The Met police chief proves he's as dishonest and racist as the force he leads

Sir Mark Rowley claims he is worried about rising 'community tensions'. But the only tensions he cares about are those belonging to an imaginary community he has created of a Jewish hive mind

Once again, the BBC laps up outright disinformation from Sir Mark Rowley, police commissioner of the institutionally racist and corrupt Met. Watch this short clip from the BBC News at Ten last night:

1. Rowley demands supporters of Palestine Action cancel or delay their protest today, after the Manchester synagogue attack, because the timing appears “antisemitic”.

How to untangle this nonsense?

a) The only possible way to interpret Rowley’s argument is that he believes every British Jew identifies and supports Israel’s mass slaughter of children in Gaza and therefore, out of respect for their grief at the Manchester attack, we ought not to protest against the slaughter in Gaza. That undoubtedly makes Rowley the antisemitic one.

b) Even were his deeply antisemitic idea true – that British Jews are an unthinking herd of genocidal monsters – Rowley assumes that we ought to be okay with this: we should just keep quiet about Israel murdering 100 or so Palestinians every day in Gaza, and starving and ethnically cleansing the rest of the population, because it would supposedly offend Britain’s Jewish community to do otherwise.

c) Rowley wants the protesters to take a time-out of a few weeks, even while Israel refuses to take any time-out on murdering Palestinians. Nor is the British government taking a time-out in arming Israel and providing it with intelligence to carry out the genocide. Rowley is suggesting we should simply quieten down for the next few weeks, even as 100 Palestinians are killed each day, before heading back to the streets. He thereby sends an unequivocal message that Palestinian life is worthless – and he does it while claiming we are the racist ones.

2. Rowley claims he wants this weekend’s protests stopped because of the danger they will raise “community tensions, which is my concern”.

And yet from everything he says, the only community’s “tensions” he appears to care about are those of an imaginary one he has created of a Jewish hive mind.

What about the tensions of Palestinian communities, of wider Muslim and Arab communities, of human communities, of those parts of the Jewish community opposed to Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, produced by watching children being torn to shreds by bombs Britain is helping to supply to Israel, by seeing world citizens – including British citizens – being abducted in international waters by Israel as they try to break Israel’s illegal starvation-siege of Gaza?

Does Rowley care about these communities and their tensions, tensions that will only heighten if they are denied their long-established democratic rights to go out on to the streets to protest – rights that have already been aggressively whittled away by successive British governments?

3. Rowley says he finds it “bewildering” why more than 1,000 people would want to get arrested for “supporting a terrorist organisation” – and berates them for taking up police resources at a time when those resources are needed elsewhere.

And yet, Rowley knows there is nothing “bewildering” about their protests. These thousands of British citizens, backed by millions more who are less courageous, are prepared to risk jail, and damage their careers and their futures, with a “terrorism” conviction. They are prepared to do so because they believe the proscription of Palestine Action – the first such proscription in British history for a direct-action group following in the tradition of the Suffragettes – is an assault on our fundamental right to protest, and the right to protest against the criminality of our own institutions, in this case institutions actively supporting a genocide in Gaza.

If Rowley does not believe he has the resources to arrest the 1,000-plus people who will be sitting quietly in Trafalgar Square today holding placards opposing the genocide, then he can simply let them be. The sky will not fall in. No one will get hurt. There will be no threat to either public or national security.

The true danger – the danger that Rowley and the government of Sir Keir Starmer really worry about – is that ever more people are beginning to understand that we are ruled by a gang of authoritarian, genocide-assisting criminals.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

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