A mother was referred to anti-radicalisation group Prevent and investigated by the police over concerns she had been radicalised because she had visited Israel.
Holly Passmore, 43, was stunned to find officers at her door two weeks after her visit to the country.
The single mother-of-two, who is not Jewish, had been part of a delegation of social media influencers invited by the Israeli embassy for a trip that included visiting Kfar Aza, one of the kibbutzim where British hostage Emily Damari was abducted by Hamas terrorists on October 7, 2023.
The police demanded to know why she had visited Israel, whether she was planning to go back and whether she felt safe to go there.
‘I asked them, “What do you think happened? That the Jews kidnapped me?”’ said Ms Passmore, who has had an interest in Jewish people after studying the Holocaust for her degree. ‘I kept saying to them, “I don’t understand why you are here” and they said only that they were there to check on me.’
She said when the officers first knocked on the door of her County Durham home and explained they were there to talk about safeguarding, she worried it was about her autistic son.
‘But then they mentioned Israel and said, “We aren’t here about your son, but about you, we’ve had a complaint”. I was absolutely gobsmacked,’ said Ms Passmore of the July 4 visit.
‘Then they came out with all these questions, “When did you go? Why did you go? Who did you go with? Why are you interested in this?” I said to them, ‘Is this real?’
Holly Passmore, 43, was stunned to find officers at her door two weeks after her visit to Israel
She had a second visit ten days later after she complained about her doorstep interrogation to local Reform councillor and former television presenter Darren Grimes, who wrote to Durham Constabulary. This time Ms Passmore, who posts on X as @MummyisTired and has nearly 17,000 followers, faced a Prevent officer and a police superintendent. It was the first time she learned someone had reported her to Prevent.
‘They kept saying to me that if the person has vulnerabilities, they have to be checked out, but I’ve looked into Prevent since and that doesn’t explain the processes they’ve had to get through to being on my doorstep,’ said Ms Passmore, who is on the autism spectrum and has ADHD.
‘The Prevent wording is that it’s for people who are vulnerable to exploitation but that is theoretically anybody. Who do they think is exploiting me into what?’
Ms Passmore said that on the second visit she was told the investigation wasn’t about her trip to Israel, even though that is what all of the questions on the earlier interrogation were about.
Fiona Sharpe, a spokeswoman for Labour Against Antisemitism, said: ‘The stated aim of Prevent is to safeguard against people, particularly vulnerable ones, from being radicalised. It is hard to understand what evidence was given to them to warrant visiting a woman just because she had visited Israel. Visiting Israel is certainly not a crime.’
Dr Daniel Allington, an expert on anti-Semitism at King’s College London, said attacking people who support Israel is a new tactic of extremists.
He said: ‘People of a certain political persuasion love to make the malicious insinuation that Britons travelling to Israel are somehow equivalent to Britons travelling to Isis. But Israel is an ally, a trading partner, a democracy – in every sense a friend of the UK.’
A Durham Constabulary spokeswoman said: ‘Each Prevent referral is reviewed to determine whether further action is required including, where appropriate, assessment to determine if there is an immediate security threat, or whether a vulnerable person is at genuine risk of radicalisation.’
