Mick Hartley

A powerful article from Juliet Samuel in the Times – Why is the UK tiptoeing around hate merchants?

It didn’t take long. Even before the first bodies had been recovered they were out on the street, carnival music blaring, flags waving and cheers resounding. “We need to celebrate this resistance,” declared Hanin Barghouti, a student at the University of Sussex, during a pro-Palestinian demonstration in Brighton. “Yesterday was a victory. For freedom fighters to break out . . . it was so beautiful and inspiring to see.”

In Manchester, a speaker at a Palestine “solidarity” rally said that the Hamas fighters “rose and inspired the world”. Dana Abuqamar, a student at the city’s university, went on television and said: “We are full of pride and joy for what has happened . . . We are proud that Palestinian resistance has come to this point.”

When her comments triggered a backlash, the university sent out an email lamenting that she was in “considerable distress” and assuring everyone that it was “supporting [the student] through this difficult time”. Meanwhile, Jewish students kept their heads down as Socialist Worker posters appeared all over campus advertising a rally to celebrate “victory to the Palestinians”….

A few days later, with Israel still standing, it’s possible to think more clearly. There are, of course, genuinely concerned people out there who are worried about further bloodshed and want to start a legitimate debate about where this is all going to end up. But most of these protests aren’t stocked with such people. These gruesome Hamas fan clubs are led by hate merchants and wannabe terrorists who carry along behind them a trail of ignorant trend-followers, usually rage-filled leftists who have replaced their moral compass with Instagram quotes from Marx and Frantz Fanon….

But although the types of protester may blend together, there is certainly a glaring distinction between how they are treated and the increasingly draconian test applied to every other instance of political or offensive discourse, from the gender critical to the purely crass. The difference is most stark at universities. Over recent years, students and academics have been disciplined or fired for such crimes as swearing at anti-Brexit supporters and questioning gay marriage.

But on Sunday, Mahvish Ahmad, the LSE’s assistant professor of human rights (no less), posted in support of the Hamas attack: “Decolonisation is not a metaphor.” The Birkbeck academic Ashok Kumar declared of the music festival massacre that “partying on stolen land next to a concentration camp . . . has consequences”. What will the overzealous “social justice” administrators have to say? My bet is nothing.

The police are displaying a similarly bizarre set of standards. Ten days ago, for example, they arrested a football fan because he mocked rival fans by displaying a picture of Sunderland’s deceased child mascot, Bradley Lowery. In 2019 police in Oxford asked witnesses to come forward with information after stickers were posted around town defining a woman as an “adult human female”….

Do I think professors and hooligans should be arrested just for waving Palestinian flags or displaying shocking insouciance at the deaths of innocent people? No. Nor do I think religious Christians, crass jokesters or gender-critical feminists should be arrested or hounded out of their jobs.

But why, when synagogues and Jewish schools are forced to lay on extra security (much of it funded by donors, not the state), are the police allowing threatening mobs to take over our streets and hold rallies glorifying acts of terrorism? Why are the trigger-happy, no-platforming “social justice” brigade suddenly so keen on free speech? Why are the usually loquacious government, university and corporate “diversity” managers now so strikingly quiet?

The truth is, as the writer David Baddiel put it, “Jews don’t count”. We aren’t going to riot or throw bricks through anyone’s window. We’re pretty unlikely to get them fired. In the end, if necessary, we’ll just leave. So the default institutional response is to lie low and wait for it all to die down. In place of a state and a society with decent norms, we have a set of cowards. That’s why we need Israel.

I suppose part of the answer is that there are just too many of them, these Hamas supporters shouting hate. How can the police possibly cope with the numbers?

I said it yesterday and I'll say it again: just as gender ideology allows men to give loud and gleeful voice to their bullying misogyny in the name of a so-called "progressive" cause, so the cause of Palestinian rights allows people who think of themselves as liberal and progressive to give loud voice to their deep-seated antisemitism while still managing to feel good about themselves. Misogyny and antisemitism don't go away: they just adopt new disguises.