Gideon Falter: chief executive of the
In response to a recent post [1] in which I stuck up for the right to cross the road - be one a proverbial chicken or an openly Jewish individual - I had a charming email from someone telling me I'm a Zionist stooge at best and an apologist for genocide at worst.
Surely you realise that Gideon Falter is an activist and provocateur and that the whole thing with him being stopped by the police was staged for the cameras?
Well, yes, okay - but that's not really the issue, is it?
Even Rosa Parks [2] had pre-planned with others in the NAACP her courageous act of civil disobedience on that fateful day in December 1955 when she refused to give up her seat on a bus in Alabama. And she was perfectly happy to be photographed being fingerprinted when arrested for a second time, in 1956, one month into the Montgomery bus boycott that her initial arrest had sparked.
The fact that Parks might also be described as an activist and provocateur who understood the power of symbolic protest and how to use the media to get her point across, doesn't detract from the rightness of her actions in exposing the shameful reality of segregation.
Similarly, the fact that Falter exposed that on a spring day in central London, in April 2024, a man can be stopped from going about his peaceful and perfectly lawful business and walking where he wishes to walk on the grounds that his openly Jewish appearance - he was wearing a yarmulke - would antagonise a pro-Palestinian crowd to such an extent that his safety couldn't be guaranteed by the Met police, is what matters here.
At least that's what matters to those of us who value the freedom of the individual above that of a vitriolic and potentially violent mob seeking to intimidate; in other words, I don't care that it was a manufactured incident.
Notes
[1] See: 'Openly Jewish' (22 April 2024): click here.
[2] Rosa Parks (1913 - 2005) was an American activist in the civil rights movement best known for her pivotal role in the Montgomery bus boycott.
I fear talking of Rosa Parkes and the likes of Gideon Falter, (and their aims and sufferings) in the same breath tips TTA into a realm of clouds and cuckoos where birds fly backwards and G-d is a hovering dog. But let's press on as best we can.
ReplyDeleteLet's be clear, as it seems to need constant repeating, that the conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is a peculiarly British stupidity. We can all also agree that the police officer’s phrase 'openly Jewish' was clumsy to say the least. Anti-Semitism is abhorrent, even though it's pretty clear that Islamophobia (in which context the well-known Islamophobe, Israeli apologist, and apparently unarrestable former PM Boris Johnson incredibly and shamefully called British Muslim women 'pillar boxes') is a far bigger problem in the UK. A minority of decent people stand against both.
However . . .
Perhaps the writer may care to consider if his phrase 'a vitriolic and potentially violent mob' might be better applied to the Israeli war machine than used to lambast Palestinian demonstrators (actually, to borrow his phrase, going about their 'peaceful and lawful business' by exercising what some of us tend to feel is a not unreasonable protest against the extermination of their people). Though perhaps it might be tinily tweaked to 'brutal and genocidal state terrorist machine pursuing its own criminal war agenda' in this instance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iupfxe38Wj0
I wanted to provide a link to the full-length video of this embarrassing episode, which readers can (and I suggest should) view it from start to finish, and perhaps peruse some of the comments while there, to help shape a more informed view of this incident. As one person comments, for those who lack context, it presents 'Gideon Falter, CEO of hardline pro Israel lobby group CAA and director of JNF which raises money to acquire land for colonial settlements in Palestine - [who] just happened to have “stumbled” across a pro-Palestinian protest in London - with his body guards and film crew in tow.' As another person remarks, he's essentially 'a professional victim' (as distinct from Parkes, who was a real and brutalised victim), who, another adds, 'went looking for confrontation' (as 'counter-protesters' tend to do).
To coin a phrase, with an attitude like his, what could possibly go wrong? If anything, the police officer's 13-minute indulgence of this entitled, disingenuous, colonialist prick (notwithstanding his dumb choice of phrase on a clearly massively pressurised day) should have got him a pay rise and Falter a fine for wasting police time! Or perhaps the local authority could just bulldoze his house to make him feel at home.
'I'm wondering if this had been Palestine and there was thousands of Israelis on a protest march, and a small group of Palestinians wearing a kaffiyeh wanted to cross over the road through the demonstration, whether Israeli police would have acted with the degree of support the British police officer was trying to respectfully help and calm the situation.
ReplyDeleteMy understanding is the Israeli police would have reacted differently.'
I'm wondering too, but I also wonder how the Met might have responded if it had been a Palestinian provocateur counter-protesting a pro-Israeli demo in London that day.