What’s more scary? A gaggle of old UKIP voters gathering to vent their spleen about mass immigration? Or a march of hulking young men, all masked and clad in black, hollering ‘Allahu Akbar’ and ‘Zionist scum off our streets’? At the risk of being branded with that cheap and meaningless slur of ‘Islamophobe’, I’m going to say it’s the latter.
Something extraordinary happened in London this weekend — there was a ‘counter-extremist’ protest that felt more extremist than the thing it was countering. Their target was UKIP, around 75 of whose supporters had assembled in Whitehall to agitate for remigration. Yet it was the anti-UKIP side that felt properly menacing. This unhappy marriage of noisy Islamists and wet leftists wailed about UKIP’s ‘bigotry’, but it was they who came off as bigots.
The UKIP protest was initially slotted for Tower Hamlets. It was clearly intended as a provocation. Tower Hamlets has a large Muslim population and here were these hard-right bruisers hoping to march through while yelling ‘Islamist invaders out of Britain!’. Fearing a ‘realistic prospect of serious disorder’, the Metropolitan Police forbade the Ukippers from beating the streets of Tower Hamlets.
So they went to Whitehall instead, a tiny gang of them. They assembled at the London Oratory and chanted angrily about ‘invaders’. In Tower Hamlets, meanwhile, lefties and masked young Muslims gathered to gloat over UKIP’s banishment from their borough. They posed as being on the side of ‘tolerance’ yet their protest felt like an orgy of intolerance. It was a fundamentalist rally wearing the convenient disguise of ‘anti-racism’.
There were the usual soppy adherents of the bourgeois left saying ‘Refugees welcome here’. And there were also columns of young men in black barking religious slogans from behind their masks. These are ‘our streets’, they roared, and then ‘Allahu Akbar’. You can call that an anti-racist rally if you like — to me it looked more like a cocky act of cultural supremacy, a unilateral assertion of Islamist rule in this part of London.
It was the anti-Zionist chanting that was most unnerving. The black-clad mob denounced ‘Zionist scum’ and promised to drive them ‘off our streets’. I don’t want to hear any yellow-bellied blather about how ‘criticising Zionism’ is not the same thing as hating Jews. When gangs of masked followers of a hardcore species of Islam gather to denounce Zionists, we know exactly who they are referring to.
The mob waved the Palestine flag, chanted ‘From the river to sea!’, and promised to honour ‘all our martyrs’. Martyrs — who did they mean? I guess it’s possible they were referring to the civilians in Gaza who have died in this infernal war that Hamas started with its fascist pogrom of two years ago. But it is also possible they were referring to the pogromists themselves — Hamas militants are often glorified as ‘martyrs’ by mobs in the West ensnared by the cult of Palestinianism.
If a masked mob in 21st-century London were indeed making favourable noises about the men who carried out the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust, then we have a serious problem. You want me to fret over a handful of middle-aged blokes lamenting mass immigration when there are gangs of masked fanatics threatening to drive ‘Zionists’ out of public life and dreaming of the destruction of the Jewish homeland? Get real, please.
Isn’t it interesting what gets called ‘bigotry’ and what does not? Apparently Ukippers hollering about ‘Islamist invaders’ is racism, but Islamist gangs threatening to hound ‘Zionists’ off ‘our streets’ is not. In fact that’s anti-racism. What a moral mess we are in.
That the left fumes about UKIP but is more than happy to march with Zionist-hating, martyr-praising Islamists is so revealing. It reveals they could not give one damn about Britain’s Jews. They have sacrificed the safety and dignity of British Jewry at the altar of sectarianism, in order that they might preserve the unholy alliance they have made with radical Muslims who share their obsessive anti-Westernism.
When will the left learn what a colossal folly it is to link arms with religious hotheads who hate homosexuals, who think women should be draped in black, and who want to drive Jews — oh I’m sorry, ‘Zionists’ — out of society? There’s a clip doing the rounds showing a placard-waving leftie saying to one of the masked Muslims, ‘We’re on the same side, bruv’. There comes a stark reply: ‘No we’re not.’ The Islamo-left needs to wake up. The road to hell is paved with their suicidal idiocy.
Lutfur Rahman, the mayor of Tower Hamlets, compared the anti-UKIP march to the Battle of Cable Street. Absolutely not. That 1936 street fight was about defending Jews from their haters. Saturday’s demo felt like the polar opposite: the moral abandonment of Jews by Islamists wary of them and a left that doesn’t care for them. Get the name of Cable Street out of your mouths.
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