The goal of the Israel lobby has been to loosen evidence thresholds, constrain critical thinking, and redefine racism and criminality. The effects have bled into dangerous new policing norms
I’ve watched with horror from afar as your “Labour” government and Metropolitan Police fabricated a false conflation between opposition to a settler-apartheid genocide and anti-semitism. I spent 32 years as a criminal prosecutor in one of the top-20 U.S. jurisdictions and I never had the slightest problem with the presumption of innocence or with only bringing charges when supported by evidence, concepts that seem to have fallen by the wayside in your country.
Having visited Britain several times and interacting with your police I must conclude that the Met force so easily slipped into this false presumption of equivalence BECAUSE of their deep-seated institutional racism. The Jabotinskyite/Kahanist propaganda trope, like that of the Pieds-Noirs and Afrikaners before them, is that they represent the last bastion of “white civilization” against the brown hordes of “Muslims” threatening “our” garden. It was with complete ease that your police slipped into this racist trope.
Excellent essay. I won’t be returning to visit the UK any time soon…
The conflation of antisemitism with all opposition to the Zionist genocidal state of Israel is a perfect example of where the west is heading...........where in fact, its been moving since at least the onset of neoliberalism.
If one thinks clearly for 15 minutes of less, it becomes apparant that much of what passes for obvious truth in the west is in fact one logical fallacy or another. Here are some of our favourites
1. Ad hominem.......the argument against the person instead of having any evidence to bolster your position.....at its strongest, the ad hominem fallacy becomes DEMONIZATION. Our enemies are evil, so we need not hear their side, or stoop to negotiation. We know already that they are of the devil and so we must oppose them, preferably with force.
2. Either-or, the fallacy of false choice. This one I label, two ideas, one of them wrong......so in fact, there is only one right answer in the true and false binary of western All knowing. Capitalism or Communism fits nicely here, se we are stuck with the money changers I'm afraid.
3. Sweeping generalization: All opposition to western ways of doing things, western demands for 'democracy' is simply wrong.............the western democracies are the best system........we seek to universalize our way of doing everything, including corruption, including war. Who needs cultural diversity, when you have the Petro-dollar?
4. The fallacy of Conflation: This is the jewel that makes all opposition to Zionist genocide AntiSemitic....which is like saying that All Opposition to Nazi ideology is anti-Christian, though our double standards protect us from seeing the conflation when we use it for a good cause, like supporting Israel.
Turn the logical fallacies on our side, and their utter stupidity is seen right away. Luckily we never look critically at our side..........we're the Good guys in the either or. Anyone having difficulty with any of our Certainties.........is obviously evil, wrong, a left wing wing nut.
Land theft and indigenous erasure is US. The west grew extremely rich on this same simple plan..........one more reason why we're easily talked into being blind to the obvious.
Well said indeed. The Police refused to hand over papers to McPherson linking Eltham Police with Clifford Norris, who was also filmed by a different police operation, passing a brown envelope to a serving police officer from Eltham. So McPherson did not mention corruption as he was not told about it. Murky business.
Of the hundreds of people who died whilst being arrested or in police custody most are black. There is an annual march by family and friends usually ignored by the media and those who have helped entrench a hierarchy of racism in all our institutions and policing.
Just one more thing: one aspect of the case that seems to be being overlooked is that, regardless of what had actually happened, the police also have a duty of care to potential criminals. It was unconscionably wrong to treat a man who was lying on the ground writhing in pain and gasping for breath in such a manner. Not only was it wrong and cruel, it was surely completely unnecessary, given that there were enough officers present to subdue him if it turned out he was faking.
Equally, video footage of the incident in Golders Green when a mentally disturbed man attacked two men showed a police officer kicking the man repeatedly in the head. Agin, cruel and unnecessary violence which could have caused brain damage.
As a citizen, I want police officers to behave responsibly while avoiding being harmed themselves, be well trained in such skills as, for example, Brazilian jujutsu, and refrain whenever possible from harming those they arrest.
Instead, they seem to be encouraged to behave like the thugs they are supposed to arrest.
I take your point. However, while the policeman did not perhaps intentionally cause further hurt to the victim, I still feel that his priority should have been to check thoroughly before arresting a man who claimed to be having difficulty breathing and was on the ground writhing in agony. Surely police have basic first aid knowledge and plain common sense would have told anyone that not all injuries would be instantly visible. It makes me wonder what teachers at Hendon and police chiefs are telling the modern police force is acceptable. In his concluding remarks, the judge was obviously concerned with emphasising the guilt of the perpetrator and the confusion he had deliberately caused.
