The normalization of public antisemitic intimidation in the United States and the United Kingdom has produced the upstream environment in which hate crime, terrorism, and hostile-state activity are now converging operationally. U.S. homeland security planners should treat that convergence as the consequence of the social environment, not as a separate threat picture.
In May 2026, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Mark Rowley described the threat picture facing the United Kingdom’s Jewish community as a convergence of three previously distinct threat domains: hate crime, terrorism, and hostile-state activity. The Met Commissioner’s formulation, articulated after the April 29 stabbing of two Jewish men in Golders Green, is the most analytically precise public characterization of the operational situation to date. It is also the framework U.S. homeland security planners should be using to read the British case and to assess the comparable American trajectory. The convergence Rowley described is not a coincidence of unrelated threats. It is the operational expression of a single upstream condition: the normalization of public antisemitic intimidation across liberal democracies in the period since October 7, 2023, and the corresponding erosion of the institutional response that previously functioned to deter such conduct.
A category of public conduct that would have produced unified institutional condemnation in either country in 2022, including large-scale chanted threats outside synagogues, harassment of identifiable Jews on transit and on residential streets, and slogans such as “Globalize the Intifada” and “Death to the IDF” deployed in close proximity to Jewish communal institutions, has by 2026 become routine enough that elected political leadership in both countries treats it as a question of protest management rather than as a public emergency.
The shift is visible not only in incident statistics but in the texture of public space itself. In both London and major American cities, chants that would once have immediately registered as extremist increasingly pass through campuses, transit systems, commercial corridors, and heavily Jewish neighborhoods as part of the ordinary atmosphere of protest activity. Demonstrators chanting “Globalize the Intifada” outside synagogues or through visibly Jewish neighborhoods are increasingly treated as participating in contentious but legitimate political expression rather than conduct demanding immediate civic condemnation. The effect goes beyond political polarization. It is the gradual normalization of confrontation language and public intimidation inside environments that previously imposed stronger social limits on both.
The recategorization of this conduct, from intimidation requiring police and political response to expression requiring management, is the upstream condition now producing operationally visible consequences in the United Kingdom. The institutional record in the United States indicates that the same recategorization process is well underway.
The effect is cumulative. Language and behavior that once would have registered immediately as intimidation increasingly become processed as background political expression. Repetition dull’s reaction. Chants calling for intifada or “resistance” stop functioning as moments of rupture and begin functioning as part of the normal atmosphere surrounding protest politics. That shift matters operationally because hostile actors no longer need to introduce escalation into a stable civic environment. They enter one where the social boundaries around confrontation have already weakened.
The clearest single institutional documentation of the U.S. trajectory is the Title VI civil rights complaint filed by the U.S. Department of Justice against Harvard University in 2025. The complaint, supported by federal investigative findings, operationalizes precisely the categories that characterize the broader normalization process: chanted intimidation in shared public space, exclusion of Jewish and Israeli students from common areas, normalization of threatening language as protected expression, the cultivation of hostile environments in which Jewish institutional participation becomes practically constrained, and the institutional non-response that allows each of the preceding to persist. The complaint documents these as federal civil rights violations subject to enforcement, not as cultural complaints. The institutional record it establishes is the analytical baseline against which the trajectory in U.S. municipal and academic settings should be measured.
The pattern of differential political response to public antisemitism is one of the documented mechanisms by which normalization advances. New York City’s incoming mayoral administration provided a high-profile illustration in its response to the November 19, 2025, protest outside Park East Synagogue, in which approximately 200 demonstrators chanted “Globalize the Intifada,” “Death to the IDF,” and other slogans calling for violence against Israelis and Jews. Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani had publicly condemned, within hours, both a swastika painted on a Brooklyn yeshiva and similar graffiti on a Brooklyn sidewalk. After Park East, Mamdani did not personally comment; his transition office stated only that the mayor-elect had “discouraged” the protesters’ language and noted that the synagogue’s tenant event involved activities allegedly in violation of international law. Outgoing Mayor Eric Adams and Governor Kathy Hochul condemned the protest in unqualified terms. The differential response, between unambiguous antisemitism that is recognizable to the political category and antisemitism that arrives in the rhetorical frame of pro-Palestinian protest, is the mechanism by which the second category becomes institutionally absorbed.
The same mechanism is documented in the United Kingdom. In September 2025, the Campaign Against Antisemitism publicly accused Mayor Sadiq Khan and Prime Minister Keir Starmer of greater institutional alarm about a far-right demonstration than about a documented pattern of antisemitic incitement at substantially larger pro-Palestinian protests, characterizing the protests as the “engine rooms” of British antisemitism. The American Jewish Committee’s 2025 State of Antisemitism Report documents the cumulative effect on Jewish communal experience, including through interviews with Jewish students who report having heard chants for intifada at sufficient frequency on their own campuses that they have ceased to register them as threats. The Columbia student whose testimony anchors the report summarized the dynamic in a single sentence: “When we normalize, we stop paying attention. This is not normal.”
