One of the UK’s largest police forces is investigating after reports people openly celebrated the mass shooting in Sydney on Sunday which killed 15 people.
Sir Stephen Watson, chief constable of Greater Manchester Police, also said schoolgirls have been phoning police asking for armed officers to accompany them to Hanukkah parties in the wake of the Bondi massacre.
It came as GMP and the Metropolitan Police launched a joint crackdown on pro-Palestinian protesters making anti-Semitic chants such as ‘Globalise the intifada’.
And he warned: ‘The intolerable has become normalised, and has almost become accepted as the way that things are.
‘I suspect what we saw in Sydney exacerbates that.’
Sir Stephen described how the Heaton Park synagogue attack on October 2 and the subsequent Bondi terror incident had shaken Manchester, which has one of the country’s largest Jewish populations.
Speaking to the Policy Exchange think tank in London, he said: ‘The fear, particularly amongst our Jewish communities, has got worse. And the grounds that underpin the fear have become more realistic.’
Citing one shocking example, he added: ‘It cannot be the case that you can for any reason fail to appreciate why it is that we are getting telephone calls into Greater Manchester Police, day in and day out over the recent days, where you have a group of ten-year-old girls wanting to go to a Hanukkah party, where they should be frankly interested in balloons and bicycles, are making a request for armed police officers.
‘You cannot say that is a ridiculous request, you understand from whence it comes.’
And he also described reports people in Manchester celebrated the Bondi massacre as ‘sickeningly distasteful’.
He said: ‘It seems to me we need to get to the heart of that.
‘There is stuff which is lawful but it is intolerable, and what is intolerable can over time become unlawful.’
This week GMP and the Met announced its officers would arrest those making hateful chants in response to growing fears among the Jewish community.
‘Intafada’ is an Arab word for ‘uprising’, largely associated with Palestinian unrest in the West Bank and Gaza.
Calls to ‘globalise’ it are seen as encouragement to attack Jews all over the world.
Sir Stephen said: ‘What I can tell you is that, if you do that this weekend, my officers will arrest you. And that is a straightforward reflection of the fact that the dynamic is changing.’
He said the phrase ‘river to the sea’, often heard on pro-Palestinian marches and has a contested inference, was more ‘subjective’.
But he said people would be arrested for chanting it outside a synagogue, or waving a Palestinian flag outside the Jewish place of worship.
He added: ‘There is a reason why we have more than doubled arrests in Manchester – we are fond of arresting people. There is no reticence in that respect.’
Bondi gunman Naveed Akram has been charged with 59 offences over the attack.
Akram and his father, Sajid Akram, 50, are suspected of opening fire on crowds of more than 1,000 people as they celebrated Hanukkah in the Archer Park area of Bondi Beach on Sunday evening.
Sajid Akram was shot dead by police at the scene, while two officers were also non-fatally wounded during an exchange of gunfire.
It came as new figures from the Home Office showed terror arrests in the UK surged in recent months following the ban on support for Palestine Action.
Some 1,706 arrests were made in the three months from July to September, a significant increase in the 63 for the previous quarter.
It means a total of 1,886 arrests were made in relation to terrorism in the year ending September, the highest for any 12-month period on record and nearly eight times the 248 arrests in the previous year.
Some 1,630 arrests in the year to September – 86 per cent – were linked to supporting Palestine Action, following its proscription on July 5.
