Open Letter to the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Mark Rowley from Anti-Racist Jews

The Suggestion That Opposing Genocide is Anti-Semitic or ‘Threatening’ to Jews and MPs is not only Anti-Semitic But It Paves the Way to a Police State

At 19.55 on February 16, on the eve of the last Palestine Demonstration, the Metropolitan Police issued a tweet changing the time of the demonstration, putting it back by 1½ hours.

The timing was deliberately planned in order to cause maximum disruption to those with pre-booked coaches and transport.

The pretext for this was in order to “accommodate an event at a synagogue along the route.” thus lending credence to allegations that marches against Israel’s genocide were anti-Jewish. The tweet reinforced this with the suggestion that “the impact on nearby congregations will be reduced.”

There was no hint as to what this ‘impact’ might have been but it doesn’t take much imagination to understand that what the Police were doing was to reinforce the message from supporters of Israel’s genocide that the demonstration was anti-Semitic.

Below is a statement from 150 Jews calling this intervention by the Police as an act of malice designed to reinforce the message of Zionist groups and their lapdogs, Sunak and Starmer, that demonstrations against genocide are ‘hate marches.

It’s correct that we’ve made it a condition that the march can’t move off until 1.30pm to accommodate an event at a synagogue along the route.

We’ve also required organisers to move the form up point south on Park Lane (marked by the green dot below) and we’ve blocked the… pic.twitter.com/jRnPkxw5fZ

— Metropolitan Police (@metpoliceuk) February 16, 2024

We have entered the land of Orwell’s double-speak where language that ‘deliberately obscures, disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words’ is employed by our rulers, the political class and their media echo chambers to try and destroy what remains of our democratic right to protest.

Opposition to mass murder, ethnic cleansing and sexual violence is bizarrely called ‘hate’ and support for the starvation of children and the deliberate murder of those queuing for food is a sign of the love that these people feel!

George Orwell wrote about this phenomenon of how the ruling class uses language in an essay Politics and the English Language which is prescient. Orwell wrote:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties.

Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.

Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.

Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

Orwell was writing at the time of the British Empire. He was describing its ‘civilising methods’. Today we don’t need to conjure up mental pictures of Israel’s atrocities in Gaza. They are on the Internet and our TV screens. That is what makes the Tory/Labour attacks on those who support the Palestinians and oppose Israel’s massacre of civilians all the more despicables.

Rishi Sunak, Keir Starmer, Lisa Nandy and all the other war criminals who govern us cannot say they didn’t know. It is impossible for them not to know. They can therefore reasonably be described as blood drenched monsters. Cool, calculated political sadists for whom children starving and being murdered is less important than defeating a resistance movement, Hamas.

As we saw last night with the magnificent victory of George Galloway in Rochdale, despite the opposition of sectarian groups like the Socialist Workers Party, there is no constituency in Britain, besides MPs and Peers, TV and tabloid journalists, who can be mobilised in support of genocide.

Support for an immediate ceasefire commands the support of 71% of British people compared to 12% who wanted the blood letting to go on. This is despite the unanimity of the press and broadcasting media, the FT excepted, in favour of letting Israel’s genocidal rampage continue.

Even in the wake of October 7 and the mass propaganda about Hamas ‘atrocities’ most of which have now been debunked, an opinion poll on 19^th October showed that 76% of British people supported an immediate ceasefire compared to 8% who didn’t.

It is the rich and powerful, those who have access to the airwaves who are the people who shout loudest for a continuation of the genocide and ethnic cleansing. As Galloway proved last night, Sunak, Braverman and Starmer’s support for a continuation of the bloodletting commands next to no support.

Only the Daily Mail could call for restrictions on the right to protest in the name of democracy - Vladimir Putin should pay attention to how the British Establishment justifies repression

So we have the pathetic Sunak slinking out of Downing Street to make an evidence free accusation that it was ‘intimidation’ that had led to the defeat of all the bourgeois parties.

