Nick Timothy itching for a fight

In yesterday’s (Monday’s) Daily Telegraph, there was an opinion piece by Nick Timothy, former chief of staff at 10 Downing Street when Theresa May was PM, giving a caricature of the pro-Palestinian protests in London by cherry-picking a few extreme things a few individual participants said or chanted, a few irrelevant examples of wider Muslim criminality, before demanding “a more muscular approach to end this culture of domestic separatism”, including tighter laws on “incitement, hate speech and extremism”, a register of imams and mosques with the threat of “preaching bans and closures” when Muslims say things he doesn’t like, a ban on the so-called burqa in public and hijab in schools and the criminalisation of “sharia marriages”. He criticises the police for not arresting enough people for carrying or shouting offensive slogans at the “rolling protests” and suggests we have a “desire to play things down, to convince ourselves that this is all about a quarrel in a far away country”. Can anyone call what is going on a mere quarrel?

For most of October, the Gaza Strip has been under sustained bombardment by Israeli warplanes and missiles, which have cost more than 9,000 mostly innocent Palestinian lives. This is no mere quarrel. This is at least a massacre; the language of Israeli politicians, military leaders and commentators suggest that it is a prelude to a forced expulsion or genocide, if their actions until now do not constitute that already. There has been an upsurge in violence by Israeli settlers, backed by the army, against Palestinians in the West Bank where Hamas has no military presence, and of repression against Palestinian citizens of Israel, who have among other things lost their jobs for social media posts criticising the attack on Gaza, or just for being Arabs. While this goes on, our politicians argue as to whether a mere ceasefire or just a “humanitarian pause” is appropriate, while the media parrot official euphemisms and narratives, taking Israeli army claims at face value. Are we supposed to just sit back and say nothing, or do no more than mouth the same platitudes?

He quotes Lord Austin, a former Labour MP, as claiming that he saw “lots of signs calling for Israel to be eradicated” but none “calling for peace, a two-state solution, Gaza to be freed from Hamas or hostages to be released”. By the first, he presumably means the slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, a quite reasonable thing to chant about any oppressive regime including the one Israel inflicts on the natives of Palestine. As for the other suggestions, a “two-state solution” has been another empty slogan liberal Zionists have been mouthing for decades. There is not going to be a two-state solution because Israel is busy destroying one part of Palestine, allowing its settlers to seize more and more of the other while driving the natives out. There was a brief period in the 1990s when it looked possible, but extremists on both sides thwarted it. As for the release of hostages, Israel could achieve that by releasing its many unjustly detained Palestinians — those held for no real reason under administrative detention and the children jailed for throwing stones at their tormentors, for example. It prefers to put their lives in jeopardy by bombing the places they are being held.

His demands regarding the status of Muslims in this country show that he is spoiling for a fight. The Hamas attack was on Israel, not us; there is no equivalent here, because Muslims do not have to contend with an occupation, with settlers taking our homes, interfering with our water supply, destroying our crops, harassing us as we go about our business. The peaceful demonstrations he does not like are the result of Israel’s collective punishment massacre; even the first one was held at a time when statements consistent with genocidal intent were being made by Israeli leaders and our politicians were not remonstrating. The offensive slogans were not targeted at British people, but the racist thugs and murderers in Israel. Muslim life here and our relations with the rest of the community are relatively peaceful because we are mostly not being interfered with and our religious practice and expression not restricted, especially on an official level. The hijab is part of the scenery, enough that advertisers routinely feature women wearing it. France has had a lot more trouble, with more severe terrorist attacks during the ISIS era and periodic riots involving mostly young people of North African background, because of Islamophobic policy (especially targeted at women) and racist policing.

Finally, the ‘hatreds’ which have been causing the most destruction recently are not ‘imported’ to the UK, as he claims, but exported by militant Zionists from Europe and the English-speaking world to Israel. A lot of the worst fanatics we have seen over the past 30 years are migrants to Israel who moved there not to flee persecution but out of ideology. If we cannot stop Jews moving to Israel for that reason, we should be standing firmly against their violence, not excusing it as self-defence, not repeating their lurid claims and not selling, let alone giving, them weapons.

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