Police in London on Monday arrested a man who attempted to carry out a knife attack on employees of a kosher supermarket in the heavily Jewish Golders Green section of the British capital.

Video of the attempted assault filmed by witnesses showed the 34-year-old man grappling with two employees outside the store as voices off-camera shouted the warning “He’s got a knife!” in Hebrew.

Ignoring appeals to “go away” and “calm down,” the man began swinging a kitchen knife with a large blade as the employees attempted to fend him off by pushing a shopping cart in his way.

“I told Shomrim to come, but I didn’t see he had a knife,” one employee can be heard saying, referring to a voluntary communal organization that assists victims of antisemitic violence.

The same employee is then heard on the phone making an emergency call to the police. “Somebody outside our store has got a knife,” he is heard saying. As the assailant departs the scene, the employee adds, “He’s going up Hamilton Road. Urgent, urgent.”

The assailant, who has not been named, was later subdued by police officers and Shomrim volunteers and placed under arrest on suspicion of possession of an offensive weapon, criminal damage and racially-aggravated assault.

Jewish people attacked in Golders Green, London – a kosher supermarket.
With a KNIFE, in plain daylight . 2024.

@israel_advocacy pic.twitter.com/z162n9wBzB

— miha schwartzenberg (@miradulescu) January 29, 2024

A statement from the UK-based Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) noted that the man had “demanded that staff answer his questions about events ‘in Palestine’. The staff responded that they did not wish to ‘talk about politics’, at which point the man allegedly brandished a knife.” It added that the “brave staff kept the man at bay using shopping trolleys and called police and Shomrim, who arrived promptly. At this point the man had entered a building and emerged having attempted to change his appearance and donned traditional Muslim garb, at which point he was apprehended.”

One of the store employees later told the London-based Jewish Chronicle that he had defended himself from the assailant using the krav maga, an Israeli martial art, that he learned at school.

“I could see the hate in his eyes. He looked like he came in looking for a fight,” 18-year-old Yosef Chaim Reitman said. “He came to ask about Israel Palestine and seemed to want us to say we were pro-Israel so he had a reason to attack.”

The CAA — which has issued several appeals to police to the prevent weekly pro-Hamas protests in London that have rendered large swathes of the city as no-go areas for members of the Jewish community — said that Monday’s incident “clearly did not take place in a vacuum. We have repeatedly warned of the dangers of hatred going almost unchecked on the streets of London. Those who have failed in their duty to uphold the law and defend British Jews cannot decry this incident without recognizing that they are responsible for creating the perfect environment in which criminal hatred thrives.”

A torrent of antisemitic hate crimes has continued unabated in London for several years. The city recorded an unprecedented number of such incidents in 2023, which massively spiked after Hamas’ massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7. According to an Algemeiner review of MPS data, antisemitic offenses in London increased 202 percent in 2023 through November, with 1,662 incidents eclipsing the full-year totals of 550 in 2022 and 845 in 2021. The MPS began issuing public data on the city’s anti-Jewish offenses in 2018.

Antisemitic hate crimes in London were already on pace to exceed last year’s figures before the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7, which led to a global surge in antisemitic outrages. Between January and September, the MPS recorded 487 incidents. In October and November, city police recorded a staggering 955 hate crimes targeting Jews — twice as many as occurred in the first three-fourths of the year.

Orthodox Jews in the Stamford Hill section of the city have been targeted disproportionately for being visibly Jewish, as shown in a spate of incidents reported by Shomrim, a Jewish organization that monitors antisemitism and also serves as a neighborhood watch group.

In December alone, an Orthodox Jewish man was assaulted by a man riding a bicycle on the sidewalk, two attackers brutally mauled a Jewish woman, and a group of Jewish children was berated by a woman who screamed “I’ll kill all of you Jews. You are murderers!” A similar incident occurred when a man confronted a Jewish shopper and shouted, “You f—king Jew, I will kill you!”

Staff writer Dion Pierre contributed to this report

The post ‘‘He’s Got a Knife!’: Kosher Supermarket Employees in London Stave Off Attempted Terror Attacker first appeared on Algemeiner.com.