Fear or Favour?

Shomrim limits its community's authority to lecture anyone else on integration or assimilation. London has always been "the world in one city", and the place where people went to escape England. But when I was right in its heart last month, if anything they seem to have met in the middle. And was London multicultural in the 1930s? I am tempted to say, "Only if you meant the Jews." Not quite true, but not far off. Or what about the 1950s and the early 1960s, when the Union Movement was on the march? Specifically, how many Muslims were there?

In any case, feelings are real, but they are not facts. Poverty of aspiration is a real feeling, but it is economic inequality that is a fact. Gender identity is a real feeling, but it is sex ("biological sex") that is a fact. When a child fears a bogeyman under the bed, then that fear is real, but, in point of fact, the threat is not. And after late night adolescent arson had included a couple of incidents against empty Jewish ambulances and an empty synagogue, there have been three knife attacks by one of this country's numerous deinstitutionalised psychotics, of which two of the victims happened to be Jewish, and all three survived. It is clear what the problems are. And what they are not.

While I am all for heckling politicians, and anyone who makes an intervention such as Mark Rowley's against Zack Polanski has entered the political fray, the man who started the chant of "Shame on you!" against Rowley and against Sarah Sackman had shouted without consequence that Sackman was "ugly" and "a bitch". For comparison, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Victims, Alex Davies-Jones, though whom the Government has threatened to ban the Gaza peace marches, was asked by two constituents about the war in Gaza, so she had them prosecuted for harassment. Summarily convicted, of course, they successfully exercised their absolute right of appeal from the Magistrates' Court to the Crown Court. Long may that right remain.

London's next Gaza march will be 16 May, as will the latest Unite the Kingdom march and rally, which no one is proposing to ban. On the contrary, the Met has made it clear on Twitter that it regarded Stephen Yaxley-Lennon as the boss to whom it had to buddy up. It is frightened of him. Using bladed articles that they had brought for the purpose, Yaxley-Lennon's drunken and coked up supporters attacked the Police at the Cenotaph on Armistice Day 2023, leading to the second sacking of Suella Braverman as Home Secretary, that time because she had encouraged them. That was the first Zionist terrorist attack in London in many decades, but it was not the first ever. Anything comparable in the Palestinian cause would have led to the imposition of martial law.

As for sacking the Home Secretary, if Shabana Mahmood had lasted that long, then whoever was the Prime Minister might ask her to explain why she had granted visas to speakers who, as everyone knew that they would, had called on Donald Trump to invade the United Kingdom, which the United States could do in seconds, and effect regime change. Yvette Cooper got away with it last time, but she has a lowbrow showbiz husband to rouse the rabble if necessary.

The rabble. Never to be confused with the Wretched of the Earth. The phrase "Globalise the Intifada" may be better avoided for the time being, but "intifada" comes from "nafaDa", "to shake of the dust", because of course Arabic has a simple and specific word for so everyday a necessity in its linguistic heartland. "Intifada" therefore has connotations of waking up, of rising out of the dusty squalor of poverty, and so on. It is not of Islamist origin. On the contrary, it was developed in the trade unions and on the women's committees of the Left.

But there is always the lumpenproletariat as well, ever willing to team up with the petit bourgeoisie in the service of the Plutocrat Populists. Hence the fury towards Craig Guildford, eventually costing him his job, over his approach to the infamous fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv; the fury of the very people who were now cheering on Rowley against Polanski. Rowley has never said a word against their frequent and vitriolic charges of two-tier policing. Nor should he have done. But even so.

Rowley's supporters ordinarily despise the Police, and while some of the elements that have lately accrued to Polanski have been known to demand that the Police be defunded, his fiercest enemies have been getting on with defunding the Police for decades. Far from placating them, Polanski's grovelling has only emboldened them. It would take a lot for me to agree with the likes of Insulate Britain, Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, but what do they make of Polanski after his prostration to the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis?