Let’s take a walk along Kensington Palace Gardens. Amnesty International have been protesting there this week. So let’s go and see what they’re campaigning against.
Just off Kensington High Street, originally laid out in 1870 as part of the grounds of Kensington Palace, is the official residence of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge – as well as those of other members of the Royal Family.
It is not just amongst London’s most expensive streets, but one of the most expensive residential locations in the world, although it is now mainly home to embassies and official ambassadorial residences.
Amongst others, we’ll walk past the French, Italian, Norwegian and Nepalese embassies.
We’ll see the Russian Embassy at numbers 6 and 7 and its consular offices just around the corner. The embassy is where Russia’s ambassador, Andrey Kelin, promotes Putin’s propaganda in the UK. Just before the invasion of Ukraine, he dismissed any suggestion that Putin was planning to invade. He guaranteed it would not happen.
Russia’s assault on Ukrainian cities has left them looking like Aleppo, the Syrian city Putin reduced to rubble. Elsewhere in the civil war, Putin’s forces have enabled the Syrian dictatorship’s use of chemical weapons against its own citizens.
A little further along and we’ll come to the embassy of Lebanon, where Palestinians who left Israel more than 70 years ago and their descendants are still not allowed to apply for citizenship, own property, work in certain jobs or receive health and education services.
And now we’re walking past the official residence of the Saudi Arabian Ambassador, who represents the country that has executed almost a hundred people so far this year, including 81 in one day this month. Some were convicted of murder or terrorism, but others were accused of protest-related activities. The country has been accused of executing people arrested as minors and extracting confessions through torture.
Next we’ll come to one of Roman Abramovich’s London homes, a 15-bedroom mansion valued at £150 million. The home is amongst the assets frozen under sanctions imposed on Abramovich following the invasion of Ukraine.
We’ll finish our stroll at the southern end close to the embassy of Israel, the Middle East’s only democracy and the world’s only Jewish state.
I bet you can guess who Amnesty were protesting against.
They put up street signs accusing one of the countries of apartheid, but it wasn’t Lebanon.
And they danced against oppression, but that wasn’t aimed at Russia or Saudi Arabia.
As usual, the anti-Israel obsessives at Amnesty have been singling out Israel for their campaigns and holding it to standards never applied to anyone else.
They are a disgrace.
They stand outside the Israeli embassy – a building where Arab diplomats have worked and which represents a government containing Arab parties - and accuse it of racial segregation.
They accuse people who survived the Holocaust of establishing a racist state.
The point of their campaign is to demonise Israel, inflame tensions, drive Israelis and Palestinians apart and prolong the conflict and make it worse.
And these disgusting campaigns have a real impact on the streets of Britain too, because they are used to justify racist abuse and attacks against the UK’s Jewish community.
They should be ashamed of themselves.
