Sir Keir Starmer has called for a police crackdown on antisemitic chanting at demonstrations, including pro-Palestine marches, saying the government “won’t tolerate” it.
The prime minister’s official spokesperson said that while “free speech is an important right in this country, that can’t extend to inciting hatred or harassing others”, saying the police will use their powers “more robustly” to tackle the proliferation of antisemitism.
It comes after two gunmen attacked a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Australia on Sunday, killing 15 people and injuring a further 27.
On Monday, a spokesperson for a Jewish security charity warned that violent chants at protests “if they are left unchecked” can lead to deadly atrocities like the Bondi Beach attack.
Dave Rich, director of policy at the Community Security Trust (CST), which provides protection for Jewish communities in the UK, said it is “not a difficult connection to make” between hatred directed at Israel during marches and “this kind of violent terrorism”.
He said calls for “intifada” and the phrase “river to the sea”, used by some protesters at pro-Palestine demonstrations, had not been challenged properly.
Meanwhile, chief rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis warned that “hate speech has the potential to become translated into hate action”.
He said: “We have seen on a weekly basis, people out in the streets of cities in our country crying slogans which incite hatred – ‘from the river to the sea’; ‘globalise the intifada’.
“What does ‘globalise the intifada’ mean? Well, on Yom Kippur at the Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester, we discovered what it means. On Bondi Beach, Australians discovered what is meant by those words.
“And the time has come for us to make it absolutely clear that such speech is unlawful. It’s not going to be accepted. It’s gone on for far too long. So much of hate speech has the potential to become translated into hate action.”
Asked whether the government would legislate to ban antisemitic chants, the prime minister’s official spokesperson told reporters: “The prime minister agreed that these particular slogans are calls to attack Jewish communities around the world.
He added: “Free speech is an important right in this country, but that can’t extend to inciting hatred or harassing others.
“We’ve seen antisemitic incidents proliferate at these marches, and we won’t tolerate that.”
The spokesperson continued: “In addition to the police using their existing powers more robustly, the home secretary is also looking at the cumulative effect of marches and protests… and that includes looking at marches that happen in the same place every time, where they happen repeatedly, and the distress and effect that that has on parts of our community, such as Jewish people living in the UK.
“Clearly the police also have existing powers and we expect them to use more.”
In October, home secretary Shabana Mahmood said police forces would be granted powers to put conditions on repeated protests.
It comes after Mr Rich told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “We’ve had these huge protests that have been ongoing in our city centres and university campuses with language like calls for intifada, for calls for resistance, all sorts of violent rhetoric, calls for the state of Israel to be destroyed, the phrase ‘river to the sea’, which is taken by a lot of Jewish people to imply that.
“And none of this language has been challenged or really addressed properly, either through law enforcement or by the organisers of these demos or by wider society. And Jewish people see a connection.
“I think people see a connection between violent words, if they are left unchecked, and violent actions.
“And so when you get terrorist attacks like the one we had at Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester, or the appalling atrocity we’ve just seen on Bondi Beach in Sydney, Jewish people make the connections.”
Justice minister Alex Davies-Jones said people should refrain from using chants like “globalise the intifada” and “from the river to the sea” after the terror attack in Sydney.
Asked about the phrases, she told Sky News: “I want to be very, very clear that chants like that, any chants that are designed to intimidate, call for violence, call for the murder of Jews, are totally unacceptable.”
She said while people have a “fundamental right to protest”, they do not have a right to “intimidate British citizens or call for violence in our streets, because sadly, we have seen the consequences of what happens when that is done”.
Intifada is an Arabic word which means “to shake off”, according to the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU).
The phrase is “used by pro-Palestinian activists that calls for aggressive resistance against Israel and those who support Israel”, the American Jewish Committee says.
Mr Rich said such phrases should not be allowed in demonstrations, adding that there have been “record levels of antisemitism in this country for two years”.
He said: “Every Jewish person has felt it and experienced it, and right across society – in workplaces, in institutions, regulators – people are too often turning a blind eye or taking the path of least resistance and allowing this problem to grow, and then we end up in situations where Jews get killed on the streets.”
The latest official statistics, published in October and covering England and Wales, showed that Jewish people had a higher rate of religious hate crimes targeted towards them than any other faith group when all police forces were taken into account.
In the year to March, there were 106 religious hate crimes per 10,000 population targeted at Jewish people, the Home Office data showed.
Source: UK Politics - www.independent.co.uk
