DEMOCRACY WATCH Why Is It Now ‘Far Right’ to Hate Hamas?
18th November 2023
It is striking how ‘far-right’ has become an all-purpose insult in Europe and the West. It is a label slapped on anybody who stands outside the narrow conformism of woke politics. Whether it’s parents protesting against drag queens preaching trans ideology to children, or citizens concerned about anything from the EU’s crusade against cars and farmers to the imposition of vaccine passports or mass migration, they are all apparently ‘far-right’ now.
The message is always that ‘these people’ are basically scum, beyond the limits of respectable debate, and should not be engaged with. Instead they should be cancelled, arrested or banned altogether.
Little wonder then that the police, politicians and media seized with relish on the ‘far-right’ counter protest in London on Armistice Day last weekend. They focused on a few hundred white working-class football fans who briefly skirmished with police near the Cenotaph on Whitehall (before respecting the two minutes’ silence for the war dead), as a welcome distraction from facing the truth about the massive ‘peaceful’ pro-Palestinian demonstration up the road, which was really an anti-Israeli, often antisemitic, hate march.