We don’t half make it easy for them. Two Iranian nationals have been charged with terror offences over an alleged bomb plot against the Jewish community of Manchester, almost a year after the Heaton Park Synagogue attack in which two Jews were killed. The cherry on top? The alleged plotters came to the UK by small boats. National security and counter-terror work is difficult enough without our government effectively leaving the backdoor open to any passing Islamist, let alone hostile foreign states intent on doing us harm.

The case is ongoing, so there’s little we can say definitively. Counter Terrorism Police believe Rahman Salehi, 35, and Salam Ahmadyan, 36, were most likely coordinating with Iran. The plot involved a chlorine bomb, with the men accused of obtaining instructions and gathering components for it, and scoping out potential targets. Sickeningly, this included the same Heaton Park Synagogue which Syrian Islamist Jihad al-Shamie attacked during Yom Kippur last year. Reportedly, the Iranians came to the UK on small boats in 2020 and 2023. One was granted asylum, the other had an asylum application pending. No doubt they will also have been put up at the taxpayers’ expense.

Even if we park this case, as due process demands we must, you need not look far for examples of Britain’s broken borders being exploited by Jew-hating Islamists. It’s been completely memory-holed now, but a week after October 7 in 2023, a Moroccan ‘asylum seeker’, Ahmed Alid, stabbed his Iranian housemate in Hartlepool and murdered a pensioner in the street because he was so inspired by Hamas’s pogrom. He had been floating around Europe for 15 years after getting in trouble with the Moroccan security services.

This time last week, we learned that a former bodyguard of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh is also facing terror charges in Britain for allegedly playing a leading role in a foiled gun plot aimed at Jews and Israelis in Germany. He came to the UK a decade ago and was even granted British citizenship. As I explained on spiked last weekend, Britain has become a haven for Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood figures over the past few decades. Muhammad Sawalha, a former leader of Hamas in the West Bank, lives in a council house in north London that he bought at a discount under the Right to Buy scheme.

Even before the advent of the Iran War, in which Britain’s airbases have been playing a supporting role, the Islamic Republic had us in its sights. More than 20 potentially Iran-linked plots have been disrupted by the authorities over the past two years. Two Iranian men were charged in March for allegedly spying on London’s Jewish communities on behalf of the mullahs. Intelligence chiefs believe Iran and its proxies were involved in a string of firebombings on Jewish sites across London earlier this year, including on the Jewish-run Hatzola ambulances in Golders Green.

Then there is the baffling case of RAF Fairford, where six men, including a dual UK-Iranian national, were arrested last week, but then curiously bailed, after a group of them were discovered near the airbase in balaclavas. After days of saying little and tutting at us for ‘speculating’, the government has now confirmed it believes Iran played a role in the Fairford incident, too.

The small boats are hardly the only weakness Iran is seeking to exploit. The Islamic Republic appears to be recruiting local scumbags on the dark web to do its bidding, exploiting homegrown criminality and Muslim anti-Semitism to attack Jews and Persian dissidents and perhaps even hatch bigger attacks against the state – many of those suspected of carrying out recent attacks have been British-born. But it is now undeniable that the small-boats crisis is a gaping hole in our national security that our Islamist enemies have clocked.

If we were led by serious people, who truly cared about defending the nation and our embattled Jewish community, this would be enough to end the fiasco on the south coast – to make them realise that allowing anyone who breaks into the country illegally to stay, provided they have a semi-plausible sob story, is bound to end in disaster. Sadly, we are led by unserious people who will continue to say ‘refugees welcome’ even as Iranian agents bob their way across the channel. How many attacks, plots and firebombings would it take for the government to stop the boats? I dread to think.