Why are people going round London tearing down posters about kidnapped Israelis, asks Tom Slater in Spiked. This is not normal behaviour.
When you see a poster about a missing person, do you feel an overwhelming urge to tear it down? When you are confronted with the victims of a racist pogrom, do you think to yourself “ah, stop going on about it already”, and start telling everyone nearby to stop their blubbing?
Of course you don’t. Because you’re not a monster. But on the streets of London over the past two weeks an alarming number of people have been carrying on exactly like this, in response to a poster campaign aimed at highlighting the plight of the 200 predominantly Jewish Israelis who have been kidnapped by Hamas.
Jewish and Israeli activists have been putting posters up across central London and other cities. Each one bears the name and photo of an innocent man, woman or child who was taken by the antisemitic terrorists of Hamas two Saturdays ago. The aim seems to be to ensure that the world doesn’t forget about these missing civilians, whose devastated families currently fear the worst.
A humanistic, heartfelt initiative, you might think. Not according to the string of people who have been filmed ripping the posters off walls, defacing them and lecturing the Jewish activists who put them up about the supposed evils of Israel, in a series of sickeningly similar encounters that have now gone viral on social media.
They really need to be seen to be believed. “Oh, fuck off”, says one poster-ripper, as she is confronted by the activists. “They’re kidnapped!”, shout the activists. “Yeah, yeah, what’s happening in Palestine?”, she responds. She then claims the posters include “inaccurate information”, because they mention women being raped by Hamas. “Do you have any evidence of that?”
This is a recurring theme of the videos. Not only are the poster-rippers offended by any reference to the Jewish suffering in Israel and Gaza at the moment, they also seem to think it’s being sexed up. After a young man and his girlfriend were filmed ripping down posters of kidnapped kids, an activist confronted them, telling them he knows one of those kids. “Really, where’s your proof?” comes the cocky response.
Others have been filmed launching into impromptu, historically illiterate lectures about Israel and Palestine, as if that explains why they are destroying posters about missing innocents. “75 years of genocide”, says one young woman in a hijab, repeatedly, as she is given a dressing down. One man scrawled “coloniser” over the faces of missing children.
Worth reading in full.
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