Keir Starmer and his Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood have said they are going to grant new powers to police to put more restrictions on ‘repeat protests’. This, they say, is to allow senior police and their Home Office bosses to consider the supposed ‘cumulative impact’ of previous protests and force organisers to re-route them or move them elsewhere entirely.

Mahmood’s new protest rules: democracy?

Typically, Mahmood dressed this up as ‘democracy’ and smeared the protests as somehow frightening:

The right to protest is a fundamental freedom in our country. However, this freedom must be balanced with the freedom of their neighbours to live their lives without fear.

Large, repeated protests can leave sections of our country, particularly religious communities, feeling unsafe, intimidated and scared to leave their homes.

This has been particularly evident in relation to the considerable fear within the Jewish community, which has been expressed to me on many occasions in these recent difficult days.

These changes mark an important step in ensuring we protect the right to protest while ensuring all feel safe in this country.

There is no question that this is targeted specifically at anti-genocide protest in an outright collaboration with Israel’s genocide – protests that have been absolutely peaceful, often despite police violence, consisting largely of pensioners, disabled people and families with kids – and have ‘frightened’ precisely no one.

Mahmood’s excuse for the ban is also deeply antisemitic, wilfully ignoring the tens of thousands of anti-genocide Jews who stand or march at the forefront of every such protest and painting the whole Jewish population as if they are uniformly supporters of Israel’s mass murder of Palestinians, including almost half a million children – and as if pro-Israel Jews are so feeble and easily frightened that they are unable to cope with any challenge to their support for the apartheid colony.

Exploiting events

It is also grossly antisemitic to exploit the deaths of Jews in Manchester this week – mostly killed and wounded by armed police – to attack the rights of Britain’s most humane people to protest against mass slaughter, a move that seems more like a calculated attempt to stir up antisemitism as long as Israel is protected from exposure and criticism.

And of course, her comments are profoundly Islamophobic, as if Muslims are the threat in a country whose ‘mainstream’ news industry gives non-stop coverage to an attack on a synagogue but ignores almost completely the arson attack on a mosque that happened the following day. A country in which Islamophobia has increased massively under the racist incitement of governments and ‘MSM’. Statistics published by pro-Israel groups on ‘antisemitism’ include criticism of Israel, inflating the figures for propaganda effect.

The government’s plan does nothing to address marches by the far right – who are a tangible threat to Jews – because the Tommy Robinson hangers-on don’t have the mettle or commitment to a cause to march every week in the way the anti-genocide movement does. They gather en masse – or more often in dozens – for a day, wreak havoc, scream racist filth, then slink back into their holes until the next convenient moment.

Those events will not be covered by legislation attacking ‘repeat’ protests, despite them being an actual threat. Instead, we are seeing a government that has already embraced fascism and a police state acting in naked collaboration with a genocidal terror state to protect its interests at the expense of the Palestinian people and those who believe in their rights to live and be free.

Featured image via the Canary

By Skwawkbox

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