London – The
usual morass of tourists milling around Downing Street were treated to a rare
sight on Saturday afternoon: a couple of dozen neo-Nazis holding nationalist
flags, massively outnumbered by several hundred counter protesters, with the
two groups divided by crash barriers and an enormous crowd of extremely polite
police officers.
This
was the summation of an affair which has preoccupied and distressed British Jews
in recent months. Initially, a handful of extreme-right activists had planned
to rally in the Jewish suburb of Golders Green to protest the “Jewishification”
of London. After much campaigning by communal groups and dozens of meetings
with the Metropolitan Police, the original rally was banned and the neo-Nazis
forced to move to a site in Westminster, just down the road from the mother of
all parliaments.
At
1 P.M. precisely, the mostly male and middle-aged neo-Nazis took up their
positions, hoisting flags belonging to far-right British groups and Polish
fascists as well as ones adorned with the red dragon of the Wessex Wyvern, an
ancient Saxon symbol. There was a Palestinian flag and a Confederate flag, just
to cover all corners. The shouting began.
“Disgusting!” said a passerby.
Through a megaphone, one of the neo-Nazis gave a speech, which was hard
to decipher through the cat-calls. There was some mention, however, of the
Magna Carta and human rights, as well as of the Shomrim, a Jewish neighborhood
watch-style group operating in parts of the capital.
“Boring, boring,” came the
chants in response.
One man made his way as close as he could to the neo-Nazi demo to hold
up a piece of card on which he had written, “You are wrong.”
Police in fluorescent yellow vests patiently tried to keep the crowds of
gaping tourists, veteran anti-fascist activists and random protesters from
clogging up the pavement.
“I think
the neo-Nazis have a right to protest but it was the correct thing to do to
move them away from Golders Green,” said Esther, a 27-year-old from North
London.
“They’re just a bunch of idiots.
I almost feel the fact that people turned up [to counter-protest] validates
them,” added her friend Eli, 25. He said he was also rather conflicted about
the contingent of counter-protesters waving Israeli flags. “We have nothing to
do with Israel, I’ve never been there. This isn’t about Israel or Palestine, we
are Jews from London, not anywhere else.”
Notable by their absence was the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, an
activist group which had implausibly claimed single-handed credit for
convincing police to move the neo-Nazi rally out of Golders Green in return for
the cancellation of their counter-protest.
In fact, part of the reason the police decided that the Golders Green
demo would have been a public order risk was because of the fractured nature of
the counter-protests, with internecine conflict raging as to whether the event
was in fact about anti-Zionism, Islamist terror and the boycott movement.
