Mick Hartley

From Saturday’s march in London, from the JC:

Chants of “long live the ayatollah” could be heard as demonstrators marched past Aldwych on their way to Downing Street.

These are people who think of themselves as progressive. But their hatred of Israel – of Jews – outweighs any sympathy they might have for the tens of thousands of Iranians slaughtered by the hard-line theocrats. It’s extraordinary. The pro-Palestine marches have been grim, for sure – “globalise the intifada”, “from the river to the sea” – but this a new low.

Talia Yosef, an activist who addressed the counter-protest, said of the pro-Palestinian marchers’ apparent lack of interest in the Iranian uprising: “It was never really about human rights. Why are these people silent about what is happening in Iran right now? Real people are risking everything – women, men, students, workers [are] standing in front of a regime that will imprison them, torture them and kill them, just for demanding basic freedoms.”

Yosef added: “They are silent because for them it was never about human rights. It was never about caring for the innocent…it is about being cool and trendy, about buying a $20 keffiyeh on Amazon and wearing it as a cute little scarf.”

Fellow activist Inon Dan Kehati, echoed her comments. He said: “The claim that they care about human rights for all rings empty and hollow…Right now, there are Iranians rising up in masses against the [regime] and they are being gunned down for it…Their response is silence.”

That’s being generous. Yes, cool and trendy, but it’s darker than that.

Kehati also claimed that the marches were “never about [helping the] the oppressed”. Instead, he argued they were “about being against Israel and the story of the Jewish people”.

Brendan O’Neill at Spiked:

It was an orgy of bigotry of the like we have sadly got used to since 7 October 2023. But this time even worse. This was, to all intents and purposes, a pro-murder rally. It was a march in defence of medieval religious violence. It was a mass act of excuse-making for the apocalyptic slaying of thousands of civilians. I don’t want to hear a peep from the brunching classes who will plead: ‘We were only there to show our support for Gaza.’ Because the minute you saw the flag of the Islamic Republic, the minute you saw the ayatollah’s face, the minute you saw mobs praising those butchers in Tehran, you should have fled. That you didn’t, that you were content to rub along with apologists for Islamist tyranny, speaks volumes. It suggests your unhinged loathing for Israel has fried every last one of your moral faculties….

Some say the Gazaholics of the activist class are being hypocritical. These people weep for the dead of Gaza but shrug their shoulders over the dead of Iran. I disagree. There’s moral consistency here. For in both their anti-Israel fury and their nonchalance over the butchery in Iran, these people are siding with the carnival of bloody reaction that is Islamist fanaticism. Their 7 October apologism and their shameful silence on the Iranian massacres spring from the same dark, warped source – a creepy sympathy for Islamism, a belief that this religious mania represents some kind of resistance to the West, to Israel, to capitalism, to modernity. Their anger over the war in Gaza and their coolness over the mass murder in Iran are both grim proof of the moral rot of identitarianism.

And grim proof of the moral rot of antisemitism.