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.