Paul Bryan

It was like all their Christmases had come at once. This was the evidence they needed to quash their opponents and get rid of that evil witch, Suella Braverman, the now ex-Home Secretary.

Famed Far-Right pantomime villain, Tommy Robinson had put in a brief London appearance on Armistice Day as part of the counter protest against the Pro-Palestine march, though he quickly fled the scene in a taxi once the police closed in. There was some pushing and shoving and objects thrown as a crowd of white men headed to ‘protect’ the Cenotaph. “Every. Single. One. Of. Them. Was. Looking. For. Blood. Every one,” intoned professional scouser, sports reporter and mind reader Tony Evans, formerly of the Times. After all, he should know. “I live in Pimlico,” he tweeted. Enough said.

The media went to town of course, with Channel 4 News embarrassing themselves with the claim that ‘the only scuffles on the day involved far-right protesters who clashed with police.’ This spurious claim was later deleted.

Meanwhile, that bellwether of over-the-top reaction, polemicist Owen Jones, did his level best to impose a simplistic division of oppressed and oppressor on the marches. “There were two protests,” he tweeted. “One were a bunch of far right thugs intent on violence. The other was a massive Palestinian protest with “no issues”. One was whipped up by politicians and media outlets. The other was demonised by them.” At least Owen, waited for events to unfold (somewhat). The Liverpool Echo’s political editor and sometime Newsnight guest, Liam Thorp, couldn’t wait to get stuck in, tweeting at 11am that “The responsibility for any violence today lies solely with the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister who is too weak to deal with her dangerous chaos.” Why does he always sound like a pound-shop Churchill?

The feeling that the script was already written before the birds had tweeted was overwhelming. So let’s get somethings straight. Members of the Far Right were present in London though their numbers are hard to pin down – I’ve seen everything from 200 to 2000 quoted in the media – a x10 level of confusion that points to the subjective nature of the assessment. Quite what qualifies which members of the crowd were Far Right and which weren’t was not always obvious – though white skin, opposition to the Pro-Palestinian marches and shouting obscenities seemed qualification enough for many pundits. I suspect membership cards of the English Defence League and their like were largely absent but who knows? After all, the Far-Right label is used so promiscuously these days, it’s becoming hard to distinguish between your Mosely’s and your Monetarists. Alan Gibbons, leader of the Liverpool Community Independents seemed to sum up the mood of presumption - “Look, if it quacks like a fascist, chants like a fascist and attacks police like a fascist it's a fascist.” Obviously not spent much time around Red Action then. Anyway, Alan thought he’d found the smoking gun – a picture of a thug with a swastika tattooed on his torso. Labour MP Dianne Abbot was chuffed about it too. Sadly, a quick reverse image search revealed the picture was from 2016 and not in fact from this year’s Armistice Day marches, but let’s not allow facts to get in the way of good story.

**If our understanding of fascism becomes reduced to hunting for swastikas, we may miss the bigger picture.** Image: Twitter

Talking of facts, here’s a few – 126 people have so far been arrested in a demonstration involving over 300,000 people. More will most probably follow but the number is thankfully relatively small. Many of those arrests, as one officer explained on the radio, were pre-emptive of serious trouble, the police choosing to use arrests as a method of keeping opposing camps apart. A knife, a knuckleduster and a baton were found as well as some class-A drugs. Nine police officers were injured amidst chants of “You’re not English anymore.”

We’re told the majority of arrests were from the right-wing and according to the Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner, Matt Twist this group was largely made up of “football hooligans from across the UK.” The police are now trying to hunt down protesters from the pro-Palestinian side who are accused of that most amorphous of crime/non-crime categories - hate crime, as well as possible support for proscribed organisations like Hamas. Officers intercepted a group of 150 who were wearing face coverings and firing fireworks. Arrests were made after some of the fireworks struck officers in the face.

So there you have it. It got ugly in places, and where it did the police successfully kept a lid on things. But and here’s the rub, I’m struggling to reconcile the relatively small scale of the trouble with the histrionic shout-outs for a disaster averted. The question we should ask ourselves is why were the ‘Ceasefire Now’ crew so excited about the appearance of a scintilla of right-wingers?

“The idea that white, Far-Right nationalists were just waiting for their Asian Home Secretary to let them off the leash is of course absurd.”

