I’m more shocked by what I saw in London yesterday than anything I’ve seen coming out of Gaza.
It was a direct attack on our democracy. Genocidal slogans projected onto the symbol of our Parliament and the Speaker breaking parliamentary procedures for fear of violent reprisals against MPs (on top of at least one MP quitting previously after Islamist threats).
These people didn’t protest for Syria (higher civilian casualties by a factor of 10), for the Uyghurs (ongoing genocide), or for Afghans (nationwide repression of women). There must be some other factor motivating them… And yes, part of it will be ✡️, but I think I goes deeper than that.
I would suggest it’s deliberate. If I were an authoritarian enemy of the West, I’d know I can’t beat the West’s military power. So instead I would focus on beating the West through subversion of institutions and subversion of the people. As an authoritarian I would use the West’s own liberal order against them.
Yesterday was the most egregious example of a direct attack on our institutions. In authoritarian states, such demonstrations against government policy would be met with violence. But we’re better than them, our laws are liberal.
And so our police must tolerate yesterday, as well as weekly intimidation of British Jews, and slogans supporting our enemies (Houthis make us proud!) chanted on our capital’s streets. The secondary effect is that wider public confidence in the police is damaged, further subverting a vital democratic institution - how many times have you seen claims of two-tier policing? These fifth columnists use our tolerance against us.
And we’ve seen the international rules based order attacked as well. South Africa’s laughable and politically-motivated genocide case in the ICJ subverts the very rules that govern our interactions with other countries.
The subversion of the people has taken place on the back of an aggressive and incredibly effective disinformation campaign. Such campaigns are designed to provoke strong emotions. The hardcore protesters will be antisemitic fifth columnists, acting knowingly, but most people there will have been well-intentioned.
A disinformation campaign has duped them into believing there are 30,000 civilian casualties (numbers that don’t stand up to the merest critical scrutiny); there’s a genocide happening (patently nonsense, even using Hamas’ inflated numbers); or that the destruction in Gaza is somehow different to any other urban war (it’s not).
All that persuasion has been achieved by a disinformation campaign leveraging social media. War is appalling: showing repeatedly and up close the effects of war on buildings, and people (women, children) is going to evoke a powerful reaction.
It’s childish and reductive to break this down to good guys/bad guys. We’re simply in the middle of a geopolitical power struggle. Our enemies know they can’t beat us militarily so they’re attacking us in other ways. They’re using fifth columnists and disinformation to attack liberal democracy and the rules based order: our political will, and the will of the people. We need to find a way to counteract this kind of disinformation campaign or the future looks very bleak.
Either way, a liberal democracy cannot survive if it continues to allow attacks on its processes and threats to politicians, like yesterday.
