The political campaigner who accused police of pulling him from a wheelchair during last week’s student protests in London has a long history of anti-Israel and anti-western activism
December 17, 2010 11:18
ByJennifer Lipman, Jennifer Lipman
The political campaigner who accused police of pulling him from a wheelchair during last week’s student protests in London has a long history of anti-Israel and anti-western activism and has described Israel as a lunatic and racist state.
In August, on his personal blog Jody McIntyre, London-born but whose great-grandparents came from Lebanon, wrote of “the system of apartheid that Israel is imposing on the Palestinians”.
But in the same post Mr McIntyre, who has on several occasions shared a platform with the controversial speaker Norman Finkelstein, admitted that despite his views he had until then his experience of Israel was limited to time in Gaza and the West Bank.
In another piece he said: “Not even a schizophrenic...would be able to think of an excuse for the crimes that Israel has committed.” He has also recalled eating a sandwich in the company of some “young guys in the ubiquitous Hamas dark-blue bomber jackets”.
Mr McIntyre, 20, who despite his presence at the university fees demonstration is not a student, also wrote of Israelis: “They come in their droves from Russia and eastern Europe, without a thought for the refugee camps on the other side of the Wall.
“Ghettos, perhaps not dissimilar to the ones their grandparents used to live in
In August he visited the town of Ni’ilin in the West Bank. He said that on arrival he saw an Orthodox Jew getting his car fixed in the village.
He wrote: “I stared at him in complete disbelief, and he smiled and waved back.
“Stealing people’s land is one thing, but apparently it’s worth leaving them a little bit so that they can give you cheap rates for puncture repairs.”
In the same piece he describes hearing the tale of a Palestinian man who “had been murdered in cold blood by an Israeli soldier as he attempted to come to the aid of an injured youth” but gives no evidence of when the alleged incident took place.
Mr McIntyre, who wrote on Twitter that his lawyer has filed a complaint with the Press Complaints Commission about a column in the Daily Mail by Richard Littlejohn, told the social networking site that he has been invited to speak alongside the radical left-wing academic Noam Chomsky.
He has called for a boycott of Israeli goods, described the Labour party as “imperialist” and at a speech in Trafalgar Square during an antiwar rally referred to “the cancer of British and American imperialism and racism spreading across the planet.”
Mr McIntyre’s own blog also shows that last week’s incident was not his first run-in with the police. Noting that “the police can only mean one thing – trouble”, in April he accused a policewoman in Edinburgh of wedging her foot under one of the wheels of his wheelchair after he refused to answer her questions.
Despite his involvement in the student fees cause, Mr McIntyre wrote of his own education that it was “eighteen wasted years.”