Yes and the same thing happened in that case at Manchester Airport where a police officer was filmed kicking a muslim man in the head - hard. Obviously wrong. Later on footage came out that the muslim man had just been violent towards the police so naturally the Right yelled at the top of their lungs "TWO WRONGS MAKE A RIGHT" because that principle is central to rightoid thinking.
Excellent article Jonathan spotlighting the real culprits behind police action and attitudes in the UK as evidenced by the appalling treatment of Mr Nowak recently.
In fact we have here, I believe, the same attitudes and actions as those that drive ICE in the US and are based on the use of overwhelming force coupled with uncritical thinking and unpredictability to create an enhanced sense of fear and amongst protesters.
And, as with ICE, this has all been imported from Israel both in terms of protest management training undertaken there and the covert pro-Zionist attitude of many police agents especially those at the top who set the tone for police behaviour on the streets. (I’m not so sure about your convoluted logic about the conflation of victim and perpetrator before ‘antisemitism’ but anything is possible these days to justify the unjustifiable).
Until these pro-Zionist elements are weeded out from the police force the situation will only get worse.
I wouldn't buy into the right-wing narrative that police were driven by anti-racism or the pressure to demonstrate anti-racism in an overly "woke" Britain. The claim that police have anti-white bias is ludicrous yet pumped out all over social media, thanks to the South African racist.
What I see is classic unsafe and neglectful police tactics, the result of poor training and standard sadism. Happens in the US all the time. Somehow every first responder *except* for police knows that when someone says "I can't breathe" you prop them up in a position where they can breathe, which in this case would also have revealed the stab wound.
Also do we know for sure that the killer lied about the attack being prompted by some kind of racial spat? Nowak's father said he may have made some "cheeky" comment. I bring this up not to remotely victim-blame, but to point out that monstrous xenophobe politicians have ramped up the rhetoric and paranoia so much that I can see unhinged people of any race violently overreacting to perceived insult or danger.
Perhaps what we need is not race-based policy, but training to address the underlying problems — to promote critical, evidence-based thinking, self-awareness of bias and compassion for those who are different to ourselves.
Or is that too much to expect from the police, let alone the politicians who would need to promote such changes?
We should expect that of all our citizens. But as a retired language teacher who taught logic, I see little of it being used in general. Logical fallacy is more what keeps many believing in 'their side' regardless of anything so annoying as evidence.
It's not so much criticism of Israel that bothers them; I think hatred of Israel is being deliberately stirred. The US interests in arms and oil etc don't like criticism of, or attention on, how they've politically captured their vassals and how they 100% support a genocide in Gaza and the bombing of Iran and Lebanon. Hatred and blaming of Israel and Jewish supremacy is cool; it deflects from the wider agenda of white, nominally christian men trying to maintain full spectrum global dominance.
Yes and no. Conflation of any criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism is a logical fallacy. That it is deliberately and consistently employed, by educated people who should know better, suggests to me that for White, nominally Christian patriarchs of every gender........conflating Anti-Semitism with hating Jewish people works for them.
Imagine their outrage if we started suggesting that bad mouthing Nazism was obviously displaying a deliberate hatred of Christians. Turn the conflation on us.......and the absurdity is easily apparant. But to keep the arms flowing to the genocidal state of Israel......and the demonization sticking to Islamic people (where they imagine it belongs) a definition of antisemitism that is obviously STUPID must prevail.
Israeli atrocities are 100% atrocities by US based interests in oil and arms (who are also institutionalised racists and Islamophobes). These giant forces, including specifically pro-Israel ones, are behind the political capture of the UK government and police.
They've got handcuffs out for all of us in the west who disagree.
The good news is its going to be the downfall of the west.
Heard part of Putin's speech at their conference in St Petersburg this AM......complements of the BBC.........and whatever we may think of him.........what he said about hierarchy, the IMF, the Petro Dollar and the unipolar world order...........made a lot of sense to me.
Why should other parts of the world kowtow to our ideas of universal what ever????
They become more obviously stupid........and criminal.........by the hour....as the murders in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, continue.
Yes, Iran, Russia and China are all standing up to the US led west and refusing to kowtow. Multipolarity is the hope, which is why it’s being smeared as one world government or globalists controlling us with green policies etc etc.
All of them hope the west will implode before direct war with the US is necessary (the UK and EU are expendable and will be sacrificed if necessary).
However, the climate crisis will affect the global south more than the global north, and the US is banking on it being to their advantage; they are deliberately accelerating it, with war and propaganda it’s not happening, in order to maintain unipolarity.
