LONDON: The UK’s Home Secretary Suella Braverman has been heavily criticized after branding recent pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Britain “hate marches.”
Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of London and other British cities for a third successive weekend demanding a ceasefire in Gaza, after which police confirmed five people had been charged on Saturday.
Braverman said: “To my mind there is only one way to describe those marches; they are hate marches.
“What we’ve seen over the last few weekends, we’ve seen now tens of thousands of people take to the streets following the massacre of Jewish people, the single largest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust, chanting for the erasure of Israel from the map.”
She added that police were concerned there were a “large number of bad actors who are deliberately operating beneath the criminal threshold in a way which you or I or the vast majority of the British people would consider to be utterly odious.”
A statement from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign accused Braverman of dehumanizing Palestinians with her comments.
A spokesperson said: “Braverman has previously sought to link the Palestinian flag, the symbol of Palestinian nationhood and struggle for liberation from military occupation and apartheid, with support for terrorism — urging police to treat those displaying it as ‘suspects.’
“She has falsely asserted the chant ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ is a call for the eradication of Jewish Israelis, when it is actually a call for the dismantling of the system of apartheid that affects all Palestinians, whether in Gaza, the West Bank or Israel.
“By so doing she is contributing to a climate of intolerance, a dehumanizing of Palestinians, including British Palestinians, and is further threatening the right to protest in this country. Her remarks will be condemned by anyone who respects democratic freedoms, the implementation of international law, and the humanity of Palestinians.”
The PSC said it would continue to organize large-scale protests and that it remained confident hundreds of thousands of British citizens would join the demonstrations.
