Andreas Roth
Andreas Roth is a schoolteacher in Germany.
I find myself in the middle of a protest. Excited people are chanting: “From the river to the sea, that’s the only flag you’ll see.” A young, bearded man right at the front is shouting something in Arabic. I look around. Next to me, a middle-aged man with his teenage daughter. A blond, young woman dressed in slacks and a blue zip-up jacket. A group of Middle Eastern looking women. Some Western Europeans, like me, a little shy, but still holding up flags and placards. A turbaned man, waving a flag that includes a navy-blue wheel. A woman in her 60s, very energetic, whose flag shows the colours of Iran. We are all enclosed in a square pen, metal barriers on all sides, the Scotland Yard building behind us, the Thames in front of us, looking onto a World War I Armistice memorial, richly decorated with poppies.
Between us and the river, however, a steady and seemingly endless stream of marchers flowing past us, from left to right. Unlike us, they are abundantly equipped with the paraphernalia of the professional protester. More and bigger flags than ours, sleeker placards, properly printed banners spanning the whole width of Victoria Embankment, menacingly beating drums, a huge sign showing a hooded man, staring grimly right at us, from just a few feet away, ready to release a slingshot in our direction. We are only separated from him and thousands and thousands of others snaking past us by a slim cordon of police officers. We are outshouted. Can we be heard at all by anyone watching this on the internet or TV?
But we will not be intimidated and yell at the top of our voices: “From the river to the sea, that’s the only flag you’ll see.” And when the chant gets to the “that you’ll see” part, we all point at our flags decorating the impromptu marquee and at the ones draped over the metal barriers: the blue-and white flag of Israel, with the Star of David in the middle.
Our Arabic speaking cheerleader is Yoseph Haddad, an Israeli Arab and IDF veteran. He keeps vociferously alerting the London policemen around us to what he identifies as pro-terrorist slogans chanted in Arabic and points the law to those among the crowd covering their faces, but his efforts are largely shrugged off. In fact, Haddad himself is singled out by an officer and reprimanded. The policemen intervene only once, when the WW1 memorial is defiled by a bunch of “Revolutionary Communist Party” supporters. The motto of our protest, “Two Tiers End Here. Start Policing Jew Hate”, is apparently not taken too seriously by the Met.
The man from India with his split India-Israel flag and the sturdy lady with her pre-revolutionary Iranian flag complete the very modest international support for Israel on this day.
The overall turnout for the pro-Israel protest on October 10th is pitifully low, a few dozen at best. It was organized by a fringe group, “Stop the Hate”. At 11am on that sunny Saturday morning a handful of people began to assemble, right next to the Chindit Memorial commemorating the exploits of Major General Orde Wingate. Wingate had been known during his earlier spell in Mandate Palestine as the ‘Lion of Judaea’. He built up the Special Night Squads, stealthily defending fledgling Jewish settlements in 1938 against atrocities during the so-called Arab Revolt. Wingate was a Christian Zionist, “raised on Bible and Empire”, according to the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore. One of the Jewish commando fighters he trained was Moshe Dayan, whose verdict about his daring mentor was that “judged by ordinary standards he wouldn’t be regarded as normal”.
Neither the pro-Israel protesters nor the pro-Hamas crowds are aware of Wingate’s presence in close proximity. How would the ‘Lion of Judaea’, who – according to the historian Oren Kessler – contributed “more than anyone to the creation of Jewish military power” – have reacted to thousands of Arabs and their occidental acolytes yelling anti-Jewish, anti-Zionist and anti-Israeli slogans, waving their many fists at us? Would we need him later to protect us, whenever we might be released from our cage? Would he be appalled how the Empire he had defended with his life so ignominiously collapsed shortly after his own demise? Would he rub his eyes in disbelief to see that the offspring of the Muslims he had so successfully kept at bay in what was to become Israel now constitute a very significant share of the British population?
But it is not only veiled and bearded Muslims on the march. I spot the banner “Greens for Palestine”, carried by the caricature virtue-signallers of diversity in gender neutral attire and rainbow-coloured hairdos. “Useful idiots” is our label for them. Several trade union banners are held up high. Are the workers’ representatives aware of the fact that Zionism, which they so passionately hate, is a progressive, to some extent even socialist, movement? Hamas itself in Article 22 of its 1988 Covenant claim that Jews are behind all revolutions in history and especially behind communism. The mind boggles at such wilful ignorance.