One thing we definitely need to get away from, is our western desire for a single answer to big issues. I agree with you that climate is the real threat, coming for all of us. I read Jared Diamond's classic COLLAPSE 20 odd years ago........and haven't forgotten the last sentence in his description of the Greenland Norse:
IN THE END, THE RICH STARVED LAST.
The ate each other in the last stages of that extinction during the little ice age.
I'm not convinced however that the west is planning to employ climate change to starve their opponents.........I don't think they are that smart, at least not most of them.
Any demographic that can believe AI is going to save us, make billions of $$$$$$$$$$$, and solve problems too intractable for the human mind........don't know much about what Thinking actually is. They do believe in creative destruction....an oxymoron made up by the same morons who bought into neoliberal globalization.
These western thought leaders can't see the future coming. Look how taken by surprise they've been by asymmetric warfare.........Canada, where I live, has been caught with our pants down as well.........agreeing to spend billions on F-35's too expensive to build, maintain and fuel.............to do a damn thing about patrolling our Arctic. Cheap drones could do the job...for pennies compared to the cost of one American F-35.
NONE OF OUR LEADERS SEE THE FUTURE IN ANY DETAIL.......they're caught out by it more than most, likely because their wealth cushions them from reality..plus, when their best laid plans faulter, they can always lie. NATO and the west goaded Russia into the Ukraine war..........think they'll admit it now Ukraine keeps losing???
They've forgot all about their actions JO............and insist, sometimes quite violently, that we do the same.
I believe for all these reasons, multipolarity has a real shot. Nor do I subscribe to the demonization (ad hominem writ large) that the west uses to blind the lot of us into hating an other we know zip about.
It is refreshing to see some manliness, testosterone, and balls coming out of the UK. It’s certainly been sad watching the abuses going on for decades and the people getting ignored, gaslit and even facing hostility from authorities.
Hell, I’m Irish with no love for Brits or the UK and it’s cringe watching their abuses and thinking, C’mon people. Get angry. Do something other than useless talking ffs! Save yourselves!
Has the man been hassling you, JC? Seems like you're pretty careful about how you write, but I don't know how you get around the "any criticism of the State of Israel is hate" thing.
I’ve watched with horror from afar as your “Labour” government and Metropolitan Police fabricated a false conflation between opposition to a settler-apartheid genocide and anti-semitism. I spent 32 years as a criminal prosecutor in one of the top-20 U.S. jurisdictions and I never had the slightest problem with the presumption of innocence or with only bringing charges when supported by evidence, concepts that seem to have fallen by the wayside in your country.
Having visited Britain several times and interacting with your police I must conclude that the Met force so easily slipped into this false presumption of equivalence BECAUSE of their deep-seated institutional racism. The Jabotinskyite/Kahanist propaganda trope, like that of the Pieds-Noirs and Afrikaners before them, is that they represent the last bastion of “white civilization” against the brown hordes of “Muslims” threatening “our” garden. It was with complete ease that your police slipped into this racist trope.
Excellent essay. I won’t be returning to visit the UK any time soon…
Excellent and insightful article as ever. Thank you, Jonathan, for remaining one of the few journalists in the UK with an intact moral compass.
The conflation of antisemitism with all opposition to the Zionist genocidal state of Israel is a perfect example of where the west is heading...........where in fact, its been moving since at least the onset of neoliberalism.
If one thinks clearly for 15 minutes of less, it becomes apparant that much of what passes for obvious truth in the west is in fact one logical fallacy or another. Here are some of our favourites
1. Ad hominem.......the argument against the person instead of having any evidence to bolster your position.....at its strongest, the ad hominem fallacy becomes DEMONIZATION. Our enemies are evil, so we need not hear their side, or stoop to negotiation. We know already that they are of the devil and so we must oppose them, preferably with force.
2. Either-or, the fallacy of false choice. This one I label, two ideas, one of them wrong......so in fact, there is only one right answer in the true and false binary of western All knowing. Capitalism or Communism fits nicely here, se we are stuck with the money changers I'm afraid.
3. Sweeping generalization: All opposition to western ways of doing things, western demands for 'democracy' is simply wrong.............the western democracies are the best system........we seek to universalize our way of doing everything, including corruption, including war. Who needs cultural diversity, when you have the Petro-dollar?
4. The fallacy of Conflation: This is the jewel that makes all opposition to Zionist genocide AntiSemitic....which is like saying that All Opposition to Nazi ideology is anti-Christian, though our double standards protect us from seeing the conflation when we use it for a good cause, like supporting Israel.
Turn the logical fallacies on our side, and their utter stupidity is seen right away. Luckily we never look critically at our side..........we're the Good guys in the either or. Anyone having difficulty with any of our Certainties.........is obviously evil, wrong, a left wing wing nut.
