The Metropolitan Police have said that an imam who led a prayer for the destruction of Jewish homes “did not meet the threshold of a crime” in a decision that has baffled security experts.
Just two weeks after Hamas’s massacre in southern Israel last year, a preacher at an east London mosque – located near a sizeable Jewish community – told his followers: “Oh Allah, curse the Jews and the children of Israel. Oh Allah, curse the infidels and the polytheists.
“Oh Allah, break their words, shake their feet, disperse and tear apart their unity and ruin their houses and destroy their homes.”
Footage of the sermon by the preacher was broadcast in late 2023 as part of an investigation into antisemitic hate speech in British mosques. In response, police said they would examine the video.
A spokesperson for the Met has now told the JC that despite the fact that “many people found the content upsetting… the entire sermon, including the wording, context and narrative have been reviewed and officers concluded that it does not meet the threshold of a crime”.
The government’s independent adviser on antisemitism, Lord Mann, urged the force to “re-investigate” and said he would be “raising the details of this specific case with the policing minister”.
Jewish security group Community Security Trust (CST), which has a close and cooperative relationship with the police, said that many Jews would “struggle to understand” the decision, while a former policeman suggested this was a sign of “two-tier policing” that followed different rules for different communities.
It comes after Essex Police prompted uproar over their decision to launch a criminal investigation into a tweet by Allison Pearson, a journalist at The Daily Telegraph.
The Guardian reported that the tweet, which was posted after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel last year, featured an image of two Asian men holding the flag of a Pakistani political party flanked by smiling police officers.
Pearson accused the Met of double standards, saying that officers had refused to pose with a British Friends of Israel banner but happily did so with people she described as “Jew haters”.
In fact, the men in the image were delegates from Pakistan’s Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), Imran Khan’s political party, and were posing a year earlier with the Greater Manchester Police, not the Met. Pearson deleted her post the next day.
Essex Police said they were investigating an allegation of incitement to racial hatred, although some lawyers have said the tweet would not meet the charging threshold for a criminal prosecution, arguing that it was directing anger at the police rather than at a specific racial group.
A former detective, Peter Bleksley, said: “The public expect police to go after threats and acts of violence, not tweets by journalists.”
The JC can also reveal that the same force – Essex Police – published a Community Tension Report issued in the wake of the Southport stabbings that claimed: “It has been reported that more than 1,000 settlers and security forces entered the Al Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem and prevented Muslims from entering the site.” Councillor Neil Gregory, a stand-in member of the Essex Police, Fire, and Crime Panel, which oversees the county’s Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC), criticised the document as adopting a “partisan approach” to the Middle East and filed a complaint with the PCC in August.
He argued that the report exhibited an “implicit degree of hostility” toward Israel, which he deemed inappropriate for an official police document.
He asked if Essex’s Jewish community was “in danger from politicised policing of community tensions”.
A spokesman for Essex Police told the JC: “[That section] came from a national report. Our report aggregates information from other trusted parties and partners so the words being attributed were included in the report but not authored by Essex Police.”
Meanwhile, security experts have voiced concerns about what language UK police forces now deem as criminal.
Bleksley said: “The language used by the [east London] preacher and the response from the Met Police is now a template for what is not illegal, for what can be said.”
He continued: “If a preacher of any other religion wanted to supplant the word ‘God’ for ‘Allah’ and ‘Muslims’ for ‘Jews’, that would be the perfect test to see if there is two-tier policing. They have set a precedent now.”
Criticising the Met’s decision, a CST spokesman said that “many people in the Jewish community and beyond will struggle to understand why it is not possible to prosecute this type of hate speech”.
One Jewish resident of the local area, who spoke to the JC on condition of anonymity, was also dissatisfied by the police’s response, saying: “We need the police to do their job.”
The resident continued: “This area has always had a proud and vibrant Jewish community, but this will only get smaller if the police don’t step up. If inciting violence doesn’t meet the criminal threshold, then what does?”
Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) was outraged by the police’s decision to take no further action.
A spokesperson told the JC: “This is another poor decision by the police in a long line of such decisions over the past year, and it is Britain’s Jews who suffer the consequences. Our lawyers are examining further options, and there is also an outstanding complaint about this incident with the Charity Commission. We hope that the regulator shows more sense than the Met.”
The seeming unwillingness by authorities to take tough action against verbal antisemitic threats has been a source of controversy.
In 2022, the Board of Deputies condemned the decision by the Crown Prosecution Service not to prosecute two people who had been previously charged for taking part in a convoy that drove through Finchley Road and shouted antisemitic chants.
“The Crown Prosecution Service is effectively stating by its decision that in Britain, in 2022, people can publicly call for the murder and rape of Jews without any consequence”, they said on social media at the time.
When reports orignally surfaced about the recording, the mosque said it had “taken swift action to investigate this matter” and “decided that the member of staff in question cease his public-speaking engagements, pending the outcome.”
It was susequently reported that several other recordings by the preacher had been removed from the centre’s social media accounts.
The JC contacted the mosque to inquire whether he had spoken at there since and what its probe had concluded, but has not yet received a response.
Defending its decision not to prosecute the imam, the Met said that “specialist officers worked closely with the Crown Prosecution Service to assess the video”. It added: “Safer Neighbourhood Teams in the area are speaking to local communities to answer any questions and provide further support if needed.”
It comes as Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has warned police they would be “held to account” for their decisions following a revelation in the Times that more than 13,000 non-crime hate incidents were recorded in the past year, including complaints against schoolchildren. Police forces should prioritise fighting crime that “matters most to their communities”, Starmer said.
Kemi Badenoch, the new Conservative leader, commented on the decision to investigate Pearson’s tweet. “We shouldn’t have journalists getting visited by the police for expressing opinions,” she told The Daily Telegraph.