Intimidate the Jews Day
The right to peaceful assembly has long crossed the line into intimidation and harmful disruption
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign has rescheduled a Gaza march which was to take place in central London on Yom Kippur — the Day of Atonement and the holiest day of the year for Jews.
Dave Rich, Director of Policy at the Community Security Trust, had called on the Home Office and the Metropolitan Police to postpone the march which was “likely to intimidate Jewish worshippers” at nearby synagogues.
The Jewish Chronicle reports:
“Every time there is a large anti-Israel march, it includes people carrying antisemitic placards, chanting for Israel to be eliminated and supporting Hamas,” said Rich. “It would be completely wrong and grossly insensitive for another such march to go anywhere near a synagogue on Yom Kippur, or to disturb Jewish people on their way to and from synagogue on such a solemn day.”
Quite so. The PSC, of course, didn’t reschedule this march because of a sudden urge to do the decent thing. It was apparently told by its Jewish supporters that they would be absent on Yom Kippur (even hard-left Jews devoted to the cause of destroying Israel and ethnically cleansing their fellow-Jews from their ancient homeland apparently want to atone for their sins) and the PSC was worried that the marchers would therefore be deprived of their reputational human shields whom they wield to rebut accusations of Jew-hatred.
It therefore brought its Yom Kippur march forward to October 5. So that’s the new Intimidate the Jews Day. This one will be two days before October 7, the first anniversary of the Hamas-led pogrom in Israel. Nice. And indeed, on its website the PSC actually declares:
In October, we will mark a year since the start of Israel’s genocidal assault on the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip. We need the largest possible mobilisation to demonstrate our solidarity, demand an end to the genocide, and to call on the British government to stop arming Israel.
How disgusting is this. October is the month when decent people will mark the start of the Hamas-led genocidal assault on southern Israel, when thousands of Arabs from Gaza stormed across the border fence and butchered, raped, beheaded or burnt alive 1200 Israeli women children and men and dragged 250 others into the hellholes of Gaza where a maximum of 100 are thought to remain alive in horrific conditions.
That is what these PSC activists obscenely plan to commemorate by glorifying those savages and grossly defaming an Israel that is still fighting for its life against the war of extermination being waged against it that started on October 7 — a war that the PSC fanatically supports.
Oh — and of course the rescheduled march is on a Shabbat (the Jewish sabbath); these marches often are. So Jews walking to synagogue in central London will again be forced to take action to avoid intimidation and possible physical threat arising from this march, its antisemitic placards and its chants for Israel to be eliminated and its support for Hamas. As they have been forced to do for the last eleven months.
What’s important, however, is the reason why this march is intolerable on any day.
The point here is that, as Rich points out, these “protest” marches and demonstrations are always exercises in sickening intimidation of the Jewish community. Yet for eleven months they have been permitted on the grounds that there is a “right to protest” and these demonstrators are merely exercising that right.
But that’s not so. These are hate marches. Not only are specific crimes being committed on them — such as support for Hamas, a proscribed terrorist organisation; calls for jihad; calls for the destruction of a foreign country, Israel, “from the river to the sea”; and calls for murderous terrorist violence against Jews in the chant “globalise the intifada!” The very purpose of these hate marches is to terrify Jews, to glorify and incite holy war and to demonstrate Islamist control of British public space.
The reason they have been allowed to continue is partly because politicians and the police fear provoking violence if they are tacked effectively, but mainly because of a reluctance to be seen to challenge the ostensibly sacrosanct right of free speech. But there is no such absolute right. Even the grand-daddy of liberalism, JS Mill, acknowledged that freedom had to be limited if it did harm to others.
A new report from Policy Exchange, Might is Right, tackles this tangled issue. It was prompted by what happened in July after three little girls were murdered and several other children and adults injured in a knife attack on a school dance class in Southport.
Fuelled by false reports that the attacker was a Muslim asylum-seeker — he was actually the British-born son of a couple who had immigrated from Rwanda two decades previously — the largest episode of rioting in the UK for more than a decade took place. It was whipped up by agitators, but also involved many ordinary people whose anger at mass uncontrolled immigration and creeping Islamisation just boiled over. There were bitter public complaints of “two-tier policing,” in which white-skinned rioters who were all labelled the “far right” were seen to be treated more harshly than Muslim and other minority demonstrators who had also committed public order offences.
The report also frames its analysis around the disruptive and confrontational protests by climate-change activists in Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, as well as the pro-Gaza marches organised by the PSC and other hard-left and Islamist groups.
Existing law and practice, it concludes, have failed to give priority to the public’s right not to be disrupted. Although these activist groups demand the protected status of the freedom to protest, their activities are actually something else. The report observes:
Groups such as Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil have conducted a campaign of disruptive, and often unlawful, protest activity which has included tactics such as “locking on” (where protestors attach themselves to buildings, the transport network or other structures to prevent their easy removal); mass obstruction of the highway (through both “sit down” and “slow walking” protests); and offences of criminal damage.
As previously shown by Policy Exchange, Just Stop Oil has in the past asked activists to sign a “contract” committing them to action that would lead to “at least one arrest”.
So they are conspiracies to commit crime.
Polling conducted for Policy Exchange shows that members of the public are choosing to avoid a range of activities such as travelling with small children or frail relatives, going shopping, visiting a tourist attraction or eating at a specific restaurant, because of these disruptive demonstrations.
As for the Gaza demonstrations, the report says:
Following and during the protests linked to the Palestinian cause, there were several occasions where the police were met with violence when attempting to enforce the law. On these occasions the police officers involved responded with conspicuous courage — for this the officers involved should be commended. During the first six months of the protests — between October and April 2024 — 415 individuals were arrested during the protests, with 193 of those for “antisemitic offences”. At the time the Metropolitan Police stated there were arrests for 15 offences related to terrorism — which it described as being “unheard of previously” and that the “majority of these have been on suspicion for support of proscribed organisations, namely Hamas”.
Against a background of legal and policy confusion over the point at which free speech becomes something else, the police have bent over backwards, it seems, to prioritise the right to protest (which doesn’t actually exist; the nearest “rights” in human rights law are the right to peaceful assembly and freedom of expression). As a result, they fail to acknowledge where this morphs into intimidation, incitement or other criminal activity, and where the ability of everyone to go about their daily business is seriously impeded. The report observes:
In particular, the police must not unduly refrain from arresting individual protestors reasonably suspected to be committing criminal offences. There remains a wealth of judgments, at both the domestic and European level, which make clear that protestors cannot rely on their frequently misinterpreted “rights” to immunise them from police action against them.
What are the chances that the government under Sir Keir “the Jews are safe with me” Starmer will make the necessary distinction between free speech on the one hand and, on the other, intimidation and harmful disruption, resulting in the overdue cancellation of the Gaza hate marches and attempts by other activists to bring everyday life to a halt in order to force their cause down everyone else’s throat? I’d say somewhere in the region of zero.