Why do we allow protests that glorify slaughter?

There are times when you wonder how history happened. And other times when you realise how it did. The past two weeks have been one such time.

The inconsistencies, naturally, have been legion. People who label everything as aggression, including microaggressions, who believe that speech is violence and that misgendering a trans person is ‘literal genocide’ are the same people who have spent the past fortnight with nothing to say, or have adopted an ‘it’s complicated’ stance, when Jews are slaughtered in their hundreds. All those people who filled the streets when a Minnesotan cop killed George Floyd seemed to have no solidarity left when Hamas came for the Jews. Not only did they fail to support the victims, but within hours of the attacks they were actually turning out to support the attackers.

And they turned out in their thousands last Saturday. A week after babies had been murdered in front of their parents and scores of young people gunned down, it was anti-Israel demonstrations that dominated Britain’s streets. The man who could have been our prime minister, Jeremy Corbyn, told the London demonstration: ‘Today, as we wave the Palestinian flag, let’s hear it for the people of the West Bank, for the people of Gaza, for the people of the refugee camps.’ There wasn’t any ‘Let’s hear it for the people of Israel, who have suffered such terrible harm.’ Of course not – just ‘let’s hear it for the people of Gaza’: some of whom were the ‘friends’ of Mr Corbyn who went into Israel to take as many Jewish lives as they could, greedy for death.

Ben Jamal, the director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, accused Rishi Sunak of ‘giving the green light to war crimes’ and Sir Keir Starmer of ‘endorsing a state enacting war crimes against an entire population’.