Thanks, did not know that when I quoted it, but upon listening to it, felt it offered verifiable facts, such as Sky News running the full clip of the police encounter. Identities of the security detail with Falter showed websites naming them and their positions, also easily verifiable.
The article I quoted from journalist Jonathan Cook also mentions Gideon Falter, calling him an Israel lobbyist.
I've been thinking about this quite a bit, not least because the problems in the Labour Party, of which I am a long-time member, under Jeremy Corbyn forced me to reconsider a lot of my attitudes to Palestine and Israel. Since I don't think white people should get to decide if something's racist or not, or men get to decide if something's sexist or not, or straight people decide whether something's homophobic, or non-Muslims decide whether something's Islamophobic, even if that's not the way they intended it to be, I think I should at least listen when Jewish people say they experience something as antisemitic.
While criticism of Israel obviously isn't necessarily antisemitic, it certainly can be; the fact that something is anti-Zionist doesn't preclude the possibility that it is also antisemitic.
I do, therefore, listen to Jewish friends, and take seriously articles by Jewish writers, who say that, whatever their views on Benjamin Netanyahu and on the IDF's assault on Hamas in Gaza, they find the huge and continuing protests in London threatening. This is partly because -- and this is something I'd never really thought about before -- their scale is quite extraordinary. We've seen turnouts of 200,000 or 300,000 or more on major national issues -- the Poll Tax, Iraq, Brexit, and so on -- but time after time demonstrations about Palestine attract similar numbers.
Jewish friends ask why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict consistently attracts so much more attention and concern than -- for example -- Turkey vs Kurds, or the continuing civil war in Syria, or in Yemen (which has been going on for the last 10 years, but I was barely aware of until the Houthis started firing missiles at US and British ships). OK, we sell arms to Israel, but we sell them to Saudi, too, who are active backers of various factions in both the Yemeni and Syrian conflicts, and whose government is at least as unpleasant as that of Netanyahu and Likud, but no one seems too bothered about that.
Of course most people on the demonstrations are there because they're concerned about the suffering of the Palestinians rather than because they sympathise with Hamas, but I think we should remember that the first of the London demonstrations after October 7, attended by thousands of people,
took place on October 9, before Israel had attacked Gaza and while the bodies of murdered Israelis were still being recovered from the various kibbutzim and the site of the Nova festival.
However, and this worries me a lot, all these well-meaning people, despite the fact they're protesting out of sympathy for the Palestinians rather than out of sympathy for Hamas, seem perfectly content to march alongside people who certainly are supporters of that right-wing, antisemitic and terrorist organisation, and to chant their slogans. They wouldn't march alongside supporters of the BNP or Britain First in support of a cause they might both happen to support -- against water companies polluting rivers, for example, or against health service cuts -- and neither, I hope, would they march alongside supporters of Narendra Modi's anti-Muslim BJP, or MAGA, but Palestinian right-wing terrorists and theocrats seem to get a free ride.
I can see why some of my Jewish friends find all this very threatening, regardless of their views on Israel and Palestine.
