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.
