The American Spectator

At Large

(Page 2 of 2)

p>This march was organized by the Stop the War Coalition (STWC) and the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB). The STWC was organized originally by the Socialist Workers' Party, which claimed Trotskyite credentials, and the MAB had links with the Muslim Brotherhood. Some of its senior officers publicly defended murder-suicide bomb attacks on Jews. MAB banners on the march read: "Palestine forever from the sea to the river," indicating its real agenda was not peace but a Final Solution along Nazi lines. Dr. Myles Harris described the scene in the following terms in the Salisbury Review : br> /p>

At the foot of Nelson's column a loud-speaker the size of a bread van gave an electronic grunt and began to chant: "Kill Bush, Kill Bush!" at 150 decibels. Overhead an animated puppet of Bush jerked across a huge plasma screen. A crowd which had been gathering in the square all the afternoon roared enthusiastically. At intervals the sentence "You are being lied to" appeared across the screen. Nobody seemed to think it might have a double meaning....

The whole gamut of the old anti-Semitic, anti-American delusions of the Stalinist left were on display....I looked at the screen again. The jerking Bush puppet was now being occasionally outlined in the cross-hairs of a rifle....A Church of England vicar in a soutane walked past wearing a white and black chequered bandanna used by Palestinian demonstrators you see chanting at the funerals of "martyrs" on TV…

Anglican cleric Canon Paul Ostreicher, former chairman of Amnesty International, equates the Israelis fighting for national survival and the Anglo-American forces in Iraq with Nazis: br>

Those old enough to remember will recollect that the French resistance were held to be heroes when they killed the German occupiers. I did not rejoice at German deaths then, any more than I rejoice at Israeli, American and, yes, British deaths now. But there is no difference.

A EU survey in November 2003 indicated that 60 percent of British people believed Israel was the major threat to World Peace. This was just above the EU average of 59 percent, though below the figures 65 percent for Germany and 74 percent for the Netherlands. Thus Britain could claim to be less anti-Semitic than Germany, though not by a great margin. The statistics have possibly changed since then.

Among other incidents Lord Triesman, the former general secretary of the Labour Party, was among prominent British Jews targeted for anti-Semitic attacks. The police Special Branch had advised him to have a 10-foot-high fence erected around his house in North London, but the Labour-run Council made him take it down.

The progressive Guardian, meanwhile, published an article under the byline of that well-known journalist and fellow-progressive, Osama bin Laden, urging Moslems to resist the "Zionist-crusader chain of evil."

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