What the normalization environment produces operationally is now visible in the United Kingdom in unusual detail, because the upstream infrastructure that hostile-state actors have built into the British environment has been independently documented in considerable depth. Written evidence submitted to a UK Parliamentary committee by United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) identifies a network of more than thirty UK-registered entities operating as the Iranian regime’s soft-power and radicalization infrastructure on British soil, including the Islamic Centre of England (which functions as the supreme leader’s official representative office in the UK), the Islamic Students Association of Britain and the Union of Islamic Students Association of Europe (operating from the Kanoon Towhid center in Hammersmith and part of the Al-Tawheed Trust), Labaik Ya Zahra, and the Islamic Human Rights Commission. UANI’s evidence documents that the Islamic Center of England filmed an IRGC-affiliated propaganda anthem designed to radicalize children with British children in 2022, hosted a vigil for Quds Force Commander Qassem Soleimani in 2020, and consistently propagated extreme antisemitism and Holocaust denial. The Islamic Students Association hosted, in 2024, online sessions with at least eight IRGC commanders, including sanctioned officials, who called on UK-based students to join what they described as an “apocalyptic army.” The Islamic Human Rights Commission’s director has appeared alongside EU-sanctioned IRGC Brigadier General Esmail Kowsari. UANI’s submission documents that more than 50 percent of IRGC training material is dedicated to ideological indoctrination, including explicit incitement to violence against Jews.
The current Iranian-directed terrorism campaign in the United Kingdom did not begin with the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran (Operation Epic Fury) of February 28, 2026. The documented operational prototype is the March 2024 stabbing of Pouria Zeraati, a presenter for the London-based Persian-language opposition broadcaster Iran International, whom the Iranian regime’s cyber apparatus first doxxed and who was then attacked outside his London home by members of a criminal gang contracted by the regime. The prototype was scaled. In May 2025, UK counter-terrorism authorities arrested eight men across multiple locations on suspicion of preparing to target the Israeli embassy in London, in an operation that British military intelligence assessed as likely ordered through the IRGC’s Quds Force Unit 840. Since 2022, UK security agencies have disrupted at least twenty Iran-backed plots on British soil, the majority targeting Jewish institutions and Iranian dissidents. The current post-Epic Fury campaign, beginning with the emergence of the deniable brand Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia (HAYI) on March 9, 2026, is the operational scaling of a model that was already tested and refined in the British environment over the preceding three years.
The operational architecture of the current campaign was clarified on May 15, when the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed a complaint in the Southern District of New York against Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood al-Saadi, an Iraqi national identified as a coordinator of at least eighteen attacks across Western Europe. The complaint identifies HAYI as a front for the Iranian-backed Iraqi militia Kataib Hezbollah, operating on behalf of the IRGC. The architecture, as assessed in this publication by Yayla and Clarke and elaborated by Cengiz and Dilallo, consists of four layers: the IRGC’s Quds Force at the directing level; the Iraqi Shi’a militia ecosystem as the operational subcontractor; the deniable HAYI brand for claim and propaganda functions; and a recruitment layer of locally based petty criminals reached through Telegram and Snapchat with cash offers for one-off operational tasks. None of the four young men charged in the United Kingdom for the March 23 arson attack on the Hatzola Jewish volunteer ambulance service in Golders Green appears to hold ideological commitment to Khomeinist Shi’ism; none had previously been known to British security services as Iran-linked. The architecture is engineered to make ideological commitment unnecessary at the operational layer. The role of the upstream infrastructure UANI documents is to ensure that the broader ideological environment is sufficiently saturated with the regime’s framing that the operational recruitment problem solves itself.
The selection of the United Kingdom as the principal European theater for the post-Epic Fury campaign reflects, accordingly, more than a simple assessment of target geography. Britain offered Tehran a composite environment in which the upstream radicalization infrastructure was operating with charity-status protection, the Iranian regime’s preferred targeting set was geographically concentrated and easily surveilled, the protest environment provided ambient mobilization cover for individual operational acts, and the political and reputational cost of conducting deniable antisemitic violence had been reduced to a level the regime assessed as preferred. Britain has declined, despite the 2024 documentation by the U.K. Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament of at least fifteen Iranian proxy operations against Jews and Iranian dissidents on British soil since 2022 and despite the standing recommendation of the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, to proscribe the IRGC. The Australian government, by comparison, expelled the Iranian ambassador and proscribed the IRGC in August 2025 in response to two confirmed Iranian-directed antisemitic attacks. The British government has had more than a dozen such attacks in the two months since March 9 and has taken neither measure.
