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Lawful Protest Is Not a Permit to Menace

(Jerusalem Post) Catherine Perez-Shakdam - On Yom Kippur, worshippers outside the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation in Manchester were rammed and stabbed by a terrorist in a deadly rampage. Then within hours, in London's streets eliminationist slogans were chanted with gusto. Lawful protest is a jewel in the crown of British liberty. But a protest is not a permit to menace. It is not a day-pass to call for the eradication of a people or the dismantling of the world's only Jewish state. It does not entitle anyone to transform the public square into a theater of intimidation. Since Oct. 7, 2023, we have witnessed a marked rise in antisemitic incidents, the normalization of chants once thought beyond the pale, a creeping tolerance for placards and slogans that would, not long ago, have prompted a collective inhalation of horror. The reaction of the government is widely read as weakness. Radicals see that a state that asks nicely and retreats at the first refusal is a state that can be played. If your strategy is to plead with radicals and shrug when they refuse, you have mistaken governance for wishful thinking. The right to assemble is not the right to terrify; the right to speak is not the right to incite. Britain at her best is steadfast and decent, with a national instinct toward fairness that is one of the wonders of the world. However, fairness is not paralysis. The time for law, applied without flinch, is now. The writer, executive director of We Believe In Israel, is an associate scholar at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs.
2025-10-09 00:00:00
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