UK’s Suella Braverman hits out at ‘hate marches’ amid Israel-Gaza conflict
The Indian-origin minister was speaking after an emergency Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms A (COBRA) security meeting chaired by British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at 10 Downing Street on Monday.
UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman has hit out at the mass protests on the streets of the country in reaction to the Israel-Gaza conflict as “hate marches” and said she will not hesitate to change terror legislation if needed to tackle “utterly odious” bad actors operating beneath the criminality threshold.
The Indian-origin minister was speaking after an emergency Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms A (COBRA) security meeting chaired by British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at 10 Downing Street on Monday.
She confirmed that it has been agreed with the UK’s Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC) to keep the country’s threat level from international terrorism at “substantial,” which means an attack is likely and reiterated her call for the police to take a “zero-tolerance approach to anti-semitism.”
UK’s Suella Braverman hits out at ‘hate marches’ amid Israel-Gaza conflict
“To my mind, there is only one way to describe those marches: they are hate marches,” said Braverman, when asked about the massive pro-Palestinian protests across London and other cities over the past few weekends.
“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 said.
The Cabinet minister in charge of domestic security warned of 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.”
“We keep our laws under review. If there is a need to change the law, just as we did in relation to Just Stop Oil protests, I will not hesitate to act,” she said. It came as the Metropolitan Police updated that 41-year-old Atif Shafiq has been sentenced to six months in prison for assaulting one of its officers during a protest in London on Saturday.
District Judge Denis Brennan told the accused in court this week that while “this country has an honourable tradition of peaceful protest,” his actions could have “provoked a volatile reaction from the crowd.”
“Assaulting police officers during protests is totally unacceptable. Good that this man has been jailed for six months, within days of committing this offence during Saturday’s protest,” responded UK Police and Crime Minister Chris Philp.
Meanwhile, Opposition Labour’s shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, said the Home Secretary has a responsibility to make it easier for the police to tackle hate crime and extremism while reassuring different communities who are deeply distressed by events in the Middle East not to use “rhetoric carelessly in a way that makes the job of the police much harder.”
“Anti-semitic and Islamophobic hate crime and the glorification of terrorism need to face the full force of the law. At the same time work is needed to rebuild community cohesion, to recognise the distress people are feeling about the Hamas attacks and the humanitarian emergency in Gaza, and to pull communities together at this difficult time,” Braverman said.
The Israel-Hamas conflict has exposed divisions within the party ranks on all sides with sections of both the governing Conservatives and Opposition Labour calling for a complete ceasefire as opposed to a humanitarian pause being propagated by the leadership.
Tory MP Paul Bristow was asked to leave his position as a parliamentary private secretary (PPS) in the government's Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) after he wrote to Sunak to urge a “permanent” break in fighting between Israel and Hamas.
“Paul Bristow has been asked to leave his post in government following comments that were not consistent with the principles of collective responsibility,” a Downing Street spokesperson said.
Meanwhile, Labour Leader Keir Starmer has been resisting pressure from several of his MPs to call for an immediate ceasefire in the region to protect civilians as Israeli forces take action against Hamas.
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