I think there are two answers to this question. One is about Suella Braverman and the other is about diverting the public gaze from the horrors of Palestinian violence.

On the first point, LBC presenter James O’Brien, who likes a good quote, couldn’t help giving the game away. “The Home secretary wanted a riot,” he thundered. Does he do anything but thunder? He continued… “Editors of national newspapers, columnists and commentators… ‘pray that there is not a riot at the Cenataph’ they wrote, while licking their lips at the prospect.” Oh, the hypocrisy! It should be clear to everyone that Suella Braverman is everything progressives hate. They were determined to pin this one on her because they wanted her head and they weren’t going to be satisfied until they got it. Right wing violence on Armistice Day was the metaphorical bullet and they were determined to pull the trigger.

I just wish the James O’Brien’s and the Liam Thorp’s of this world would be honest about that – they were licking their lips too. The absurdity of the proposition that it was all Suella’s fault was for me, best summarised by this tweet…

**Adult literacy amongst the Far-Right has clearly improved in recent years**. Image: Twitter

‘Seen the latest from Suella lads? Worth the subscription to get over the Times paywall. Also excellent pieces from Caitlin Moran and Giles Coren, and Eleanor Hayward is simply the best health correspondent in Fleet Street,’ wrote Gareth Roberts.

The idea that white, Far-Right nationalists were just waiting for their Asian Home Secretary to let them off the leash is of course absurd. But it reveals how the public is increasingly viewed by the political class as mindless puppets who will do whatever they’re told. If it wasn’t for Suella, the logic goes, the yobs would have stayed at home, ironing their flags of St George. They were ‘inflamed’ by her words, unleashing the beast within. As if.

The other reason for the lip-licking is all too transparent. It’s the finger pointing of the anti-racist. ‘Look’, they say, ‘only racists and white supremacists would not want to join our side in our quest for a Free Palestine. Israel is an apartheid state. Join us, as we march from the river to the sea.’

“For all the focus on the threat of Britain’s rump of a right-wing and their historic focus on immigration and racial purity, do you not see a far more extreme mirror of that vile ideology in the rantings of Hamas and Hezbollah?”

These tactics are destined to fail because there are many who can see through them and don’t want to become apologists for a form of Islamofascism. Yasser Arafat, the one-time Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and leader of the supposedly more tolerant Fatah Party, once said, “We will not bend or fail until the blood of every last Jew from the youngest child to the oldest elder is spilt to redeem our land.” What do you think he meant exactly? For all the focus on the threat of Britain’s rump of a right-wing and their historic focus on immigration and racial purity, do you not see a far more extreme mirror of that vile ideology in the rantings of Hamas and Hezbollah? Except, unlike the EDL, these ‘liberators’ have the weapons and the resources to kidnap, maim and kill, as well as making victims of their own people.

Calling for a Ceasefire Now means leaving Hamas intact, free to pursue future campaigns of horrific barbarism. More October 7ths. No thank you. Not for me.

Israel-Hamas: Collective insanity threatens to overwhelm us

In the aftermath of the Pro-Palestine marches in London and the much smaller counter-protest, a game of political ping-pong has ensued. Videos clips are being swapped online from all sides as a new digital currency in moral certainty. Have you seen the one of fascists surging past the police? Yobs! Right-wing scum. Yes, but have YOU seen the one with the Palestine supporter saying, “Hitler knew how to deal with these people.” Islamic fascism right there. Yes, but what about those WHITE supremacists causing mayhem at the train station? What, you mean the one where a protester shouts “death to all Jews.” And so it goes on…

There’s a danger that we’re all about to lose our heads and if we let it, it could get ugly.

Now, I don’t want to give the impression that this is about to be some country vicar, Thought For The Day style piece, urging a gentle middle road, while papering over the cracks in our civilisation with kind words and a cup of tea. There is clearly a huge amount at stake. But I would at least ask everyone to take a deep breath and not assume the very worst motivations from those who find themselves on the opposite side of the fence. There lies the path to de-humanisation and all that goes with it. Rather than summoning partial evidence to prove a point that we know deep down does not represent the full picture, maybe we should look for the courage to acknowledge the flaws in both camps.

