Falter’s set up controversy only emphasises that Zionist complaints are routinely over-reactions
April 23, 2024
by Martin Odoni
Gideon Falter is the chief executive of the fake – and illegally politicised – “charity”, the Campaign Against Antisemitism. It is really just a campaign against anti-Zionism, as is well-recorded. Falter himself is one of the most zealous pro-Israel fanatics on Earth, and as is always the case with fanatics, he is quite unable to grasp that his need to tell lies to advance the position of Zionism demonstrates that Zionism is wrong; if his position were a truthful one, he would not need to tell lies, the truth would be all that is needed.
The remarkable and inspiring surge of support across the UK over the last six months, in solidarity with the Palestinians under siege in the now-irredeemably ruined enclave of Gaza, has led to demonstrations in major cities and towns every week, and considerable and increasingly-effective direct action against businesses whose profits or manufacturing output go to benefiting Israel in one form or another.
The pushback against Zionism means there is no returning to the default
The enormous scale of this popular push against Israel has clearly caught the political class rather by surprise, and the pressure exerted has caused them to, no pun intended, falter somewhat in their pro-Israel stance. Several factories that provide arms and equipment to the Israeli Occupation Forces have been shut down, with numerous others suffering serious disruption. And above all, both Conservative and Labour Parties have taken startling loss of support around the country for providing so much funding and equipment to Israel at a time both favour ongoing austerity and impoverishment of the poorest back home.
Falter and his allies in the Zionist movement have been persistently trying, with little success, to portray these demonstrations and marches as “antisemitic” (surprise, surprise), in the hopes of discrediting them and maybe even of getting them forcibly stopped. The unending refrain, shamefully echoed by a number of Jewish media figures who should have been old enough to know better when they were half their current ages, such as Stephen Fry and Simon Schama, is that Jews feel “unsafe” to go out.
The media infantilisation of British Jews
I could go through the usual routine of pointing out that I am Jewish, and that not only am I not scared by the demonstrations, marches and direct action, I eagerly join them. That I do not feel endangered when I openly declare my Jewish background while taking part, that I find I am always given warm, even grateful, expressions of solidarity from every direction, and have made numerous real friendships over the course of the last few months – yes, very much including with Muslim campaigners. Mushy though it may sound, we do not regard each other as rivals at all, we see each other as brothers and sisters in a common cause; a cause to save the Palestinians from extermination, and to liberate Jews from the disguised banishment that Zionism imposes.
But even if there were such a friction, the truth is that most Jews are not made of papier mâché. Nor are we the quick-to-cry babies of LBC Radio’s condescending imagination. We are made of as stern a stuff as any other social grouping – arguably sterner, given the history of real anti-Semitism we have had to endure – and we do not need the special protection the likes of Falter are claiming. They claim it for reasons quite other than the declared ones, and they are distinctly political reasons. It is Zionism that needs the protection they seek, not Jewish people.
What Falter did
If you want a full, detailed analysis of the stunt Falter tried to pull, please read Jonathan Cook’s summary.
My shorter version is that Falter, with a full camera crew, deliberately set off to cross a road in London (wow, pretty brazen for people who are “scared to go outside,” eh?) that he knew would be temporarily barricaded off to allow a pro-Palestine march at exactly the time he showed up. (NOTE: Falter claims he ‘stumbled’ across the march, as though he had no idea it would be there, but the presence of his camera crew is way too much of a coincidence for anyone to buy that.) A police officer stopped him from crossing, and Falter has been playing merry hell about it ever since to anyone who will listen.
NB: Falter and his accomplices were wearing their skull-caps (‘Kippahs’), no doubt to help highlight that they are Jewish. But another aspect this draws attention to is that this was a Saturday, the Sabbath, and the use of mechanical or electrical equipment is forbidden to practicing Jews on the Sabbath. So why did they have a camera…?
No, I am not implying that they are not Jewish, only that their “feelings of devout sensitivity” do not appear to be quite as passionately held as they want us to believe.
Now, in fairness to Falter, the police officer in question did say something rather foolish and offensive, but it seems to me it was more a matter of “poor-choice-of-words” rather than actual racism. The officer gave one of the reasons for not allowing Falter to cross the road that he was “openly Jewish.” I rather wrinkled my own nose on first hearing that, given, as we see above, I am openly Jewish when lending my support to these sorts of demos. It has, as I have pointed out, provoked no one to lash out at me; the only exceptions being, funnily enough, Zionists observing the demonstrations from outside, and who have given me abuse from time to time for being a “traitor”.
