Some of us switch off when we hear a ‘loony left’ story. We might cock an eyebrow at the latest tale of progressive idiocy but that’s about it. They’re at it again, we think, and move on. But there are reports this morning of some truly perverse behaviour among the activist classes and we cannot afford to laugh it off or look the other way. It’s far too serious for that.
It’s the revelation that the Palestine Solidarity Campaign applied for the right to protest against Israel on the very day Israelis were being butchered in their hundreds by the neo-fascists of Hamas. On 7 October 2023, Hamas’s pogrom still unfolding, PSC notified the Metropolitan Police of its intention to march against Israel on the streets of London the following Saturday: 14 October.
In response to a Freedom of Information request from the Campaign Against Antisemitism, the Met has confirmed that a representative of PSC phoned up on ‘Saturday 7 October at approximately 12.50pm’ to inform the Met of ‘the intention to protest’. A headline in today’s Jerusalem Post puts it starkly: ‘Anti-Israel activists planned London protest while 7 October massacre raged.’
Think about what this means. As Israelis were being knifed, shot, raped and kidnapped, London’s left was planning a march against Israel. As the youthful revellers of the Nova music festival reeled from the rape and slaughter of hundreds of their friends, the safe, secure luvvies of London’s activist set were giddily plotting an Israel-bashing demo. As Israeli toddlers and grannies were being dragged from their homes and violently spirited into enemy territory, the virtuous of London were organising a protest – not against that vile and criminal behaviour but against the nation that was its victim.
They couldn’t wait until the bodies were cold? They couldn’t wait until the rape victims who survived their sick ordeal were safe in hospital? They couldn’t wait until the house fires started by Hamas’s anti-Semitic bandits had been put out? The coldness, the inhumanity, is startling. The world watched in horror as a neo-fascist militia wreaked sadistic destruction upon the Jewish state, and yet here were the right-on of London’s leafy suburbs essentially saying: ‘Screw that state.’
Let’s be clear about how morally degenerate this is. To my mind, it’s as sick as if people had organised protests against France as the butchery at the Bataclan in 2015 was still unfolding. Or if activists had responded to the Easter massacres in Sri Lanka in 2019, in which hundreds of Christians were slaughtered by Islamist fanatics, by writing ‘F**k Sri Lanka’ on a placard and hitting the streets.
The PSC has responded to the storm over its hasty plotting by pointing out that Israel had already responded to Hamas’s attack by this time on 7 October. It is ‘citing Israel’s retaliation to the terror attack’, says the Telegraph. A PSC spokesman told the Telegraph:
‘[By that morning] it was already clear that the Israeli attacks on Gaza would be of an indiscriminate violence we had not witnessed before, and that 2.3 million people in Gaza – more than 50 per cent of them children – were at severe risk. It is entirely appropriate, therefore, that PSC would call for a protest that would seek an immediate ceasefire and call for the root causes of Israeli occupation and apartheid to be addressed. Those who seek to demonise the organisers of and participants in protests for justice for Palestinians do so to deflect attention from the crimes against humanity that Israel has committed. We shall not be deflected by their apologism for genocide.’
Of course Israel retaliated. Its men, women and children were being murdered by an invading militia. What did they want Israel to do – turn the other cheek? Someone needs to tell the PSC it’s not the 1930s anymore. Armed men can no longer kill Jews with impunity.
It is profoundly unsettling that people in the PSC saw Israelis being chased, shot, burnt out of their homes and beheaded and thought to themselves: ‘Let’s protest against Israel.’ Such a response to the most barbarous pogrom of the modern era falls entirely outside of the bounds of normal moral and political behaviour. To organise an anti-Israel demo even as Israelis were being slain was to rub the salt of Israelophobia into the wound of Hamas’s pogrom.
It was not anti-war activism – it was gloating over Israel’s suffering. The sadism of Hamas’s attack found its echo in the moral detachment of western leftists. What the revelations about the PSC really show is how unhinged anti-Israel activism has become. Today’s fashionable loathing for Israel belongs less to the realm of anti-imperialism than to the realm of bigotry. Our activist classes have dehumanised Israel and its inhabitants to such an insane degree that even the mass murder of Israelis by invading Islamists leaves them unmoved.
There are people in Britain who, when their grandkids ask them what they did following the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, will have to say: ‘I organised a protest against the Jews’ homeland.’ The left might think this was a normal response to 7 October – I guarantee you future generations will disagree.
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