Comic relief, however, is presented by a group of middle-aged white British ladies carrying a placard richly decorated with floral designs advertising their horticultural contribution: “Gardeners for Gaza.”
We shout “Terrorist supporters – off our streets!”, but the mob is not impressed. I notice a middle-aged white male, beer-bellied and bald – a bit like me. He is looking at our stand, showing no visible reaction. He is wearing an Irish soccer shirt. Why is he out and about, rather than sitting in the pub having a Guinness, watching Match of the Day? A little later, a set of three Irish tricolors, hoisted high, flutter in the light breeze. The Irish have abandoned Catholicism as their religion and become converted to the gospel of Gaza. For some weird reason they see Palestinian Arabs as a mirror image of themselves, the ultimate victims. Up until basically yesterday the discourse of Irish mainstream political culture was dominated by tales of stout heroism and resistance to British rule. Now, the leaders of the 1916 Rising are seen as fascists avant la lettre. The focal point of public imagination is no longer the active national struggle but the passive perceived victimhood of the 1840s famine.
How would Robert Briscoe, long serving member of the Irish Parliament and Lord Mayor of Dublin, feel, if he saw his countrymen’s current dispositions? Briscoe, who had liaised with Menachem Begin in the days of armed struggle, when Jewish freedom fighters in Mandate Palestine admiringly assumed the noms de bataille of Michael Collins and others, visited Israel in 1950 and pointed out in his autobiography the many parallels between Israel’s and Ireland’s struggle for independence, including the attempt to revive an ancient language. Briscoe wisely concluded that Ireland and Israel had both accomplished their achievements by “moral force”. Today, the disciples of postcolonial theory claim the high moral ground for themselves and most self-loathing Westerners cheerfully follow.
Is the Irish soccer fan in the crowd aware of this? He more likely applauded the antics of his team a few days earlier, when the boys in green refused to shake hands with the Israeli team and bowed their heads when the Israeli anthem was played. No doubt, they would also have bent the knee if asked to do so, but in the end they only wore black armbands.
So, what lesson can we learn from Orde Wingate’s unselfish heroism? Mere arguments won’t help to convince public opinion in the West that Palestinian Arabs are not the victims but the perpetrators. Our educational institutions and legacy media have irrevocably succumbed to progressive pundits. Their ears are closed to authoritative voices like that of John Spencer, chair of Urban Warfare Studies at West Point, who convincingly argues that the IDF’s Gaza warfare has been as humane as could possibly be in comparison with similar theatres. They will not hear about the murderous nature of Hamas rule in Gaza, about the nefarious activities of Iran and its proxies in the region. We need more brave people like Yoseph Haddad, who in Arabic, Hebrew and English yelled truth to power during that morning and early afternoon vis à vis thousands of adversarial marchers, right next to Orde Wingate, a “man of genius”, according to Winston Churchill. Or men like Warrant Officer Ibrahim Kharuba [a Bedouin Muslim] who was killed on October 7th while battling Hamas terrorists at an IDF outpost, where 14 unarmed female observation soldiers had been slaughtered.
Personal bravery must be accompanied by the power of the sword. Hitler was not defeated by superior allied propaganda or individual acts of bravery. The Germans following him were brainwashed into believing that he defended the moral high ground. Just like the thousands of pro-Palestine marchers who are so sure of their righteousness. Their brainwashers in the Wolfsschanzen of Gaza and Tehran must be militarily annihilated. If it was possible for Orde Wingate to form the Special Nights Squads, a force of barely 100 men, to successfully challenge Arab terrorism, the IDF and their American allies must surely be able to eradicate militant Islamism in the Middle East completely. If they stop half-way, as at present, the Hydra will keep regrowing her severed heads.
Once Gaza has been liberated from Hamas and turned into a seaside resort, maybe then I will meet the Irish soccer supporter again and we will go for a pint of Guinness together.
This article was originally published by the Daily Sceptic.
