Mick Hartley

At yesterday's "No to Terror" rally in Tavistock Square, from the JC:

The public response to October 7 showed that there are “different rules for Jews” who are killed in terrorist attacks, a survivor of the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing has said. 

Speaking at the No To Terror rally in London on Sunday, Ziv Mann-Wineberg told the crowd that after the Manchester terrorist attack, which killed 22 and injured over 1,000, he had “watched the entire country, and the world, offer their support and condolences, united against terror”.

But on October 7, when terrorists “fuelled by the same extremist beliefs”, killed 1,200 people in southern Israel, wounded nearly 5,000 and took around 250 hostages into Gaza, the world responded with “victim blaming, celebration [and] outright denial”.

Mann-Wineberg, from Manchester, added: “So what's the difference? The victims were Jewish. And there seems to be different rules for Jews. It seems to be acceptable to celebrate terror when it is the Jewish people being terrorised.”…

The rally, which was held on Tavistock Square, the site of the 7/7 bus bombing, also heard from British-Palestinian pro-peace activist John Aziz.

Aziz said that his views on the Middle East had led to him being called a “traitor”, receiving death threats and being publicly disowned by a family member….

Aziz’s calls for peace were echoed by campaigner Loay Alshareef from Abu Dhabi. After being welcomed to the stage in Arabic by rally organisers, the 7/10 Human Chain Project, he said: “I want to say to Hamas sympathisers that I am really sorry to disappoint you. If you thought that the enmity between Jews and Arabs was eternal, it is not.”

Calling the fighting in Gaza “an ugly war that Israel didn’t ask for”, he said the war could end “in a second if all the hostages were released and Hamas lays down its weapons”.

Alshareef said that the only disappointment during a “great 10 days” in the UK, had been “the genocidal chant on the Houses of Parliament”, projected by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

Joseph Cohen, executive director of the Israel Advocacy Movement, the largest pro-Israel online movement in the UK, said that October 7 had been a direct response to the normalising of relations between Israel and the Arab nations of the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan.

“This terrified the terrorists. Because a world where Jews and Arabs co-exist is a world where Hamas have no purpose. Coexistence is a death blow to their genocidal cult.”