The barbaric terrorist attacks on Thursday morning in London made us all feel like Englishmen.

Sitting in Jerusalem and watching the scenes on the television screen of emergency workers evacuating wounded from the burned out bus and of survivors, faces blackened from the underground blasts, describing the frightful events, bend one's heart toward Britain in its hour of pain.

As we Israelis think of England, it is hard to help from wondering if perhaps, in the hearts of some of the British, the sentiment arose that on July 7, 2005 they became Israelis.

It will take a long time to sort out how the attacks were organized and perpetrated. But one thing is clear enough. Britain was attacked by jihad. In attacking London's financial center, as in the attacks on the World Trade Center, the object of the terrorists was not merely to kill people, but to harm a way of life, built on freedom and free trade – the way of life of Western civilization.

The reason that it is hard not to wonder if, at their moment of shock, the British people felt a kinship with the Israeli people is because for the past five years, since the Palestinians began their jihad against Israel, Britain has been playing a lead role in distinguishing between jihad directed against Israel and jihad directed against the rest of the world.

In Britain itself, which for the past two decades has hosted some of the ideological leaders of global jihad, the jihadists have made no attempt to hide that their goals are not limited to the Jewish state, or as the common parlance has it, "the occupation," but rather span the globe.

In the weeks ahead of the British elections tis past May, Muslim activists stormed mosque meetings and denounced democracy demanding that British Muslims boycott the elections. Even as radically anti-Israel politicians like George Galloway and Oona King tried to outdo one another with their anti-Israel diatribes to win a seat in Parliament, both were attacked by Muslims on campaign stops.

In 2004, anti-Semitic attacks against Jews in Britain increased 42 percent over 2003. Yet, lip service aside, the steady rise of violent anti-Semitism has been greeted with complicity by the government. The Labor Party's election campaign was marked with anti-Semitic imagery. In one campaign poster, Tory leader Michael Howard was depicted as a hooked-nose Fagin – the anti-Semitic archetype from Oliver Twist. Rather than apologize for the slur, Prime Minister Tony Blair's adviser Alistair Campbell laughed off the storm, saying that the publicity the poster had generated was worth millions of pounds of free advertising.

In an article published on his website, www.elaph.com, and quoted by MEMRI this past spring, Dr. Ahmad Abu Matar, a Palestinian living in Oslo, discussed the Islamic Liberation Party, active in Britain, which, "announces from London its political platform – to establish the Islamic caliphate over all corners of the earth – and declares that the party will suggest to the Queen of England that she convert to Islam, and thus will not have to pay the Islamic poll tax on non-Muslims." MEMRI reported that in the same article Matar cited the activities of Abu Hamza Al-Masri, the imam of Finsbury Park Mosque in London, who called for jihad and suicide bombings in Israel, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Last summer, London Mayor Ken Livingstone received Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the main religious authority of the Muslim Brotherhood, which has spawned such movements as al-Qaida and Hamas, to his City Hall, referring to him as "an Islamic scholar of great respect." This "scholar" to whom Livingstone gushed, "You are truly, truly welcome," is a bit of a liberal in Islamist circles. He believes that both men and women should strive to become suicide bombers in the name of jihad.

Just months before, the senior imam of the Grand Mosque of Mecca, Abdul Rahman al-Sudayyis, visited London as well. Sudayyis was welcomed by a minister from Blair's government as an honored guest of Britain even though he has referred to Jews as "the scum of the human race, the rats of the world, the violators of pacts and agreements, the murderers of the prophets, and the offspring of apes and pigs."

Writing in May of the prospect of suicide bombings in Britain in the Saudi daily Al-Yawm, also published by MEMRI, Sawsan Al-Sha'er noted, "After we read about three English youths of Asian background breaking into one of the mosques in London to prevent the worshipers from voting in the [recent] elections, on the grounds that [Muslims] should not vote in these elections, expect the English 'Islamist' version of exploding suicide bombers soon."

Rather than accept that the jihadists who live in and visit Britain themselves make no distinction between their anti-British rhetoric and their anti-Semitic rhetoric, the British societal elite, on both the Left and the Right, have been intent on ignoring that in the minds of those who seek their destruction, there is no distinction between the war against the Jews and the war against the Christian West. The vilely anti-Semitic decision by the Anglican Church last week to divest from Israel and companies doing business with Israel is a case in point. The Anglican Church, which has wholeheartedly adopted the anti-Semitic "replacement" theology which asserts that Christianity replaced the Jewish covenant with God, is no doubt so blinded by its anti-Semitism that it is incapable of understanding that it shares the same enemies as the despised Jews. Continued...