More footage exposes Met’s false claim anti-genocide marchers ‘forced’ through police line

Police officers smiling as marchers allowed through peacefully – but anti-genocide Jewish bloc barred as Cooper claims police protecting Jews

On Saturday, the Met Police arrested around seventy peace marchers, some of them violently, claiming that they had ‘forced’ their way to Trafalgar Square, supposedly in an area the force, to appease pro-Israel groups, had banned the march from entering. At least ten people have been charged and dozens were imprisoned for twenty-four hours or more, while MPs who participated in the march were questioned ‘under caution’, including former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

But video footage emerged showing that the police claim was false – and that officers had stood aside to allow marchers to lay wreaths in Trafalgar Square in a peaceful and orderly way. Now further footage, from a different angle, shows both avenues the police created to allow protesters through, with some police officers smiling as the marchers were allowed past:

One group that appears not to have been allowed through was the Jewish Bloc of anti-genocide campaigners, including Holocaust survivors, who were prevented from passing – perhaps because the presence of the large bloc would undermine the state and pro-Israel lobby’s false narrative that Jews are unsafe in London when pro-Palestine marches take place:

The JustJews group commented:

Police blocked the Jewish Bloc from marching on Saturday. How can all this repression be about protecting Jews?

The obvious nonsense at play did not prevent Home Secretary Yvette Cooper from amplifying, in a ‘ratioed’ post, the propaganda of pro-Israel lobby groups and claiming the police were protecting Jews and their worship – a claim for which she was rightly taken to task, with many pointing out that Israel has bombed churches and more than a thousand mosques in Gaza:

These state manoeuvres now have every appearance of being staged to create an excuse for banning protests against Israel’s mass murder of civilians in Gaza and the lies it tells to try to justify it – yet another example of the Starmer regime’s active collusion in genocide.

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