It gives considerable pleasure to be able to report that Saturday’s ‘Enough coalition’ rally turned out to be a washout. The march against ‘Israeli occupation’ which the organisers believed would bring tens of thousands of people out onto the streets of London had to make do with a few thousand odd stragglers.
Among them were the terrorist-supporters and wannabe-terrorists, holocaust-deniers and anti-semitic conspiracy theorists who this blog has made mention of in the past. Though saying so says much about our times, it is nevertheless a notable success that – even with so many ‘celebrity’ endorsements – so few people wanted to walk down the street with this crowd.
The counter-demonstration proved highly successful, and hopefully jolted at least some of the people on the main march - not least with the rightful cry of ‘Free Alan Johnston’.
Washington’s demo, the next day, proved much the same point. There the main demo had, by some estimations, fewer than a thousand people, while Stand With Us and other organisations held a huge and successful counter-protest in which the wonderful Roz Rothstein gave a spine-tinglingly powerful speech. The day was, as in London 24-hours earlier, a victory of peace over terror, of decent protest over hate-speech and of common sense over conspiracy-theory.
But certain questions raised by the day still need to be answered. For instance, there remains the charitable status of the organisation ‘War on Want’. Having been the subject of a Charities Commission investigation in the past, it is high time that such an investigation occurred again. As a signatory to ‘Enough’, War on Want has far exceeded its charitable mandate. Surely allying itself with organisations which openly call for the destruction of a UN member state doesn’t count as ‘charitable’. Does it?
On a lighter note, it might be noted that the Saturday march in London coincided with a number of other marches. Among them was a procession of nude cyclists. Considering that the ‘Enough’ coalition still claims to comprise honest, decent and peaceful people, it remains hard to decide which of the days marches showed more bare-faced cheek.