There are times when you wonder how history happened. And other times you realize how it did. The past two weeks have been one of those times.
The inconsistencies were, of course, numerous. People who label everything as aggression, including microaggressions, who believe that speech is violence and that misgendering a trans person is a “literal genocide” are the same people who have had no say in the last fortnight, or a “ it’s complicated’ behavior. ‘ attitude, when Jews are slaughtered by the hundreds.
All those people who filled the streets when a Minnesota police officer killed George Floyd seemed to have no solidarity left when Hamas came for the Jews.
Not only did they fail to support the victims, but within hours of the attacks, they showed up to support the attackers. And they showed up in their thousands.
After babies were murdered in front of their parents and dozens of young people were shot, anti-Israel demonstrations dominated the streets of Britain.
DOUGLAS MURRAY: Protesters included not only people waving the flags of banned terrorist groups, but also young women carrying images of paragliders, as pictured (above) in The Mail On Sunday
Yesterday, 100,000 people marched in central London, some chanting for Israel to be destroyed and some holding up anti-Semitic banners. Outside the Egyptian and Turkish embassies, an Islamic extremist group that Tony Blair and David Cameron tried to ban has ordered ‘Muslim armies’ to ‘liberate the Palestinians’.
The man who could have been our Prime Minister, Jeremy Corbyn, said at a rally in London last weekend: ‘Today, as we wave the Palestinian flag, let us hear that for the people of the West Bank, for the people of Gaza, for the people of the refugee camps.’
There was no ‘Let us hear it for the people of Israel, who have suffered such terrible damage.’
Of course not – but ‘let’s hear it for the people of Gaza’: some of them were Mr Corbyn’s ‘friends’ who went to Israel to take as many Jewish lives as they could, eager for death.
Ben Jamal, the director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, accused Rishi Sunak of ‘giving the green light to war crimes’ and Sir Keir Starmer of ‘supporting a state that commits war crimes against an entire population’. Because for Mr Jamal and co, the Israeli counter-attack cannot even be considered until people like him advise the British and Israeli governments on how to surrender.
What do people like Jamal think Israelis should do to defend themselves? The answer is clearly ‘nothing’. Lean back. Take it lying down. Preferably in a pool of blood.
Meanwhile, all those liberal Jews and others who thought solidarity could be reciprocal found that out the hard way. Black Lives Matter Chicago tweeted a celebratory image of a paraglider (one of the means Hamas terrorists used to travel over the Gaza border fence to kill young people at the music festival).
Black Lives Matter UK retweeted the Palestine Solidarity Campaign advert for last weekend’s protest, saying: ‘We will not silently witness genocide and ethnic cleansing. We must urgently show up today and call for an end to the bombing of Gaza and the illegal military occupation of Palestine.”
And what a great time people had when they showed up.
DOUGLAS MURRAY: Think about that for a moment. Imagine if – say – in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, there had been a demonstration in favor of kneeling on the necks of black men. And that those present mocked the way he died. Would black people feel reviled? That’s what I thought too (photo: a Black Lives Matter demonstration in London)
Protesters included not only people waving the flags of banned terrorist groups, but also young women carrying images of paragliders, as depicted in The Mail On Sunday – proving that, after their use in a massacre, paraglider motifs have now become a form of radical chic for part of the Jew-hating left.
Think about that for a moment. Imagine if – say – in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, there had been a demonstration in favor of kneeling on the necks of black men. And that those present mocked the way he died. Would black people feel reviled? I thought so too. Would it have been tolerated? I didn’t think so. Then imagine if instead of one death in Minneapolis, there had been 1,300.
After babies were murdered in front of their parents, anti-Israel protests dominated
The World Socialist Website helpfully interviewed protesters in several cities across the UK. Here are some highlights. There is Myra, a student from Manchester, who said: ‘It is not an invasion of Hamas, it is a rightful resistance to a brutal occupation by a racist apartheid regime. It’s genocide – the people can’t evacuate.’ Strange to respond to a real attempted genocide by making up one that didn’t happen.
Then there was Zina, a student from Iraq, who declared that the pro-Palestinian protests were about “basic human rights, seeing videos of children being murdered.” She is not referring to actual videos of actual Israeli children being murdered, but rather the possibility that in a Gaza without electricity, Palestinian babies could be unintentionally murdered. But then intentionally, unintentionally; tomaito, tomato.
Yasser, an Amazon employee, stated, “Israel has a license to commit atrocities.” (He did not say what kind of permit Hamas received.) And Abdallah, a teacher, declared that Gaza is “a concentration camp.”
The same voices came from all over Britain, from Leeds, Huddersfield, Glasgow and Bradford. They all had the same views: that Israel is “an apartheid state,” that “resistance” is allowed, and that Israel is committing genocide. And these claims, among other things, were made in a way that was best aimed at injuring Jews.
DOUGLAS MURRAY: They all had the same views: that Israel is “an apartheid state,” that “resistance” is allowed and that Israel is committing genocide. And these claims, among other things, were made in a way that was best aimed at injuring Jews (photo: a pro-Palestinian protest in London this weekend)
For example, according to someone named Ayesha, the Israelis are “repeating what the Nazis did.” Because if you want to make a comparison that is deliberately intended to injure Jews, what better way to describe them than as Nazis?
The Warsaw Ghetto is also mentioned. After all, one fact everyone knows about the Warsaw Ghetto is that as soon as the captured Jews had a chance to escape, they went around beheading babies.
And the thing is, this isn’t Israel’s problem: it’s ours. It is our cities that are full of such voices. Just as it is the Jewish schoolchildren in our cities who now have to hide their uniforms and yarmulkes – or close their schools if they happen to live in a beautiful, diverse, multicultural place like London.
Our Minister of the Interior says that the police will be knocking on the door in the coming days. There is no shortage of people who have glorified terrorism in the days since the massacre of Israelis. There should be thousands of arrests.
So will there be? To ask the question, as they say, is to answer it.
- This is an updated version of an article that first appeared in The Spectator.