I am pretty sure in the context of the argument that the officer meant “openly Zionist”, which would be, and indeed is, a potential provocation. Come to that, I have no doubt that that was the whole point of the stunt. Falter was hoping to push his way into the march, against the flow of its movement, to provoke an angry reaction from the marchers, and then present any slightest gesture of hostility as ‘evidence’ of protester anti-Semitism. As the police officer was preventing him from doing it, but in a clumsy way, Falter decided to make a big deal out of that instead, moaning that the police were “curtailing the rights of law-abiding Londoners” to walk wherever they like freely. A bit rich coming from a man who has called for the protest marches to be stamped out?
How sad and pathetic are media people such as the BBC and Sky News that they have yet again taken Zionist whining more or less at face-value and broadcast Falter’s “everyone-feel-sorry-for-me!!!” demands for the police officer in question to be sacked.
There is no physical threat to Jews or to Zionists
Some would argue that the police officer may have done Falter a strange favour, as, if he did provoke the marchers, they might well have clobbered him and smashed the camera. I do not agree with that. Jonathan Cook in his summary above, commented that,
‘There is no evidential basis whatsoever for the police officer’s suggestion that Jews are in any danger, as Jews, from the protesters. Again, lots of “openly Jewish” people attend the marches. There is not even any evidence that Zionists – even the most obnoxious ones – are in danger from the demonstrators.’
Mr Cook is not wrong, but I would argue that his conclusions should be even firmer and more positive; there is clear evidence that the Zionists are in no danger from the demonstrators, because in recent weeks, Zionists have attempted to set up counter-demos in London, Manchester and Birmingham to confront the pro-Palestine marchers. And, as I have documented before, the Zionist attendance has always been absolutely dwarfed to a truly embarrassing degree by the Palestine supporters; literally over ten thousand to one in London last month, and then in Manchester the following week, it was something like one thousand five hundred Palestine protesters faced by exactly twenty-one Zionists (I was there and there were so few Zionists that I was able to stop and count them! Genuinely. I and the others I was marching with were laughing too much to bother getting angry with them). The barricades across the side road they were lined up in stretched wider than the Zionist protesters themselves did when all stood in a single line. I can even state with absolute confidence that there have been emphatically more Jews supporting the Palestinians in these protests than have supported Israel.
But for all that the numbers have been ridiculously lopsided, there has not been any actual violence of note. Sure, there’s been mockery, name-calling etc, but no one has raised a fist. If violence did break out, or anti-Semitic feeling really were the driving force behind the pro-Palestine marches, the Zionists would be absolutely hammered to Kingdom-come in the streets. There would certainly be no deterrent presented by the Zionists against attacks, when they are as laughably outnumbered as that. And yet it has not happened.
That is solid enough evidence for me that there is no physical danger to the Zionists. Palestine supporters may not respect what Zionists are arguing for, but they have respected their right to make their argument – such as it is. Drowning them out with far louder counter-chanting is sufficient.
Indeed, it has even been argued that the violence was coming from Basil himself; –
Bottom line
The bottom line about Basil’s self-martyrdom attempt is that, despite his claims that his rights were being curtailed due to being Jewish, he was really upset about not being allowed to provoke a riot that was almost certainly never going to happen anyway. Whether the police officer did the right thing or not is certainly a dicussion well worth having, but when the whole conversation is heard in context, he was clearly speaking from a reasonable position and impulse, no matter how clumsy his words were. He just wanted to prevent disorder. He is a police officer, he does have to show at least some interest and concern when there appears to be a threat of a punch-up. He even offered Falter an escort to get him across the road via a different route, which sounds a perfectly fair and reasonable compromise, which Falter rejected.
So in the end, this really boils down to just one more example of someone moaning about protests blocking up a street. Such complaints are hardly “man-bites-dog” occurrences, and are therefore unworthy of the press devoting so much time to them. (I am even questioning, even as I type this, whether I am myself dignifying Falter with too much attention.) The fact that this silly failed stunt even got into the media once again demonstrates that David Baddiel could not be further from the truth when he says, “Jews Don’t Count!”; thousands around the country moan every weekend about political demos getting in their way, but only Falter – a Jew who claims prominence for himself – got his objection into the top-of-the-hour news.
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