Nazism has been misunderstood.
WAIT FOR IT. IT'S COMING.
Israel is a criminal and rogue state engaged in ethnic cleansing and the theft of Palestinian land!
Land theft and indigenous erasure is US. The west grew extremely rich on this same simple plan..........one more reason why we're easily talked into being blind to the obvious.
Well said indeed. The Police refused to hand over papers to McPherson linking Eltham Police with Clifford Norris, who was also filmed by a different police operation, passing a brown envelope to a serving police officer from Eltham. So McPherson did not mention corruption as he was not told about it. Murky business.
Exactly same here in Australia.
Of the hundreds of people who died whilst being arrested or in police custody most are black. There is an annual march by family and friends usually ignored by the media and those who have helped entrench a hierarchy of racism in all our institutions and policing.
Just one more thing: one aspect of the case that seems to be being overlooked is that, regardless of what had actually happened, the police also have a duty of care to potential criminals. It was unconscionably wrong to treat a man who was lying on the ground writhing in pain and gasping for breath in such a manner. Not only was it wrong and cruel, it was surely completely unnecessary, given that there were enough officers present to subdue him if it turned out he was faking.
Equally, video footage of the incident in Golders Green when a mentally disturbed man attacked two men showed a police officer kicking the man repeatedly in the head. Agin, cruel and unnecessary violence which could have caused brain damage.
As a citizen, I want police officers to behave responsibly while avoiding being harmed themselves, be well trained in such skills as, for example, Brazilian jujutsu, and refrain whenever possible from harming those they arrest.
Instead, they seem to be encouraged to behave like the thugs they are supposed to arrest.
I agree re Golders Green, but less so in the Nowak case. It's worth reading the sentencing remarks -
https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Digwa-Final-Sentencing-Remarks.pdf
I take your point. However, while the policeman did not perhaps intentionally cause further hurt to the victim, I still feel that his priority should have been to check thoroughly before arresting a man who claimed to be having difficulty breathing and was on the ground writhing in agony. Surely police have basic first aid knowledge and plain common sense would have told anyone that not all injuries would be instantly visible. It makes me wonder what teachers at Hendon and police chiefs are telling the modern police force is acceptable. In his concluding remarks, the judge was obviously concerned with emphasising the guilt of the perpetrator and the confusion he had deliberately caused.
Yes and the same thing happened in that case at Manchester Airport where a police officer was filmed kicking a muslim man in the head - hard. Obviously wrong. Later on footage came out that the muslim man had just been violent towards the police so naturally the Right yelled at the top of their lungs "TWO WRONGS MAKE A RIGHT" because that principle is central to rightoid thinking.
Yes indeed - appalling. And I bet they wouldn't say that if 'Tommy Robinson' got kicked in the head!
Thank you.
Excellent article Jonathan spotlighting the real culprits behind police action and attitudes in the UK as evidenced by the appalling treatment of Mr Nowak recently.
In fact we have here, I believe, the same attitudes and actions as those that drive ICE in the US and are based on the use of overwhelming force coupled with uncritical thinking and unpredictability to create an enhanced sense of fear and amongst protesters.
And, as with ICE, this has all been imported from Israel both in terms of protest management training undertaken there and the covert pro-Zionist attitude of many police agents especially those at the top who set the tone for police behaviour on the streets. (I’m not so sure about your convoluted logic about the conflation of victim and perpetrator before ‘antisemitism’ but anything is possible these days to justify the unjustifiable).
Until these pro-Zionist elements are weeded out from the police force the situation will only get worse.
I wouldn't buy into the right-wing narrative that police were driven by anti-racism or the pressure to demonstrate anti-racism in an overly "woke" Britain. The claim that police have anti-white bias is ludicrous yet pumped out all over social media, thanks to the South African racist.
What I see is classic unsafe and neglectful police tactics, the result of poor training and standard sadism. Happens in the US all the time. Somehow every first responder *except* for police knows that when someone says "I can't breathe" you prop them up in a position where they can breathe, which in this case would also have revealed the stab wound.
Also do we know for sure that the killer lied about the attack being prompted by some kind of racial spat? Nowak's father said he may have made some "cheeky" comment. I bring this up not to remotely victim-blame, but to point out that monstrous xenophobe politicians have ramped up the rhetoric and paranoia so much that I can see unhinged people of any race violently overreacting to perceived insult or danger.
Perhaps what we need is not race-based policy, but training to address the underlying problems — to promote critical, evidence-based thinking, self-awareness of bias and compassion for those who are different to ourselves.
Or is that too much to expect from the police, let alone the politicians who would need to promote such changes?
