Back in June 2020, I attended a quasi-legal Black Lives Matter protest in London, and a widely reviled counter protest, by hard-right Tommy Robinson-esque ‘football lads’, who were determined to ‘defend’ the Churchill statue and the Cenotaph.
As a journalist, I was able to move freely between these two protests: one – the football lads – took place in Parliament Square and lower Whitehall, and the other – BLM – was largely confined to Trafalgar Square and Charing Cross. Mostly, the police managed to keep the warring tribes apart, occasionally the lines broke, and pretty serious violence ensued. I saw this violence from both perspectives.
I saw Piers Corbyn, brother of Jeremy, make a bizarre speech about McDonalds and Zionism
It was thus with a sense of sad expectation that I sat down to read what my fellow journalists wrote about that day, and it was with a total sense of shock that I realised that none of the journalists was prepared to tell the truth. Because these journalists were standing right beside me and they saw what I saw.
They saw that the BLM protests were way more violent than the pathetic drunken football lads. They saw the gangs of BLM protestors targeting people just because of their race – for being white and looking a bit laddish. They saw people being gouged, kicked, stabbed, and nearly killed, as the football lads had a pitiful ruckus with the police down in Whitehall. And yet, did they tell you any of this? No. Instead, all the focus was on ‘the ugly threat from the far right’, whereas, in fact, the ugly threat was that you might be beaten to death by BLM, simply for being white in the wrong place.
And so it was with a much greater sense of scepticism – towards the media – that I attended the two rallies in London on Saturday. I was interested in many things, I was definitely interested to see if the media would lie once more, not least because the circumstances were eerily similar. Again in Parliament Square, it was a tiny crew of tragic, leering, coked-up, snaggle-toothed football lads allegedly ‘defending’ the Cenotaph. Once again there was a more diverse opponent, though this time the ‘enemy’ was far more significant: 300,000 people marching from Hyde Park to the US Embassy in defence of Palestine.
What did I see? Lots of strange things. A kaleidoscope of surreal images. At one point in Parliament Square I saw a drunk, racist football hooligan angrily abusing a preternaturally calm police officer: ‘you dickless wanker, you have no minerals, you fucking loser’. An hour later, on Vauxhall Bridge Road, I saw the pro-Palestinians also abusing the police ‘you racist fascist scum, you Nazi bastards’.
I saw Piers Corbyn, brother of Jeremy, make a bizarre speech about McDonalds and Zionism. I then saw the marchers denounce him as a ‘thief and a Freemason’ – and do it so ferociously he had to be escorted away. I saw stray Tommy Robinson fans in Pimlico pubs make unwise ‘wanker’ signs at the enormous march going past the saloon bar windows. I saw the police manfully defend the lives of these idiots.
I saw happy and amiable Muslim families, lovely little kids in Palestinian headbands, glamorous students with blue hair and angry placards, middle-aged women with Just Stop Oil tattoos, and I heard them all shout, chant or shriek – ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’. And then I saw the sky and the mood darken as we crossed Vauxhall bridge – even as the BBC reported that the protestors were all singing Imagine like it was a vast jamboree of kumbaya-ness.
Finally, the crowds dwindled in the dusk to a sizeable hardcore of protestors dressed all in black and entirely masked, which made me ask: why do you need to protest like that, in London, if you care about a war 3,000 miles away? And then I had to ask, why are you now shooting fireworks directly at buildings, passers by and police?
This felt especially strange when I read what Channel 4 news was right then tweeting: ‘After being branded hate marchers by the Home Secretary, a massive pro-Palestinian march passed off peacefully, with hundreds of thousands in attendance. The only scuffles on the day involved far-right protestors who clashed with police.’ Channel 4 News was tweeting an outright lie.
It was, in other words, another bleak experience, to match the BLM protests of 2020. Indeed it was much bleaker, as the levels of anti-Semitism I witnessed yesterday were like nothing I have ever seen in the UK or indeed any western nation. It made me despair for our media and for the future of Jews in the UK.
I can, however, report one nice experience, which perhaps gives me a shred of hope. Towards the end of the events, I was talking to a copper about his task. He was pleased to have a friendly chat, I think: thankful to meet someone not obviously hostile. At the end of our conversation, I said ‘anyway, well done you guys, you have a tough job, policing this, you do it well’ and as I said this a Muslim girl in a hijab overheard the exchange and politely interrupted to say ‘yes, I agree, thank you’ to the policeman, adding ‘you’ve been amazing’. She obviously meant it; he looked properly touched.
It was a rare moment of human decency on a desolate day. In the middle of all the media lies and the ethnic hatred, I am clinging on to that. We have to cling on to that.
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