Suella: Police must do all they can to protect Jews in Britain
SUELLA Braverman yesterday warned that waving the Palestinian flag and chanting slogans could amount to a crime.
The Home Secretary urged police to use ‘all available powers’ to protect Jewish communities in the wake of the bloody attack on Israel by Hamas.
In a letter sent to all chief constables, she indicated the threshold for arresting someone could be lower than normal given the current febrile atmosphere.
Frontline officers should act if incidents ‘stray into criminality’, she added, making clear that it was ‘ not just explicit proHamas symbols and chants that are cause for concern’.
In her two-page letter sent to police top brass yesterday, Mrs Braverman said: ‘I would encourage police to consider whether chants such as “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” should be understood as an expression of a violent desire to see Israel erased from the world.’
She went on: ‘I would encourage police to give similar consideration to the pres
‘Intended to glorify acts of terrorism’
ence of symbols such as swastikas at antiIsrael demonstrations.’
The use of such chants ‘ in certain contexts may amount to a racially aggravated… public order offence’, she added.
Hamas is a banned terrorist group in the UK and showing support for it is a criminal offence. But police now face the difficult task of deciding when lawful expression of support for Palestinians has crossed the boundary into harassment.
‘Context is crucial,’ said Mrs Braverman in her letter. ‘ Behaviours that are legitimate in some circumstances, for example the waving of a Palestinian flag, may not be legitimate such as when intended to glorify acts of terrorism.
Nor is it acceptable to drive through Jewish neighbourhoods, or single out Jewish members of the public, to aggressively chant or wave pro-Palestinian symbols at.
‘Where harassment is identified, I would encourage the police to take swift and appropriate enforcement action.’ Any decisions on whether to make arrests were ‘rightly an operational matter for the police’, she added. Offences on the internet should be taken equally seriously, the Home Secretary went on, as she advocated a ‘swift and zero tolerance approach to anti- Semitism’. It came after Mrs Braverman tweeted on Sunday, in the wake of the attacks on Israel, that police in the UK should ‘use the full force of the law against displays of support for Hamas’. The intervention came after masses of pro-Palestinian demonstrators took to the streets of the UK on Monday.
In London, about 1,000 gathered near the Israeli embassy in Ken
sington, west London, with some chanting the ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ slogan referenced in Mrs Braverman’s letter. There were also proPalestinian rallies in Birmingham, Manchester and Newcastle.