We should expect that of all our citizens. But as a retired language teacher who taught logic, I see little of it being used in general. Logical fallacy is more what keeps many believing in 'their side' regardless of anything so annoying as evidence.
It's not so much criticism of Israel that bothers them; I think hatred of Israel is being deliberately stirred. The US interests in arms and oil etc don't like criticism of, or attention on, how they've politically captured their vassals and how they 100% support a genocide in Gaza and the bombing of Iran and Lebanon. Hatred and blaming of Israel and Jewish supremacy is cool; it deflects from the wider agenda of white, nominally christian men trying to maintain full spectrum global dominance.
Yes and no. Conflation of any criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism is a logical fallacy. That it is deliberately and consistently employed, by educated people who should know better, suggests to me that for White, nominally Christian patriarchs of every gender........conflating Anti-Semitism with hating Jewish people works for them.
Imagine their outrage if we started suggesting that bad mouthing Nazism was obviously displaying a deliberate hatred of Christians. Turn the conflation on us.......and the absurdity is easily apparant. But to keep the arms flowing to the genocidal state of Israel......and the demonization sticking to Islamic people (where they imagine it belongs) a definition of antisemitism that is obviously STUPID must prevail.
Only idiots..........and fascists.......buy it.
Israeli atrocities are 100% atrocities by US based interests in oil and arms (who are also institutionalised racists and Islamophobes). These giant forces, including specifically pro-Israel ones, are behind the political capture of the UK government and police.
They've got handcuffs out for all of us in the west who disagree.
The good news is its going to be the downfall of the west.
Heard part of Putin's speech at their conference in St Petersburg this AM......complements of the BBC.........and whatever we may think of him.........what he said about hierarchy, the IMF, the Petro Dollar and the unipolar world order...........made a lot of sense to me.
Why should other parts of the world kowtow to our ideas of universal what ever????
They become more obviously stupid........and criminal.........by the hour....as the murders in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, continue.
Yes, Iran, Russia and China are all standing up to the US led west and refusing to kowtow. Multipolarity is the hope, which is why it’s being smeared as one world government or globalists controlling us with green policies etc etc.
All of them hope the west will implode before direct war with the US is necessary (the UK and EU are expendable and will be sacrificed if necessary).
However, the climate crisis will affect the global south more than the global north, and the US is banking on it being to their advantage; they are deliberately accelerating it, with war and propaganda it’s not happening, in order to maintain unipolarity.
One thing we definitely need to get away from, is our western desire for a single answer to big issues. I agree with you that climate is the real threat, coming for all of us. I read Jared Diamond's classic COLLAPSE 20 odd years ago........and haven't forgotten the last sentence in his description of the Greenland Norse:
IN THE END, THE RICH STARVED LAST.
The ate each other in the last stages of that extinction during the little ice age.
I'm not convinced however that the west is planning to employ climate change to starve their opponents.........I don't think they are that smart, at least not most of them.
Any demographic that can believe AI is going to save us, make billions of $$$$$$$$$$$, and solve problems too intractable for the human mind........don't know much about what Thinking actually is. They do believe in creative destruction....an oxymoron made up by the same morons who bought into neoliberal globalization.
These western thought leaders can't see the future coming. Look how taken by surprise they've been by asymmetric warfare.........Canada, where I live, has been caught with our pants down as well.........agreeing to spend billions on F-35's too expensive to build, maintain and fuel.............to do a damn thing about patrolling our Arctic. Cheap drones could do the job...for pennies compared to the cost of one American F-35.
NONE OF OUR LEADERS SEE THE FUTURE IN ANY DETAIL.......they're caught out by it more than most, likely because their wealth cushions them from reality..plus, when their best laid plans faulter, they can always lie. NATO and the west goaded Russia into the Ukraine war..........think they'll admit it now Ukraine keeps losing???
They've forgot all about their actions JO............and insist, sometimes quite violently, that we do the same.
I believe for all these reasons, multipolarity has a real shot. Nor do I subscribe to the demonization (ad hominem writ large) that the west uses to blind the lot of us into hating an other we know zip about.
It is refreshing to see some manliness, testosterone, and balls coming out of the UK. It’s certainly been sad watching the abuses going on for decades and the people getting ignored, gaslit and even facing hostility from authorities.
Hell, I’m Irish with no love for Brits or the UK and it’s cringe watching their abuses and thinking, C’mon people. Get angry. Do something other than useless talking ffs! Save yourselves!
Has the man been hassling you, JC? Seems like you're pretty careful about how you write, but I don't know how you get around the "any criticism of the State of Israel is hate" thing.
Confront it as the sweeping generalization, conflation of categories that it is.