A review of Never Again: How the West Betrayed the Jews and Itself by Jake Wallis Simons, 320 pages, Constable (October 2025). 

Thursday 2 October was the day on which Jews marked this year’s Yom Kippur—the holiest of Judaism’s holy days, a 24-hour period in which they seek forgiveness for sins and ask God for mercy (kippurim means atonement). As worshippers were leaving the Heaton Park synagogue in the city of Manchester, a man drove his car into the crowd, and knifed several people. Two people have since died while three others sustained serious injuries. The attacker himself has been shot dead by police. He is believed to have been Jihad Al-Shamie, a 35-year-old of Syrian descent, who came to the UK with his family as a child. 

Jihad means struggle, and in one of its iterations it is held to mean struggle against unbelievers, among whom Jews are prominent. The Hamas raid on an Israeli kibbutz and a music festival, which killed around 1,200 people also took place in early October (of 2023). Although it was far smaller, the attack in Manchester nevertheless signals that Jews are not safe from Islamist attack, even in the West.

Jake Wallis Simons’ book fully acknowledges the likelihood of continued Islamist terror in the West. He impresses upon Western democracies that they have lost their will to protect themselves and their cultures. To recover this, would require a spiritual, intellectual, moral, and likely military renaissance for which they are almost all presently unprepared—with the sporadic exception of Donald Trump’s America and the total exception of Israel. Simons’ second main point is to argue that Israel deserves to protect itself against a terror that may currently be in retreat but is not in decline.

Israel’s Western allies in Europe and elsewhere harbour attitudes towards the Jewish state composed of wishful thinking and platitudinous assurances that all will be well, while antisemitism in Western societies has sharply increased. Simons believes that “the betrayal of the Jews” is “symptomatic of how, in recent years, the democracies have incrementally betrayed our own values, bankrupting our inheritance and opening the door to an age of radicalism.” This situation, he claims, has been engineered by a liberal elite. This is not a new claim, but it is more strongly emphasised than usual. This elite, writes Simons, is soft on Islamist extremism, while tolerating no dissent from its orthodoxies on the part of those who speak up against the way in which such extremism is “dismantling what remains of our sense of self.”