The Spectator’s Sean Thomas attended the recent pro-Palestinian rallies in London to assess whether both the march and its media coverage were as bleak as during the BLM protests of 2020. He was not disappointed. Here’s an excerpt:
Back in June 2020, I attended a quasi-legal Black Lives Matter protest in London, and a widely reviled counter protest, by hard-right Tommy Robinson-esque ‘football lads’, who were determined to ‘defend’ the Churchill statue and the Cenotaph. …
Mostly, the police managed to keep the warring tribes apart, occasionally the lines broke, and pretty serious violence ensued. I saw this violence from both perspectives.
It was thus with a sense of sad expectation that I sat down to read what my fellow journalists wrote about that day, and it was with a total sense of shock that I realised that none of the journalists was prepared to tell the truth. Because these journalists were standing right beside me and they saw what I saw. …
And so it was with a much greater sense of scepticism – towards the media – that I attended the two rallies in London on Saturday. I was interested in many things, I was definitely interested to see if the media would lie once more, not least because the circumstances were eerily similar. …
I saw happy and amiable Muslim families, lovely little kids in Palestinian headbands, glamorous students with blue hair and angry placards, middle-aged women with Just Stop Oil tattoos, and I heard them all shout, chant or shriek – ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’. …
It was, in other words, another bleak experience, to match the BLM protests of 2020. Indeed it was much bleaker, as the levels of antisemitism I witnessed yesterday were like nothing I have ever seen in the U.K. or indeed any western nation. It made me despair for our media and for the future of Jews in the U.K.
Worth reading in full.
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