> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://goodoil.news/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Today of All Days - URL: https://goodoil.news/today-of-all-days/ - Published: 2026-10-09T00:30:33.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-09T00:30:32.000Z - Description: British Jews have to endure the spectacle of people marching under Palestinian flags, a political party defining their national movement as racism and being told they are not welcome at a commemoration of the defeat of fascism, while living under a government which is belligerent towards Israel. - Author: Reproduced with permission - Tags: UK Politics, Antisemitism, History [**Laura Dodsworth**](https://www.thefreemind.co.uk/p/today-of-all-days?ref=goodoil.news) *Writer, photographer, commentator.* Today, of all days, there is a pro-Palestinian protest in London. The police have apparently urged the organisers to move the event to another date. And of course they haven’t. After all, that would entirely miss the point – today of all days, the protest is designed to cause maximum offence and hurt to Jews. It is not a march against genocide but a march for terrorism. What better date could the organisers have chosen? Met Police Deputy Assistant Commissioner James Harman has voiced serious concerns about the impact of the student-organised march on Jewish students and staff – and you’d hope he’s also aware of the wider impact on Jews in London – but said that marches can only be banned if police consider it would result in serious public disorder, and that placing restrictions on it would not prevent that disorder from taking place. But British Jews don’t tend to cause serious public disorder, do they? Anyway, such a decision needs approval from the Home Secretary. And Home Secretary Shabana Mahmoud has obviously not provided this approval. Perhaps she’s too busy reopening the UK Resettlement Scheme, which will create ‘safe and legal’ routes to the UK, specifically in the first case for Palestinians and Afghans. People have short memories. It was only three years ago that Hamas terrorists and Gazan civilians invaded Israel and killed children, babies, women, men and literal Holocaust survivors, took hostages and injured thousands. I can’t write about it any more. I’ve done so before and other people will list the horrors if you need reminding. If memories seem short now, they seemed even shorter in October 2023. Within a few short days of one of the most barbaric acts of terrorism in our lifetime, student unions who are normally all over the concept of ‘safe spaces’ tweeted cartoons of paragliders. Academics in the West proclaimed that Hamas’s blood-soaked pogrom was a fine example of ‘decolonisation’. Just one week after the horror, on 14 October 2023, I travelled through London to give a talk. I was stunned by the pro-Palestinian march, attended by thousands of people, calling for a ceasefire even as Israel had not finished counting the bodies of its slain. On that occasion, the Met Police had been contacted on 7 October at 12.50pm of the intention to protest by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Take that in: the protest was being planned while the barbaric attack in Israel was *still underway.* On 14 October I drove through Piccadilly and saw that Eros, one of London’s most famous statues, had been draped in a Palestinian flag. A switch in me flicked. A small group of friends and I hastily set up British Friends of Israel and the October Declaration to stand up for British Jews, show our support for Israel and make the oft-missed point that Hamas are terrorists and should be named as such. (This needed pointing out to the BBC and much of the media who still choose to omit it.) ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!OSrM!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc7923908-ff47-48aa-9928-1fb48e81289b_1232x612.png) Eros, Piccadilly, 14 October 2026. Today’s pro-Palestinian march is not all. Today of all days, British Jews must sit with the deeply troubling knowledge that a British political party has just passed a motion that ‘Zionism is Racism’. Most British Jews and Jews around the world identify as Zionists – many polls testify to this. Zionism is the national movement that supports the creation and protection of a Jewish homeland in the historic and ancestral home of Jews. I am a Zionist since I also believe in that. Lubna Speitan, the Green Party member behind the motion, addressed a crowd in London by saying, ‘We will continue until we dismantle Zionism from the world, from every country. They will be shunned and that time will come when they are hunted in the same way as the Nazi oppressors were… It won’t happen without force.’ This is yet another inversion of Nazism and the Holocaust. She knows full well it was Jews who were the victims of a Nazi genocide. And I am sure she must know it was Jews who led the global hunt for the Nazis afterwards. Today of all days, British Jews are living with antisemitism at a level that has become grotesquely normalised. The Community Security Trust (CST) recorded 1,926 antisemitic incidents across the UK in the first half of 2026, the second-highest total ever reported to CST in the first six months of any year, exceeded only by the 2,019 incidents recorded from January to June 2024\. This is an increase of 21 per cent from the 1,598 incidents recorded in the first half of 2025\. Depressingly, this means that antisemitism has stabilised at a higher rate than before 7 October. Just three days ago, at the 90th anniversary commemoration of the Battle of Cable Street, demonstrators in east London chanted ‘Zionists are not welcome here’ and ‘Zionism is fascism’. At one demonstration that day, marchers shouted at a Jewish woman journalist, ‘You are a Zio! Zionists are not welcome here.’ The irony of protesters telling Jews commemorating the defeat of fascists in Cable Street that Jews who identify as Zionists were themselves fascists and unwelcome. Today of all days, UK Labour politicians are expressing solidarity with Jews. It’s a little hard to swallow the performance – both for us and them, I think. You can almost sense that they can’t wait for the normal business of waving Palestinian flags and issuing tellings-off to Israel to resume tomorrow. Just yesterday, Labour MP Dame Emily Thornberry reacted to the news that Israel is threatening to shut the British consulate in Jerusalem on LBC. Her argument was that Britain does not recognise the consulate as being in Israel, but believes it to be in the State of Palestine. ‘We don’t recognise it as part of Israel. What legal right do they have?’ she said. I couldn’t help wondering if she was sober. I’m afraid she doesn’t realise that the UK’s game of ‘fantasy countries’ doesn’t change the governmental, legal or military situation in Israel. As chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, she may need to brush up a bit on the reality of foreign affairs. (There is nothing from Emily Thornberry so far today to commemorate 7 October, to mourn the loss of lives that day, including British lives, or to express sympathy with Israel.) Finally, I thought I’d check out the BBC’s coverage of the anniversary of 7 October. At 12.33pm the latest Live Reporting news item is this: ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!cOOB!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff310cae1-2f54-422b-8dfd-c17732e09498_1182x1102.png) The BBC really can’t help themselves, can they? Today, of all days, British Jews are being asked to endure the spectacle of people marching through London under Palestinian flags, a political party defining the national movement of most Jews as racism, and protesters telling Jews that they are not welcome at a commemoration of the defeat of fascism, while living under a government which is belligerent and unsympathetic towards Israel. They are expected to suck it up and carry on as normal, but perhaps occupying a little less space visually than before. But it is not normal. Today of all days, I stand with British Jews and I am still a Zionist. This article was originally published by [the Free Mind](https://www.thefreemind.co.uk/p/today-of-all-days?ref=goodoil.news).