It’s the 21st century and Jews are being arrested for making fun of fascists. The Telegraph has revealed that last September a Jewish protester was nabbed and detained by cops in London for the speech crime of mocking the then leader of Hezbollah, Hasan Nasrallah.
The man – who wishes to remain anonymous, which is wise in these febrile, anti-Semitic times — was holding a placard featuring a cartoon of Nasrallah with a pager and the words ‘beep, beep, beep’. It was clearly a reference to Israel’s pagers operation against Hezbollah’s top dogs, which some beautifully call ‘Operation Grim Beeper’. Nasrallah was alive at the time this fella held aloft his blasphemous banner, but it’s obvious what the guy was saying: tick tock, Hasan, your time is coming.
Worst of all, there’s the galling fact that a Jew was interrogated for mocking Jew haters
I hope I don’t get a knock on the door from the Met for saying this, but that is one funny placard. How deliciously wicked to taunt a cartoon Nasrallah with the ‘beep, beep’ of those thousands of Trojan Horse pagers that Israel used to decimate his cruel and racist movement. That placard deserved prizes, not police investigation.
The Met saw it differently. They hauled the man in for questioning. They repeatedly asked him if he believed his placard would cause offence to demonstrators who are ‘clearly pro-Hezbollah and anti-Israel’. I hope he replied: ‘Yes! That’s the entire point, you dimwits.’
Everything about this case is properly psycho. We’re now expected to consider the feelings of people who support Hezbollah? A proscribed organisation? Maybe soon people will be accused of Hezbollahphobia if they dare to diss that neo-fascist militia.
You know what I find offensive? The thought of people in Britain supporting this self-styled ‘Army of God’ that is openly anti-Semitic and which dreams of expelling the ‘cancerous’ Jews from Israel and sending them ‘back to Germany or wherever they came from’.
If you cheer such an eliminationist group, such a vile Jew-hating outfit, then it is the duty of every good Brit to offend you. To mock you and ridicule you and say ‘beep, beep’ to piss you off. That the Met, in this case, took the opposite view and sought to ringfence Hezbollah fanboys from offence is chilling.
Then there are the staggering double standards. I’ve seen anti-Israel agitators freely prance in the streets with the most sick-making banners. I’ve seen placards calling Jews ‘Christ killers’ and comparing the Jewish nation to the Nazis. I’ve seen the Star of David tangled with the Nazi swastika – the grossest libel that depicts Jews as the heirs to the monsters who once murdered them.
How many of these people had their collars felt? How many were interrogated for causing offence? If London is a city in which you can mock Jews but not Jew haters, in which you can defame Israel but not make fun of its anti-Semitic enemies, then I fear our capital is even more lost than we thought.
But worst of all, there’s the galling fact that a Jew was interrogated for mocking Jew haters. That a Jewish man was arrested for making fun of a movement that views his kind as an inferior species. To my mind this is as repulsive as arresting a black person for criticising the KKK. What was the Met thinking? This is too serious to let it blow over. Heads must roll over this humiliation of a British Jew.
What a moral test this will be for the left. They are currently manning the barricades for Kneecap after one of its members was charged with a terror offence for allegedly waving the Hezbollah flag. Will they likewise speak up for a Jew arrested for criticising Hezbollah? Many home truths are about to land, and with a mighty bang.
We need to get serious about free speech. The state’s meddling in the liberty to utter is out of control. To grill a man for caricaturing violent anti-Semites is a new low for our regime of censorship. Sense and freedom must be urgently restored.
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