Normal people don't go on protest marches

Extremism is valorised by the media, who present those on the marches as normal, ordinary people swept up in the emotion of events. We need to stop pretending this is true.

Journalist and writer David Aaaronovitch had this to say about recent protest marches in London:

“1. I think it's reasonable to assume that the large majority of people on yesterday's Palestine march were there for humanitarian reasons. 2. But it's depressing how little responsibility any of them take to argue with and disavow the minority of extremists and antisemites.”

I am curious about this argument since most normal, ordinary people don’t use up one of their precious Saturday afternoons going on a protest march. I forgot, of course, that Aaaronovitch is not a normal, ordinary person but rather a political activist. In his world, going on protest marches - even with a sort of journalistic cynicism - is exactly what people do with those Saturday afternoons.

I’ve never been on a protest march despite having been actively involved with politics since I was fifteen. I’ve been to a few, well quite a lot of, public meetings but most of these have been the parish pump variety of such meetings and I had a sort of professional obligation as a local councillor. But I have never felt the urge to pick up a banner and parade through the streets in response to world events. In this respect I’m like nearly everybody else. We forget that, even the biggest protest marches - against the Iraq war, in support of countryside rights - barely reached a million people in a country with a population higher than 60 million. For some context, on an average Saturday afternoon nearly a million people will go to a football match and half a million will go fishing.

So this weekend’s marches, attended by (let’s take the organisers figures which are probably an exaggeration) 300,000 people, need to be seen as one choice for social activity amongst the many available on a Saturday afternoon in November. Almost certainly there were more people shopping in London’s ‘Zone One’ than there were people marching in support of Gaza, and that’s despite the disruption that the march caused. And those people who were marching did so, not because of ‘humanitarian reasons’, but because they are politically engaged with the issue. In the case of the ‘March for Palestine’ most of those attending were either Muslim activists or those involved with far left groups.

For the Muslim activists the cause is simple - they believe that the land we call Israel was stolen from Palestinians and that groups like Hamas are ‘resisting’ this historic occupation of Palestine. The most common chant at the marches - ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ - is a simple statement of this belief that Palestine was stolen from Muslims by Jews. For the far left, whether the Socialist Workers Party or Jeremy Corbyn’s Peace & Justice Project, the cause is seen differently. Like the Muslim activists they see Palestine as stolen land but this is then framed in modern leftist terms as ‘settler colonialism’, ‘apartheid’, and ‘imperialism’.

Neither of these groups, even within the wider group of Muslims and socialists, are normal, ordinary people. I remember a rally (imagine lots of men in a room with food) for the 2001 election in Keighley where a young man took the microphone and started a diatribe in Punjabi. Once he’d been cleared off it was explained that he was a ‘nutter’ because he supported terrorists - on this occasion in Kashmir. The Muslim world is full of these nutters and, in the case of Israel and Palestine, their view of the conflict, one dominated by hatred of Jews, exists in an environment that is supportive of this belief even though their calls for jihad aren’t liked.

Protest marches give credence and voice to extremist voices because that is the entire point and purpose of marching. Even when there is a wider sympathy for the cause (as there undoubtedly is for these recent marches) the events are organised by fringe groups. A glimpse at the list of organisers of the ‘March for Palestine’ shows this:

“...the PSC, the Muslim Association of Britain, Friends of Al-Aqsa, Palestinian Forum in Britain, Stop the War and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.”

The march wasn’t organised by the Church of England, the Labour Party or any other ‘broad church’ organisation but by fringe extremists. And, along with giving these dangerous views of these groups airtime, the marches act as recruitment agents for the various radical groups. When far left groups talk about ‘organising’ and ‘mobilising’, the protest march and the rally are where they start. Within 24 hours of Hamas terrorists raping, murdering and kidnapping civilians in southern Israel, the groups that organised these marches were calling for demonstrations, setting up rallies and issuing calls for ceasefire. Israel had done nothing beyond respond to terrorists killing its citizens and groups like those organising the marches were organising anti-Israel campaigns.

The media, meanwhile, because it is oriented toward political activism (cynically because it provides great images and good copy), valorises confrontation with talk of ‘free speech’ and ‘the right to protest’. The idea that a lot of abnormal people driven by extremist attachments should maybe not be encouraged only takes hold when those abnormal people are the sort of thuggish bloke who marches through Keighley or Luton shouting about Muslims. Just like the assorted trots, commies, peaceniks and Islamist nutters, the fans of Tommy Robinson are not normal people. But there’s a subtle difference in that the police and media treat the ‘Football Lads’ and the ‘EDL’ as dangerous oddities but fail to see the same in the SWP and Friends of Al-Aqsa.

All of this makes the ‘they didn’t know what it means’ line about chants for the destruction of Israel a fiction. Nobody bar a few exploited children dragged to the march by their activist parents isn’t fully aware of the issue and the meanings of these chants, yet the media allows them to maintain the fiction that somehow chanting ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ is just a generalised argument for a two-state solution not a call for the elimination of Israel. It may sound sweet to the innocent maybe but nobody who goes on a march like this is innocent, they are all politically engaged and well aware of what they are doing.

Normal people have a different response to what is happening. One woman asked my wife (who has Jewish heritage) ‘why do people hate jews so much?’ Others chunter about religion or express dismay in general at the scenes they see on their televisions. But these normal people don’t head off down to London to wave banners and call for the destruction of Israel. People want to understand but any chance of them getting much understanding is drowned out by the extremists who, indulged and encouraged by the media, present a collection of simplistic but loaded terms - ‘settler colonialism’, ‘occupation’, ‘apartheid’, ‘concentration camp’ - designed to endorse the extremist position rather than to shed light on the reasons for the conflict. As a result the political narrative sets up Israel as the bad guys, a view that seems incongruous when the reality of Hamas terrorism appears on our screens and news pages.

Our political narrative around the middle east is dominated by the tiny minority who organise protest marches. This protest is valorised by the media who present those on the marches as normal, ordinary people swept up in the emotion of events in Gaza. The truth is that, even for the biggest marches, it isn’t normal, ordinary people walking along waving banners and chanting chants fed them by activists with megaphones. Ordinary people are watching telly with a mug of tea, standing in cold football grounds, huddled under umbrellas watching a float, and window shopping in Stratford Westfield. Normal people don’t go on protest marches. We need to stop pretending they do.