There have been some interesting takes on Saturday’s protest in London by supporters of Palestine Action. The police arrested 522 people for expressing their support for the organisation, which has been proscribed under the Terrorism Act. But shockingly, according to a social media post by German comedian Henning Wehn, those arrests include geography teachers. ‘I can’t believe the police are put in a situation where they have to arrest hundreds of harmless pensioners and geography teachers,’ he wrote. I have never previously encountered the argument that geography teachers should be exempt from terrorism laws.
But Herr Wehn has hit upon one truly absurd aspect to the protest, albeit unwittingly. Because it is indeed ridiculous that geography teachers should have been arrested, just as it was ridiculous that everyone else was arrested. Not, however, because the police were wrong to arrest them, or even that the law is wrong to require their arrest for supporting a proscribed organisation. Rather, because their very protest was absurd.
The focus of the protest, Palestine Action, is almost incidental as a cause, because those arrested, and the rest of those who attended, were there not because they identify in any specific sense with the cause of Palestine Action but rather because they identify with every cause.
Support for Palestine Action is merely the latest example of what has been dubbed the ‘omnicause’. Whether they’re demonstrating for Palestine, trans rights or the environment, it’s essentially the same people doing the same thing, but under supposedly different labels. If you drew a Venn diagram of Palestine, eco and trans activists, you would draw a simple circle, because they are basically the same people. They aren’t protestors with a focus; they protest about everything, everywhere. Palestine Action is itself an offshoot of a green group.
On its website, for example, one Just Stop Oil press release, tells us: ‘Ordinary people must step up to resist imperialism and authoritarianism and we must demand no new fossil fuels if we are to minimise the effects of climate collapse. Palestinians are among the most vulnerable people on earth to the effects of climate collapse, and in the daily struggle to survive in an apartheid state, they have no capacity to protect themselves against what is coming.’
Another protest organisation, Youth Demand, says its focus is on ‘making the Labour Party’s fuckery clear by exposing their complicity in genocide: the Palestinian genocide and the global genocide from burning fossil fuels.’ It demands a ban on all trade with Israel, and that the government raise £1 trillion by 2030 to ‘pay damages to communities and countries harmed by fossil fuel burning’.
Earlier this year there was a protest in Parliament Square after the Supreme Court ruling on the definition of ‘woman’ in the Equality Act, with the chant: ‘One struggle. One fight. Palestine and trans rights.’ (One wonders how such a chant would go down in Palestine. Actually, one doesn’t wonder at all…)
Trans Aid Cymru (a ‘mutual aid group for trans, intersex and nonbinary people in Wales’) suggested various chants for the Cardiff March for Trans Liberation, which took place a few days after the Parliament Square demo:
No pride in genocide, too many queers have died, charge Israel with genocide.
From Cardiff, to Gaza, a queer intifada!
Get those Zionists out of our gay clubs!
Every Zionist is ugly at heart and no one will fuck them.
From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!
From Kashmir to Palestine occupation is a crime!
Intifada, intifada! Globalise the intifada!
Another chant adopts the Islamist language of martyrdom for trans people:
We will honour all our martyrs, all the children, sons and daughters.
We will honour all our martyrs, all the parents, mothers fathers.
The women of Gaza are revolutionary!
One struggle, one fight – Palestine, trans rights!
Advocates of the omnicause tend to have a shared trait: a deep ignorance of the individual cause they happen to be protesting about. Pick, for example, a random Palestine marcher and ask them what ‘From the River to the Sea’ means – which river, which sea? – and you’ll more than likely be met with a blank stare.
That’s because they don’t actually know much or care about any of the actual issues; rather, they are protesting against society itself. This has many causes, and is a variation of Gramsci’s ‘long march through the institutions’ and a result of the Marxist/left takeover of academia. They have been educated to hate themselves and the West.
In this, the role in destabilising the West played by Russia and China is under-appreciated. In its modern incarnation it takes the form of troll farms which turn social media into a propaganda for the enemies of the West. The Chinese have TikTok, on which Gen Z spends so many of its waking hours. It is now the primary search engine for 40 per cent of that age group and pushes content in which the West is evil, Israel is the real villain and trans women are not just real women but heroic. Scott Galloway, professor of marketing at New York University, says the Chinese Communist Party ‘has implanted a neural jack into every under-30’. It is classic psyops.
The result is the omnicause, and its manifestation is protests in favour of Palestine Action, marches for a free Palestine, the trans rights movement and eco-warriors who seek to disrupt – and ultimately destroy – capitalism and the West.
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