Sunak complained that Galloway supported Hamas and Hezbollah. Neither of these organisations have murdered 30,000 innocent people and injured another 70,000. Neither of these organisations have deliberately starved children to death and left babies to die in incubators. It is an indictment of the murderous twisted values of Sunak and his puppet Starmer that they believe that Hamas is the incarnation of evil whilst Israel is the symbol of all that is sweet and saintly in this world.

These are the values of capitalism and imperialism. No amount of blood shed is enough for these human vampires. Yet if their racist Rottweiler in the Middle East suffers an attack from those it has occupied for 57 years then this is the incarnation of evil.

It is this perversion of human values that leads these creatures to call demonstrations against genocide ‘hate marches.’ And it now appears that the Police, who are an instrument of class rule, there to protect property not people, who are using the pretext of ‘anti-Semitism’ to hem in the marches and provoke confrontations.

A number of people, myself included, have been arrested on the preposterous allegation that supporting the Palestinian right to resist is somehow support for ‘terrorism’. The proscribing of Hamas’s political wing in November 2021 by Sajid David was a nakedly political act. It had not an iota of justification.

If you go to the government website and see how the government justified its proscription of Hamas’s political wing (its military wing was proscribed in 2001) there is nothing saying why it was felt necessary to proscribe the political wing.

Throughout the Troubles in Northern Ireland from 1968 to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, whilst the IRA was proscribed Sinn Fein remained legal despite calls from the Tory right to proscribe it. If Sinn Fein had been proscribed then support for the IRA would never have been channelled in a political direction and the peace agreement would never have been signed. That is what that shallow political lightweight Sajid David was doing when, with a stroke of the pen, he proscribed Hamas political wing.

The government said that at the time when Hamas’s military wing was proscribed in March 2001

it was HM government’s assessment that there was a sufficient distinction between the so called political and military wings of Hamas, such that they should be treated as different organisations, and that only the military wing was concerned in terrorism. The government now assess that the approach of distinguishing between the various parts of Hamas is artificial. Hamas is a complex but single terrorist organisation.

Yet there is nothing to say why the government made this assessment. Absolutely nothing to justify proscribing the political wing. All it says is that:

Hamas commits and participates in terrorism. Hamas has used indiscriminate rocket or mortar attacks, and raids against Israeli targets. During the May 2021 conflict, over 4,000 rockets were fired indiscriminately into Israel. Civilians, including 2 Israeli children, were killed as a result. Palestinian militant groups, including Hamas, frequently use incendiary balloons to launch attacks from Gaza into southern Israel. There was a spate of incendiary balloon attacks from Gaza during June and July 2021, causing fires in communities in southern Israel that resulted in serious damage to property.

Even assuming that the above attacks were ‘terrorist’ as opposed to resistance activities, why were they attributed to Hamas’s 20,000 strong political wing? Hamas was the elected leadership of Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza under the last free elections in 2005.

If Hamas is to be classified as ‘terrorist’ because it killed 2 Israeli children then what should we call Israel which has murdered 15,000+ children in Gaza? The racist hypocrisy of this provision is nauseating.

Any normal person would classify Hamas as a resistance group. That does not mean you have to support it. It is an Islamic group. I’m an atheist. They are conservative socially and politically whereas I’m a socialist. But terrorist? This is the label that was applied to all colonial resistance to British imperialism.

‘Terrorist’ was also the label that the Nazis applied to the French and Polish Resistance. The Tory government and their Labour echo chambers are no different in their approach to Hamas than the Nazis occupiers in Europe were to the Maquis.

There had, before the Police’s decision to impose restrictions on the last Palestine march, been at least 9 previous such demonstrations without any discernible impact other than on the hysterical Braverman, the late and unlamented Home Secretary, who literally lost the plot when she accused the Police of a pro-Palestinian bias. No-one who is Jewish has been attacked or molested in any way prior to or subsequent to the marches.

