The woke wing of Hamas
by Brendan O’Neill, spiked:
From London to New York, young radicals have become footsoldiers of Jew hatred.
Can we call them hate marches now? On Saturday in London there was yet another gathering of frothing Israelophobes. Another noisy assembly of bourgeois leftists and radical Islamists. Another long trudge through the city by that unholiest gang of Waitrose shoppers and jihad fanboys, of plummy liberals and the people who’ll be giving them a hundred lashes if the Islamic Revolution ever sweeps Britain. And this time the mask was well and truly off. This was no ‘pro-Palestine’ march – it was a viscerally anti-Israel march that frequently crossed the line into something even darker. Into the darkest hatred of them all.
There was the usual anti-Semitism. The kind we’ve seen at every anti-Israel demo since Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October. ‘I thought Hitler was dead’, said one placard, next to an image of the Star of David. The Jews are the new Nazis, you see. They are such a wicked people that they now gleefully visit on Palestinians the kind of horrors once visited on them. ‘Wanted for mass murder’, said another, with an image of Benjamin Netanyahu next to Hitler. One turbo-smug hippyish couple, complete with culturally appropriated keffiyeh scarves, held up a placard featuring a photo of Israeli spokesman Eylon Levy and the words: ‘The Goebbels of Gaza.’
This is rank Holocaust inversion. Anti-Israel hotheads seem to derive a sick thrill from comparing Jews to Nazis. If you hate Mr Levy so much that you feel the need to take a day off from perusing the kale aisle at Whole Foods to defame him on the streets of London, then why not just call him a ‘liar’ or a ‘propagandist’? Because that wouldn’t achieve the true aim of these vile marches, which is not merely to criticise people like Mr Levy but to hurt Jews. To taunt Jews. To rub salt in their historic wounds. The public branding of Levy as ‘the Goebbels of Gaza’ is hard proof of the racial animus behind these fake anti-war gatherings.