I knew the police had lost the plot, but even I didn’t expect them to start issuing chin-stroking theological justifications for jihad. It happened on Saturday during the ‘March for Palestine’ in London. Protestors chanted for ‘Muslim armies’ to commence ‘jihad’ against Israel. To most ears, it will have sounded menacing, threatening even. To the ears of London’s Jews it must have sounded terrifying: just two weeks after a self-styled ‘Muslim army’ invaded Israel and visited the most unspeakable ‘jihad’ upon the Jews there, including British Jews, here were people on the streets of London calling for more ‘Muslim armies’ and more ‘jihad’.
The jihad dreamers were from Hizb ut-Tahrir, an Islamist outfit so extreme it is banned in Germany, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. An organisation whose members described Hamas’s vile onslaught on the civilians of Israel as ‘good news’ and ‘egg on the face’ of the Jewish State. Hearing people like that chant ‘Jihad, jihad, jihad!’, as they did on Saturday, will have rattled and unnerved all decent folk.
The jihad dreamers were from Hizb ut-Tahrir
Not the Metropolitan Police, it seems. They appeared positively chilled out about the chants for jihad against Israel just two weeks after the country experienced the worst act of anti-Semitic violence since the Holocaust. The Met took to Twitter to explain to us dim people who don’t like seeing radicals calling for a holy war on the world’s only Jewish state that ‘the word jihad has a number of meanings’.
Most of you ‘associate it with terrorism’, they finger-wagged, but our ‘specialist counter-terrorism officers… have particular knowledge in this area’ and they did not identify ‘any offences’ arising from Saturday’s chanting. Shorter version: calm down, idiots.
It was an extraordinary intervention. And a disturbing one. Why is the Met making excuses for Hizb ut-Tahrir? None of us knows for certain what was in the minds of the men saying ‘Jihad, jihad, jihad’, but I’m going to take a wild guess and say they weren’t thinking of holding a pray-in for peace. I wager that a movement whose membership includes people who think 1,400 dead Israelis are ‘egg on the face’ of an evil nation were probably talking about holy war in the literal sense. As in a war, that’s holy.
It got worse. Those placards that contained the words ‘Muslim armies’ – don’t take that too literally, said the poundshop muftis of the Met. There are ‘varying interpretations of what the language on the placards should be interpreted to mean’, they said, in garbled language perhaps reflective of garbled minds. But there really aren’t ‘various interpretations’ of a phrase like ‘Muslim army’. It very clearly refers to a land-based fighting force (‘army’) that wages war for religious reasons (‘Muslim’). You don’t need a PhD in Islamic Studies to clock that.
The Met then told everyone to relax about the black Islamic flags some protesters were waving. They are ‘not those of Isis’, our theology cops said. Okay. But maybe just show a smidgen of sympathy for those who think it’s disconcerting that any such flags were being waved in London on the two-week anniversary of one of the worst acts of Islamist terrorism ever carried out? The Met did, at least, arrest the man who was allegedly seen saying ‘God’s curse be upon the Jews.. God’s curse be upon Israel’.
The Met’s behaviour on Saturday was disgraceful. They refashioned themselves as the religious police, issuing social-media fatwas about what words like jihad, holy war and army really mean. They talked down to us as if we were kafirs ignorant of the majestic multiple meanings that Islamic words have. Listen, we’re not idiots. We understand context. And many of us feel very worried indeed that bellows of ‘Jihad’ rang out on the streets of London just a fortnight after radical Islamists slaughtered more Jews in one day than any other day since the Holocaust. It isn’t unreasonable or ‘Islamophobic’ to feel this way. It’s human.
The police are meant to act without fear or favour. But what message will the Met have sent to London’s Jews with its weird apologetics for the radical Islamist antics we witnessed on Saturday? Some Jews say they avoided central London because they knew the atmosphere would be tense and hostile. And they were right. Answer me this: does an Islamist’s right to chant for jihad count for more than a Jew’s right to traverse his city as he sees fit?
As a free-speech advocate, I think the police should only meddle with speech if it is genuinely inciting violence. I don’t want cops rounding up radical Islamists or anyone else who just says ugly or unpleasant things. But at the same time I don’t want the police making excuses for holy-war chatter. It is not their job to issue religious or political pronouncements.
We need to be honest about Saturday’s march. Chants for jihad, curses against the Jews, anti-Semitic caricatures, placards comparing Zionists to Nazis, and barely a word uttered about the Israelis still being held hostage by Hamas…. Yes, people have the right to march, and the rest of us have the right to say their march was a nasty, reactionary affair that will have made Britain’s Jews feel even more isolated than they already did.
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