Hebrew” while on their way to a nightclub.
One of the victims, a 28-year-old woman named Tehilla, told The Telegraph: “They heard us talking and said, ‘are you Jewish?’… I said ‘yes, I’m Jewish,’ and then they started chanting ‘Free Palestine’, and f— Jews, all this kind of swearing at us.”
“So we just tried not to get into trouble, to walk away, but they started following us and then all of a sudden, it started with like two or three guys, and all of a sudden, they called all their friends and 15 to 20 guys started attacking us physically.”
“I hurt my leg, they punched me in the neck,” she continued. “I tried to run away and I called the police so many times, at least 10 times and I kept crying to them, ‘I’m a girl, there’s a group of guys attacking me and my friends because I’m Jewish, please can you come, I’m scared I’m going to die’.”
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Tehilla claimed that despite her repeated pleas for the police to come to the scene, she was told by an operator: “You are not the only one that called tonight”.
Detective Superintendent Lucy O’Connor of London’s Metropolitan Police confirmed that officers only attended the scene 28 minutes after being called and after the attackers and victims had already dispersed.
“Of course, I wish we could have come to their aid sooner,” she said. “I know how upsetting such inexcusable violence is for anyone who was injured or who witnessed the incident, and also for the wider community. I share their concerns.”
O’Connor said that the Met are treating the incident as an anti-Semitic hate crime, adding: “I can assure Londoners, tackling anti-Semitic crime is a priority for the Met. There is no place for hate in our city.”
However, a friend of the victims accused the London police force of “two-tiered policing”, saying: “The police are not tackling the weekly hate marches, they are not tackling antisemitism.
“The feeling for the Jewish community is that the leadership of the police, the government do not care about us… The climate is very very distressing for the British Jewish community.”
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