Like you, I’m sure, I’ve been horrified by the riots. What a terrible sight – and how terrifying for those on the receiving end of the hatred. And I am fed up hearing from some that we need to look at the underlying causes. The underlying cause is that the rioters are thugs (the BBC might describe them as “designated by the government as thugs”), who need to be punished for their actions .
But I’m also struck by another aspect to the riots – the sheer hypocrisy of much of the reaction. Quite rightly, there has been condemnation of the people milling around before the rucks kick off. The idea that they are somehow innocent, decent people who had no idea they were about to caught up in a riot is risible.
Maybe, in theory, it might have come as a surprise to them once or even a second time when the peaceful protest they claim to have turned up for turned into a riot. But no one is falling for that excuse now.
In that context, it’s fascinating and disturbing to compare the reaction to the riots and the reaction to the fortnightly hate marches in London and elsewhere.
The organisers of the ‘pro-Palestine’ marches – and those who support them – repeatedly push the canard that they are peaceful protests in which “decent” people are simply showing their concern for the people of Gaza. Point out that alongside these “decent” people are Jew haters of almost every stripe – not a march goes by that is free of blatantly antisemitic placards, let alone the ‘globalise the intifada’ chant, which means murdering Jews – and you are accused not just of acting in bad faith but of lying and smearing the tens, even hundreds, of thousands of “decent” people. There might be a few bad apples, you are told, but the vast majority are good people who care.
Imagine turning up for a public meeting and discovering that there are BNP members in the corner, shouting racist chants. I’d suggest you would, at the very least, be discomfited.
Then imagine that you came back to the next meeting to discover that no one had stopped the BNP members from coming back – or had even condemned their presence from the platform. Would you stay? Would you come back yet again a third time? Or would you think there might perhaps be something wrong with the meeting when every time it happens there are BNP members present, and none of the organisers says or does anything about them.
If you didn’t want to be associated with the BNP then you would give future meetings a wide berth.
Which brings us back to the hate marches. Because that word, hate, isn’t a term of abuse but a literal description of the tone of the marches. Jew haters are present at every one, always. And no one does a thing – really, nothing – either to try to stop the haters from attending or to condemn them and dissociate the marches from them.
And the tens and hundreds of thousands present alongside them are complicit in the Islamists spreading their Jew hate. They are no more decent than any run of the mill antisemite. If you know – and it is a stone cold certainty – that you are going on a march alongside Jew haters and terrorist supporters, and that in no way gives you cause to think that maybe you don’t want to be associated with them, then you cannot lay claim to being decent. Own the Jew hate, because you are part of it.
The hypocrisy of the comparable reaction to the hate marches and the riots is striking. When it’s the people who turn up for a riot, righteous politicians quite rightly point out that everyone attending one these "protests" is endorsing the lawlessness that is inseparable.
But when it’s people who turn up to a march alongside a bunch of Jew haters, then we are told that these are indeed decent, well-meaning folk and we should stop smearing them.
They’re not. They are indecent. It’s simple: if you are happy to march or protest alongside racists then you, too, are a racist.
