The impossibility of appeasement: monuments and flags

Wednesday, March 6, 2024, saw the penultimate — perhaps the ultimate — budget of the current Conservative government.

Appeasement doesn’t work

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt gave us a superb exercise in appeasement. Straight out of the starting blocks — yes, the first item — was

£1 million for memorial for Muslims in both World Wars.

This had been an appeal from Conservative MP Sajid Javid from Birmingham’s Bromsgrove. As he will not be standing again for Parliament, this is his legacy of sorts.

The Muslims won’t be alone in having a dedicated war monument. I understand that Jewish and Sikh veterans also have theirs. These are located in war memorial grounds other than the Cenotaph.

However, if news of this new monument reached Edinburgh, no one there cared. In fact, the Queen Elizabeth House building there was vandalised because of the ongoing conflict involving Gaza.

At midnight on Thursday, March 7, The Times reported, ‘Gaza protesters tear down Union Jack and fly Palestinian flag’ (emphases mine):

Activists hoisted a Palestinian flag above a UK government building in Edinburgh in a protest against Britain’s support for Israel.

A fire extinguisher full of red paint was used to spray the front of the building in Sibbald Walk and water balloons containing red paint were thrown at the UK government crest.

Campaigners from the organisation This Is Rigged scaled Queen Elizabeth House on Wednesday morning. They removed the Union flag from the roof, threw it to the ground and replaced it with a Palestinian one.

The group said it was targeting the UK government because of its position on the war in Gaza, accusing ministers of being “complicit” in the conflict.

The UK government has resisted calls to back an immediate ceasefire and previously abstained on UN resolutions demanding one. This week Downing Street said it wanted to see a “sustained humanitarian pause” agreed as quickly as possible to allow the safe release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas and a significant increase in aid to Gaza.

A Police Scotland spokesman said: “Around 10.30am on Wednesday, we were called to a report of a protest at a building in Sibbald Walk in Edinburgh. Five people have been arrested and inquiries are ongoing” …

Meanwhile, in East London, Palestinian flags are everywhere, much to the chagrin of some local residents, as UnHerd‘s Nicole Lampert discovered in ‘Will Tower Hamlets follow Rochdale?’ Rochdale was the scene of last Thursday’s dramatic Gaza-centric by-election which renegade sometime-MP George Galloway won from Labour in Lancashire.

Nicole Lampert tells us:

The Palestinians flags come in clusters. They may dominate entire streets, hanging high on lampposts out of the reach of a stepladder should anyone be tempted to take them down. Or they gather outside shops, communal buildings and particularly around schools. Come to Tower Hamlets and you’ll soon understand the swirling mess of Britain’s politics. It is here, not Rochdale, that a community has been renamed “Little Palestine”.

When Paul Scully, the former minister for London, claimed this week that there were “no-go areas” in the city’s most deprived borough, he was rightly criticised for hyperbole. But he was tapping into a very real concern. Yes, Tower Hamlets is one of the most diverse local authorities in England, with Muslims, Jews, the white working class, and the odd hipster living cheek by jowl. But in recent months, it has become an increasingly oppressive landscape for many of its residents.

One Jewish resident, who asked to remain anonymous, tells me he is planning to sell his home and move somewhere safer. “I feel this tension all the time,” he says. “My daughter is getting comments at school about her religion and the school is surrounded by pro-Palestine flags. Even the class WhatsApp group has become a place of division and campaigning for Palestine.”

Lampert interviewed several long-time residents who had previously felt at home in these various neighbourhoods. One felt comfortable enough to complain to the local council, but to no avail:

I’ve been here for decades but I am thinking about moving. I have changed so many habits; I’ve even stopped using the hairdressers I’ve been going to for years because there is a flag outside and I don’t want to risk hearing a conversation that will upset me. I have made about 50 calls to the council, but it hasn’t made any difference. The customer-service desk people sometimes hang up; no one wants to remove the flags and stickers.

One does not have to be Jewish to feel the tension. Another local told Lampert:

Flags to me are symbolic of territory and possession. The first thing done, when new land was discovered or captured from another nation was to raise a flag. So now I walk down these streets and it brings a chill to my spine — it is really a physical reaction. I’m suddenly in an area where the very streets are telling me: ‘If you don’t subscribe to this way of thinking, you’re not welcome here, go somewhere else’.

By November 2023, roughly one month after the October 7 Hamas attack took place:

… the council had, according to a response it sent to one local resident, received 355 complaints about the flags and “related paraphernalia”. But the flags stayed; many of those who wrote in received responses that explained how the borough is “inclusive”.

Woe betide anyone who took matters into his or her own hands:

“There was always a collection of stickers that I would take down, and then they would come back in greater numbers; it is a war of attrition with a neighbour I’ve never seen,” says one resident. He notes it’s a battle that isn’t without dangers. One taxi driver who drives through the area regularly was taking videos of the flags when he was spotted by locals. They later wrote to TFL and accused him of being both drunk and Islamophobic; he could potentially lose his licence if the false allegation is upheld.

More recently, Jan Evans, a Malaysian-Chinese former nurse, got into an altercation when she tried to put a placard which had been placed between a community centre and a school in the bin. “I saw this placard with a big fist and Palestinian colours. Because it looked violent, I tried to move it over to the bin, but then his man got out of his car and started screaming at me and using all sorts of expletives. He snatched the placard out of my hands and put it back and walked towards his car.”

When he drove off, she put the placard in the bin. She later wrote to the council about what had happened, only to be told not to touch any of the Palestinian paraphernalia: “I feel like the council is encouraging this — they are allowing one group to oppress the others,” she says.

The council has since written to a resident to warn against the removal of Palestinian flags and similar items:

The subject of Palestinian flags and their erection/removal within the borough is a matter of community tension and safety and certain information being released into the public domain is likely to contribute to issues of community safety and tension which could lead to the endangering of individuals.

A local councillor told Lampert that the situation is becoming quite tense:

“This is a potential tinderbox which the police and council should not ignore,” he says, on the condition of anonymity. “It is not just the council but the police too. I had a meeting recently with a Detective Superintendent about the stickers calling for an ‘intifada’.” He claims the police officer pushed back at the idea that this could be a hate crime, although for many Jews the word intifada recalls the terrorist attacks in Israel targeting Jewish civilians. “She said she’d looked at the dictionary and spoken to some local people and had established that the word meant ‘shaking off’ or ‘tremoring’. I was shocked that she didn’t see the problem with having stickers saying that word in this context.”

Unfortunately, the conclusion of the article is blocked off, as I have exceeded my UnHerd quota for the time being.

Suffice it to say that we Britons have not seen the end of this. We’re not even close. Arabists building an appeasement monument won’t even touch the sides of what is to come.