UK Jewish Children Assaulted on Bus in Third Antisemitic Outrage on London Public Transport in Single Week
by Algemeiner Staff
Three Orthodox Jewish boys traveling on a London bus earlier this week were assaulted by another passenger, who punched one of them and threw their hats to the ground in an antisemitic attack.
CCTV footage of Sunday morning’s incident showed the assailant running onto the 253 bus, which serves a stretch of north London where there is a large population of Orthodox Jews. He proceeded to attack a group of Jewish men who were traveling on the bus while standing up. Passengers were filmed picking up their hats and fleeing the bus.
London’s Metropolitan Police said that the incident was being investigated. “At approximately 16:30hrs on Sunday, 24 November police received a report of an antisemitic assault that had occurred on a bus in Clapton Common, E5 at around 08:15hrs that morning,” a police statement said. “Officers have made contact with the male victim with a view to progressing this investigation. ‘There have been no arrests; enquiries continue.”
The attack on the bus was the third reported incident of antisemitic behavior on London public transport in the space of a week.
Last Friday, a man screamed “Jews don’t belong here” at a Jewish couple on another London bus and showed them his middle finger, before pulling the man by his hood and the woman by her sheitel (a hair covering worn by observant Jewish women), the UK-based Campaign Against Antisemitism reported.
And last Saturday, police in the city of Birmingham said that a man had been arrested in connection with a viral video that showed a Jewish family being harassed and “targeted with anti-Semitic abuse” on the London Underground the previous day.
The man was seen loudly reading a passage from the Christian Bible that addresses “them of the synagogue of Satan, which say they are Jews, and are not,” while pointing to a kippah-clad Jewish man who was traveling with his wife and three young children.
He was then confronted by Asma Shuweikh — a 36-year-old Muslim woman who was on the same train — who acted, she later explained, because “I thought it is my duty as a mother, as a practicing Muslim, as a citizen of this country, to have to say something.”