Braverman wasn’t the only person who lost the plot. The misnamed Campaign Against Antisemitism, which was set up at the behest of Israel’s dirty tricks Minister of Strategic Affairs last time there was Israeli a major attack on Gaza, in the summer of 2014, called for the military to be called in!

The CAA even had the galls to say they were doing it in order to  “uphold the values that our country stands for”.  That is the contempt that Zionists have for democratic rights. But the CAA probably thought that they were still in Israel.

Since Braverman’s resignation the Police have been slowly caving in to the raucous and racist Tory and Zionist lobby with Police officers seeing their role as monitoring the slogans and speech of demonstrators. As if the average thick plod is capable of understanding political nuance.

The most ludicrous arrests were of four members of an obscure Stalinist group who had been selling a book on Nazi-Zionist collaboration with the Star of David intertwined with the Swastika. What business is it of the Police to decide that an artistic front cover of a book infringes the law?  Since when were the police the arbiters of what is acceptable?  This takes us back to the early 60s when the publishers of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Penguin Books, were prosecuted for gross indecency.

I just hope that those arrested follow through with their threats to sue the Met for false arrest and malicious imprisonment.

In recent years the Met have increasingly taken upon themselves the roles of deciding what is and is not acceptable politically. We all remember the pre-emptive arrests of protesters at the Coronation of Charles III.

The mere fact that the Police took it upon themselves to decide that supporting Republicanism was an arrestable offence points to a deeper malaise in the police. Their ingrained right-wing bias.

As the Undercover Policing Inquiry into police malpractices, including rape by deception, revealed the Met’s Special Demonstration Squad, which infiltrated political groups concentrated solely on left-wing groups despite the fact that it is the far-right that has indulged in terrorism, bomb making and in the case of Darren Copeland the bombing of the Admiral Duncan pub in Soho, which killed 3 people a quarter of a century ago.

The pathetic excuse given for their political prejudice was that the police were too frightened to infiltrate fascist groups. Which, if true, just goes to show how nice we are and how we are the opposite of Braverman’s rhetoric!

Of course the Police response to accusations of bias is that they are only ensuring observance of the law without fear or favour.

If that is the case then it is strange that another law seems to have gone by default.  I refer to the International Criminal Court Act 2001, which makes it an offence to commit war crimes, be it in this country or abroad. It also makes someone who is ancillary to, i.e. helps someone commit a war crime equally guilty of the offence, wherever it is committed.

Given that Sunak, with the support of his faithful lapdog Starmer, has been supplying the Israelis with weapons with which to commit war crimes isn’t it about time that Sunak and Starmer shared a cell together?

With a bit of luck this would do wonders for penal reform as they might get to experience that which they wish to inflict on others. It would, I am sure, be an extremely popular measure since everyone knows that politicians are the biggest crooks.

Speaking of which isn’t it about time that the Police started prosecuting Tory Ministers who set up the VIP channel for their friends and cronies who took advantage of the COVID crisis to trouser billions of pounds? It would make a change from prosecuting shop lifters for petty theft.

As the letter below shows, the Police are fully aware that hundreds of Jews have taken part in the marches, many of them as part of a Jewish bloc.

I know that the habits of colonial divide and rule tactics die hard because at an earlier march the Police suddenly interposed themselves between the Jewish bloc and the rest of the march, because they believed that Jews were in danger from non-Jewish demonstrators.

This is not mere stupidity but a consequence of the false propaganda that the right churns out. The idea that there is anything anti-Semitic about pro-Palestinian marches is levelled by supporters of Israeli genocide in the absence of anything with which to defend what I called Hitler’s bastard offspring.

Because the Met operate within a racist and right-wing milieu, they have convinced themselves that the marches are inherently anti-Semitic. They seriously believed that demonstrators would attacks Jews who support the Palestinians, whereas in fact Jews opposed to genocide have been welcomed on the marches. This is part of the racist mindset of a police force that is notorious for the racists, bigots and Islamaphobes who make up its ranks.

Tony Greenstein