The BOF feared that all steam had been exhausted - but he was wrong. Returning late in the afternoon, he found a crowd already gathering, albeit many of them the same faces as the day before. It looked initially as if Londoners returning home were ignoring the growing throng, hurrying away from an embarrassment on their streets.
But that, again, was proved wrong. They stopped, they talked, some even made their way back to the barricade entrance, joined in with the protest. How happy they would be, knowing that their faces were now installed on the police database, is another matter.
The crowd continued to grow, and with it the noise. Sad to relate that, even with the greater numbers, it is unlikely that their voices would be heard in the safely-cloistered embassy.
They came from Haringey,
they came from the sixties,
and they came from Orthodox Judaism.
Neturei Karta International do not believe that Jews can enter Israel until the coming of the Messiah. They are a tiny sect, but their consorting with the enemies of Israel brings them undue attention.
And here's the problem: this just protest against slaughter and destruction is riddled with hate. Yesterday, the BOF initially heard the chant as "Calm down, Is-rael!" His aging ears were mistaken. What seemed an intriguingly rational slogan was actually one of loathing: "Down, Down, Is-rael!"
It should have been a wonderful conjunction, those black-and-white scarves and those sombre homburgs,
but the Jewish hand holding the British Muslim Initiative placard is a hand as mired in disgraceful compromise as any US President's.
"My enemy's enemy is my friend" seems clever on first hearing, but watching the slavering of the resulting mongrel beast brings the realisation that it is far from that.
Hate is never clever, it is crass, it is pointless, it is, above all, uncivilised. For anything to progress here, civilisation must take the upper hand.
Right now, there's no sign of that.
No comments:
Post a Comment