Is this image dehumanising? Owen Jones thought so but others disagreed. If we are forever re-defining words to mean whatever we want them to mean, we will lose our ability to think straight. Perhaps that’s the point. Image: Twitter; cartoon originally from Ramirez, Las Vegas Review Journal for the Washington Post.

I for one am critical of the Pro-Palestinian ‘peace’ marches. I just don’t think they represent what their supporters claim, hopelessly entwinned as they are with Islamicist influences favouring a free Palestine ‘from the river to the sea’. A recent article in the Telegraph showed six of the organisations behind Saturday’s London march had connections to Hamas including Muhammad Kathem Sawalha, a former Hamas chief who co-founded the Muslim Association of Britain. This is not a good look. To me, too many people are diving naively in with their eyes closed to the movement’s nasty antisemitic underbelly and risk turning themselves into willing tools of groups who do not share their values and who use apologists consciously and calculatingly as cover. But even I have to admit that many of the protesters clearly mean well – responding to the horrific pictures coming out of Gaza with a natural, empathic desire to put a stop to the suffering. Clearly, they hope that silencing the guns can be a first step in finding a new and lasting peace process in which all can reconcile and heal deep wounds. This is an admirable instinct and should be recognised (when it’s not premised on virtue signalling), but I’d put it in the category of viewing the world through the lens of how we want it to be, rather than how it is really is.

Palestinian leadership have rejected every peace offer that’s ever been put on the table – in 1947, in 2000, and 2008. Negotiations have swiftly been followed by rockets and bombs. Meanwhile, the Jewish settler movement, aided with a nod and a wink by the administrations of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, appears to believe it is their God-given right to continue encroaching on the West Bank. As one settler infamously explained a few years back, while attempting to take possession of a property that wasn’t his, “If I don’t steal it, someone else is gonna steal it.” This is religiously inspired entitlement as cover for our basest instincts.

A prized peace cannot hold in the iron grip of absolutism. For all the blood and rubble, you cannot negotiate with someone whose only vision of the future is wanting you dead and gone. Especially ones with a scripture-endorsed death wish where, as author and podcaster, Sam Harris puts it, sadism is “celebrated as a religious sacrament.” Those who have watched the raw footage of the October 7th massacre have described how the killers were elated at their deeds. Douglas Murray for the Jewish Chronicle recounts chillingly, how one Hamas terrorist called his parents back in Gaza to boast that he had killed ten Jews “with my own hands.” Ecstatic with joy he received the praise he desired - “Their boy had turned out good.”

“A prized peace cannot hold in the iron grip of absolutism. For all the blood and rubble, you cannot negotiate with someone whose only vision of the future is wanting you dead and gone.”

There is a secularist presumption at play that all people basically want the same thing – peace, security, a roof over their head, good schools, full bellies and a decent job. But what if it’s not true? Here in the West, this ‘humanistic’ presumption is mapped onto the Israel-Hamas conflict even if it doesn’t apply to all the protagonists. People calling for a ceasefire now, such as the RMT union leader, Mick Lynch end up thinking with a bit of good grace and a fair wind the Israelis and Palestinians can be convinced to sit around a table and hammer it out. As if this was a negotiation over terms and conditions. From this perspective, when confronted with the reality of suicide bombers and hideous acts of barbarity, the question is asked - how could this be? What could turn people to such extreme behaviour? And the prescription as Sam Harris characterises it, is always the same – “they must have been pushed into it…their entire society oppressed and humiliated to the point of madness by some malign power. So many people, he says, “imagine that the ghoulish history of Palestinian terrorism simply indicates how profound the injustice has been on the Israeli side.” And some might argue that the extremities of the Jewish holocaust layered on century after century of cruel pogroms have had a similar effect on the Jewish psyche. But perhaps these explanations are all too neatly packaged for the contemporary western imagination. In an interview with Piers Morgan, psychologist and author, Jordan Peterson makes the point that the sins of the father are visited on their children. That we may not wish life was like this, but it is – generations of bloody violence echoing down in retribution. It’s hard to break the cycle, not impossible, but hard, especially when you add a strong dose of religious certainty that can make even good people do bad things.

Maybe, just maybe, the cries to martyrdom reveal a deeper, unsettling truth about the role belief plays in violence. Maybe the people of the region need to look deep within to question the core ideas that shape their coda.