The relationship between the social-normalization story and the operational-attack story is causal in one direction. The IRGC did not produce the normalization of public antisemitism in the United Kingdom; that process is the product of British domestic political and social dynamics over a period of years, in interaction with the Iranian regime’s long-running cultivation of its UK infrastructure. The normalization, however, reduced the cost of conducting deniable antisemitic violence on British soil to a level Tehran identified as actionable.
The critical shift is not that large numbers of people suddenly support violence. Most do not. The shift is that repeated exposure to confrontation language, public intimidation, and ideologically framed hostility changes what becomes easier to absorb publicly once violence occurs. Escalation enters an environment already conditioned to treat hostility toward Jews as part of ordinary political conflict rather than something requiring immediate civic rejection.
According to the al-Saadi complaint, the same model is under active development for North American targets.
The U.S. trajectory toward the same convergence is measurable. The 2025 ADL Audit recorded a year-over-year decline in U.S. incident totals from the 2024 peak but documented that on-campus incidents remain approximately three times higher than in 2021, that 45 percent of all 2025 incidents were Israel- or Zionism-related (a category that did not exist in operationally significant form a decade ago), and that the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia collectively experienced the deadliest year for antisemitic violence since the 1994 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires. The Harvard Title VI complaint documents that the institutional categories the British case has revealed as load-bearing, including chanted intimidation, public-space exclusion, slogan normalization, and institutional non-response, are operative at a federally-actionable scale on at least one major American university campus. The Park East political-response pattern indicates that the institutional reflexes that produced the British outcome are present in U.S. municipal politics at a meaningful scale. The United States has not yet reached the British convergence point. But parts of the same trajectory are now visible.
Three implications follow for U.S. homeland security planning. First, the normalization of public antisemitism is an upstream homeland-security indicator and should be treated as one. The Department of Homeland Security, the FBI Counterterrorism Division, and state and local fusion centers should integrate measurable indicators of normalization, including incident counts disaggregated by category, the institutional response patterns of municipal authorities to high-profile incidents, federal civil rights enforcement actions, and the political disposition of jurisdictional leadership toward public threats against Jews, as leading variables in projecting the operating environment for deniable foreign-state-directed attacks. Britain crossed the convergence threshold without recognizing the crossing as such; the failure of recognition is the structural failure that has produced the current British position.
Second, the operational model is functionally portable, and the upstream infrastructure that supports it is replicable. The Telegram and Snapchat recruitment infrastructure, the criminal-cutout structure, the deniable Arabic-language branding, and the composite targeting set combining Jewish, Israeli, U.S., and Iranian-opposition assets are not geographically constrained. The al-Saadi complaint specifies that the Southern District’s interest extends to plotting against North American targets. The IRGC’s soft-power infrastructure in the United States, while less developed than in the United Kingdom, has been documented; the same regulatory loopholes that have allowed UK charities to function as radicalization vectors are present in U.S. nonprofit oversight. Detection signatures developed against jihadi-inspired plotters over the past two decades are not directly transferable to criminal-cutout recruitment by state-sponsored proxies; new signatures, focused on the gig-economy recruitment model and the criminal-intermediary architecture, are required.
Third, the political response is the consequential variable. The British case demonstrates that incident documentation, intelligence-service disruption, and statements of concern by senior officials are not sufficient when not accompanied by political action commensurate with the threat. The U.S. equivalent of the British refusal to proscribe the IRGC is the unresolved policy question of whether the federal government will treat a sustained, organized campaign of public intimidation of Jews across campuses, transit systems, neighborhoods, and houses of worship as a homeland-security matter or as a downstream issue of contested speech. The Harvard Title VI complaint represents one institutional answer to that question. Sustained federal enforcement on the same model, across the categories Rowley has identified as converging, would represent another. The absence of such enforcement would represent a third, and would establish the conditions for the convergence point the United Kingdom has now reached.
The danger is not only that hostile-state actors have identified Western cities as operational terrain. It is that parts of the surrounding social environment increasingly condition the public to absorb antisemitic intimidation as politics before recognizing it as escalation. That conditioning weakens the social and political barriers that previously imposed costs on sustained public hostility toward Jews and lowers the threshold at which hostile-state and proxy actors can operate inside already destabilized civic environments.
The al-Saadi complaint in the Southern District of New York names the entity currently conducting deniable terror operations against United Kingdom Jews, against U.S. financial-sector facilities in Europe, against the Israeli diplomatic establishment, and against Iranian opposition voices, with British and European hands and Iraqi militia direction. The operational architecture is portable. The upstream radicalization infrastructure UANI has documented in the United Kingdom is replicable. The social and political environment in major American cities is on a measurable trajectory toward the British convergence point. The political response to the next high-profile public-antisemitism incident on American soil, and the federal civil rights enforcement posture that follows it, will determine which side of that convergence point the United States is positioned on.
