London’s finest are proud of themselves: they’ve managed to shift anti-Semitic marches to be held on 4 July a few miles away from the Jewish areas.
Banning them altogether isn’t on, according to a police spokesman: “We have a duty to safeguard the right to protest, and cannot impose unreasonable restrictions upon that right. We carefully consider the use of any of our powers against the Human Rights Act.”
If ever I’ve heard a ringing denunciation of that pernicious Act, there it is.
Fine, one can understand the reluctance to “impose unreasonable restrictions” upon the right to protest against Jews. But what about reasonable restrictions?
Allegedly the marchers have issues not with Jews in general, but only with the Shomrim, the neighbourhood-watch patrols. One can understand their indignation: how dare those Jews protect themselves against pogroms?
Solzhenitsyn, the ideological twin of our British anti-Semites, had similar problems retrospectively. In his openly anti-Semitic tract 200 Years Together, he castigated the Jews who had the gall to defend themselves.
He was particularly unhappy with the Jews of Gomel who, in response to the murderous Kishinev pogrom of 1903, organised self-defence groups. When their turn came, they met the frenzied Russian mob with pistol shots, rather than flowers, which the great writer must have felt would have been more appropriate.
To febrile anti-Semitic minds, Jews just can’t win. When they meekly go to Nazi gas chambers, they are despised for not resisting. When they defend themselves, they are hated for fighting back.
Unlike the self-defence groups in Gomel, circa 1903, those in London’s Golders Green and Stamford Hill, circa 2015, go unarmed. All they do is patrol the streets and try to detain any wrongdoers until the police come.
The category of wrongdoers includes not only anti-Semitic thugs but also muggers, burglars, rapists and so forth. It’s thanks to the Shomrim that the crime rate in Stamford Hill is lower than in the rest of its borough of Hackney.
So what’s there to protest against? Silly question, really. It’s not the Shomrim that ‘protesters’ have problems with. It’s the Jews.
Yesterday the would-be protesters daubed sickening graffiti on the gates of a Jewish primary school. The text didn’t say “F*** the Shomrim”. It said “F*** the Jews”, broadening the message to cover the world’s entire Jewish population, which has just managed to reach the pre-Holocaust level.
Incidentally, this school shares its playground with a Muslim free school, although one can’t readily see how the words ‘Muslim’ and ‘free’ belong in the same designation.
On the same day, a ‘protester’ wielding an axe smashed the windows of a car parked outside a synagogue in the same area. Unfortunately there were no members of the Shomrim in the vicinity.
One of the organisers of the rallies the Met are powerless to stop explained on his blog what the protests are really about. He called for the participants to destroy Israeli flags – by hand, for burning them is against the law. It’s good to see that our fascists are so mindful of legal niceties.
He also advertised a “private ceremony” to take place just before the rally, in which Jewish scriptural texts will be burned. And there I was, unaware that those texts were all about the Shomrim in Golders Green and Stamford Hill.
Long live freedom, in other words. Yet, as I never tire of repeating, freedom isn’t a suicide pact. If untrammelled by discipline, it can drag the whole society into a putrid anarchic swamp, throwing up all sorts of creepy-crawlies.
One could argue that constitutional protection must not be extended to those who aim to undermine the constitution. It’s not only Jewish areas but society at large that has the right – nay, the duty – to protect itself from fascists, communists, fans of UK Sharia and all those who abuse the rights of Englishmen in order eventually to deprive Englishmen of those rights.
One has to observe also that our police display varying degrees of zeal when protecting the people’s right to protest. Would they be as understanding about a march protesting against the Islamisation of Britain, homomarriage, abortion on demand? Somehow one doubts that.