ROBERT JENRICK: It's time we stood up against those who defend terrorists

For too long we have harboured those who hate us. We are now a year on from the October 7 massacre that saw 1,200 innocent Israeli citizens tortured, raped and murdered by barbaric Hamas terrorists.

But for the 101 hostages that remain trapped in the hands of Hamas, including a Brit, the ordeal still isn't over.

Now, as then, we must stand with Israel as they work to rescue the hostages and defeat the Islamist militant groups on their doorstep intent on their annihilation.

The response here in Britain to this evil attack exposed a profound sickness at the very heart of our society. Thousands immediately took to the streets here in the UK to celebrate the biggest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust. Before Israel had even responded, masked protesters were seen valorising Hamas, throwing projectiles and vandalising buildings.

Since then, our country has become unrecognisable from the liberal, tolerant nation we like to pride ourselves on.

Tens of thousands took to the streets to chant 'from the river to the sea' – a genocidal chant knowingly, or unknowingly, calling for the elimination of Israel. The flag of Hamas and Hezbollah were proudly flown in London, and chants of jihad rang out in Oxford Street from masked men acting with impunity.

At the time I, and other colleagues, raised concerns over the police response. While the French banned marches riddled with anti-Semitism and terrorist sympathisers, we simply had to watch on.

I've seen the police crack down harder on football fans than the mobs defiling our war memorials and attending events organised by those with links to Hamas.

Our political elite appeared cowed, too. When an Islamist mob gathered outside Parliament the night before a crunch parliamentary vote on the ensuing conflict, the Speaker caved to the outside pressure. It was left to a few of us in the House to call out the Islamists behind it and their hard-left sympathisers, and demand a robust response.

With such a cowardly response from our leaders, this sickness in our society has grown.

We have seen an explosion of anti-Semitism, and polling out today shows an astonishing 16 per cent of young British adults believe that attacks carried out by Hamas were justified, which rises to 28 per cent for those who identify as 'very left-wing'.

It's time we stood up and showed a backbone. The longer weak politicians such as Sir Keir Starmer maintain a conspiracy of silence over Islamism, the more fractured our society will become.

That means systematically rooting out those who despise Britain and our values who have no right to remain here.

As Immigration Minister I revoked the visas of those who valorised Hamas after October 7 – there is no excuse for Yvette Cooper not to do the same, wherever possible, for any of those supporting Hezbollah as we saw at the weekend.

Yes, the growing threat from incels being radicalised online is a concern, but Labour should not be distracting our stretched counter-extremism experts from what the data shows is the biggest problem: Islamist extremists sowing division on our streets and in our communities.

We urgently need to amend our laws to combat the scale of extremism on our streets. The threshold for prosecution is currently 'incitement' or 'encouragement', and so cheerleaders of terrorist groups manage to slip below the criminal threshold. Any expression of support for terrorism, whether it's designed to provoke emulation or not, should have no place in our society.

And we must finally close the loopholes to proscribe extremism groups. We can no longer wait to proscribe the IRGC. So we must capture the extremist groups, not involved in terrorism – like Friends of Al Aqsa or the Palestinian Forum in Britain – but that harm our communities and public order, by creating a new category for banning organisations.

There is no time to waste. Our country is fractured, divided by those who despise us. We must stand up and fight back, or risk losing the caring and tolerant country we all love.