When Holly Passmore heard a knock at the door one morning in July last year, she assumed it was an Amazon delivery. Instead, the 44-year-old mother of two from County Durham found two plain-clothes police officers on her doorstep. They wanted to know why she had recently visited Israel. That’s right – Israel.

‘They said it was a safeguarding matter’, she told Janet Eastham at the Telegraph. Passmore, who cares for her severely autistic nine-year-old son, assumed they were worried she had taken him into a war zone. Not so. ‘This is about you’, the officer replied, ‘because you may be at risk of manipulation’.

It emerged that she had been reported to Prevent, the UK government’s counter-extremism programme. Her ‘crime’? According to a police intelligence report she later obtained, an anonymous referral claimed she ‘over-identified with the conflict between Israel and Palestine’ and was ‘supportive of Israel to the point that she has travelled to Israel’.

How did we get to the point where the UK is so brainwashed that it treats support for the only democracy in the Middle East as a possible sign of extremism? Let’s break it down.

Passmore is not Jewish. After the 7 October attacks, she used her X account, where she posts as @MummyisTired to some 28,000 followers, to speak out against anti-Semitism. The Israeli embassy invited her on an educational trip, which included a visit to Kfar Aza, the kibbutz where Hamas abducted the British hostage Emily Damari. Passmore is also enrolled on a Holocaust studies course at the University of Haifa in northern Israel.

Less than three weeks after Passmore got home, the police were asking her about her ‘links’ to Israel, why a woman from County Durham was interested in ‘Jewish issues’ and whether she had ever been to Auschwitz, which was shamefully framed as a sign of further radicalisation.

The police’s own report conceded that there ‘is no CT [counter-terror] concern with an individual being supportive of Israel as a democracy’. So why were officers on her sofa? When she complained, a superintendent turned up to reassure her that she was ‘clearly’ not a terrorist, and, she says, to urge her to stop talking about it online.

Passmore has since discovered that her NHS records had labelled her a ‘vulnerable adult’ for almost a year, without anybody even bothering to tell her. This label isn’t just absurd – as Passmore says, the NHS clearly doesn’t consider her too ‘vulnerable’ to be the sole carer of her disabled child. Understandably, she is also concerned that this secret designation may have had something to do with her Prevent referral.

Let’s put this in context. This is the same Prevent programme that was told about Axel Rudakubana three times before he murdered three little girls in Southport, and closed his case each time. A teenager obsessed with violence slipped through its fingers; a mum who went on a trip to Israel did not.

Passmore’s is not an isolated case. In 2024, Israeli student Neriya Ashwal was detained by counter-terror police when he landed at East Midlands Airport. There, he was interrogated over whether he had recently been in Israel or served in the Israel Defence Forces. The same year, passengers on an El Al Israel Airlines flight arriving at Heathrow were reportedly pulled aside for extra checks after a Border Force officer spotted an Israeli flag on a bag.

You get the picture. In the space of a few years, Israel – a country with free elections, a free press and an independent judiciary – has been transformed in the minds of Britain’s institutions into an extremist pariah state.

To sympathise with Israel supposedly puts you ‘at risk of manipulation’. To visit the country is a ‘safeguarding matter’. Meanwhile, those who march through London chanting for intifada are treated as concerned citizens exercising their democratic rights. This is a testament to the success of jihadi propaganda.

Who is to blame? We know who. Hamas and Iran, obviously, and also Qatar, Turkey, Russia and China. So too have the liberal media, universities and just about every left-wing institution and political party shamelessly pushed the jihadi agenda.

Obviously, Prevent must follow up referrals, and nobody wants a system that ignores genuine warnings. But a system that cannot tell the difference between a radicalised teenager and a woman studying the Holocaust is less a counter-extremism programme than a mirror of the prejudices of the people who run it, and a threat to the safety of us all.

‘Nobody would describe me as vulnerable’, Holly Passmore said. Quite right. The people who should worry us are the ones who reported her and the officials who thought it worth knocking on her door.

Jake Wallis Simons is co-host of The Brink, with former parachute-regiment officer Andrew Fox. It is available on all platforms now.