Finally the left is showing an interest in freedom of speech. And all it took was a police clampdown on cries for violence against Jews. They turned a blind eye when cancel culture ran riot on campuses. And when gender-critical women were gagged for telling the truth about biology. And when people lost their jobs after dissing Islam. But stifling Jewphobic speech? That’s a step too far. They’re up in arms now.
Let’s be clear: ‘Globalise the intifada’ is a call for anti-Jewish violence
This is the news that the Metropolitan Police and Greater Manchester Police have promised firmer action against chants like ‘Globalise the intifada’. In the aftermath of the massacre of Jews at Bondi Beach, ‘the context has changed’, said the forces in a joint statement. From now on, anyone who hollers ‘Globalise the intifada’ in a ‘targeted way’ can expect to have his collar felt.
And it’s happened. Two people were arrested in London last night for ‘racially aggravated public order offences’ after allegedly bellowing for ‘intifada’. Overnight, the digital left has gone from guffawing over the cancellation of feminists who say you can’t have a penis and be a lesbian, to wringing their hands over Britain’s descent into Stasi-like lunacy. ‘We’re being censored!’, they’re wailing.
I’m going to say it: if your supposed love of liberty only kicks into gear when anti-Jewish speech is curtailed, then it isn’t freedom of speech you love: it’s taunting Jews. You are not defending the British people’s hard-won liberty to utter. You are defending the right of noisy mobs in keffiyehs to cause great distress to British Jewry by barking for more intifadas just two years after an intifada left more than a thousand Jews dead in Israel.
Let’s be clear: ‘Globalise the intifada’ is a call for anti-Jewish violence. Apologists for this hateful slogan say intifada just means ‘uprising’. They point to images of Palestinian kids hurling stones at IDF soldiers during the First Intifada of the late 1980s. The BBC joined in. The First Intifada was a ‘largely unarmed and popular uprising’, it said.
First of all, that’s a spectacularly reductive understanding of the First Intifada. More importantly, that intifada was nearly 40 years ago. Most of the Israel-haters in the Islamo-left freakshow on our streets weren’t even alive. In the intervening decades, intifada has come to mean one thing and one thing only: apocalyptic violence against Jews carried out by armies of anti-Semites.
The Second Intifada was an orgy of fascist-like violence. Hundreds of Israeli civilians were burnt to death in nightclubs, pizza restaurants, hotels. They were blown up on buses. They were gunned down. Their crime? They were Jews in the Holy Land. Hamas is an Islamofascist outfit founded with the express intention of annihilating the Jewish nation. It acted on that Nazi-like dream with its racist violence of the Second Intifada.
You should be wary of anyone who downplays the fact that this more recent intifada – it lasted until 2005 – consisted of ceaseless acts of Islamist savagery.
Then there’s 7 October, considered by some to be an ‘intifada’. That was the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust. Do they expect us to believe that when leftists and Islamists hit the streets in the wake of that atrocity and said ‘Globalise the intifada!’ they were talking about some harmless stone-throwing from the 1980s? Come on. We’re not stupid.
To say ‘Globalise the intifada’ after 7 October was to relish in that mass killing of Jews. To say ‘Glory to our martyrs’ – as some campus radicals did – was to praise the racist killers of Hamas. To chant ‘From the river to the sea’ was to express support for Hamas’s dream of eradicating the world’s only Jewish nation.
And now they’re doing it after Bondi. Yesterday, the youngest victim of that anti-Semitic horror – ten-year-old Matilda – was buried. At the same time, people in London were chanting ‘Globalise the intifada’. The rules of journalistic decorum prevent me from saying what I think about those people.
For those of us who really do believe in free speech – for everyone – the arrests last night are nothing to celebrate. But here’s the thing: Jews have been begging you to stop chanting for intifada. And you ignored them. Worse, you accused them of ‘weaponising’ their feelings to the end of silencing ‘criticism of Israel’. You accused them of cynicism and self-interest – a charge the left never lays at the door of any other ethnic minority.
If you had listened to Jews, if you had considered them your equals deserving of your respect, we wouldn’t be in this situation. It shouldn’t have taken police action to stop the chant of ‘Globalise the intifada’ – the left should have had the decency to retire that sick, bigoted chant when the Jews asked them to.
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