UK: Palestinian festival (Palestine Expo) billed as biggest of its kind in Europe in London

Via Melanie Phillips:

(...) Early next month a Palestinian cultural festival called Palestine Expo – billed as the biggest of its kind in Europe – is scheduled to take place at the QE2 centre in Westminster. It is being organised by the Friends of al Aqsa (FOA). The founder of FOA, Ismail Patel, has openly expressed support for Hamas. In 2009, he told a rally: “Hamas is no terrorist organisation. The reason they hate Hamas is because they refuse to be subjugated, occupied by the Israeli state, and we salute Hamas for standing up to Israel […] to the state of Israel: you no longer represent the Jewish people.” 

The Culture Secretary, Sajid Javid, had told FOA he was considering cancelling the event on the grounds of “concerns that your organisation and those connected with it have expressed public support for a proscribed organisation, namely Hamas, and that you have supported events at which Hamas and Hizballah – also proscribed – have been praised”. 

Today, however, Javid’s department reportedly told FOA it was “content to let the event proceed.” 

That will please Tim Black. In a piece for Spiked published before Javid made his decision, he wrote it would be wrong to ban Palestine Expo just because those involved “have expressed something the state deems unacceptable”. Apparently he thought this unacceptable something amounted to “railing against Israel” and also had “a faintly Islamisty aura”. 

Well Hamas isn’t “faintly Islamisty”, nor is it merely guilty of “railing against Israel”. It is an Islamist terrorist organisation which has deranged views about Jews and wants to destroy Israel. It never ceases trying to murder Israelis whether by multiple rocket fire, tunnelling into their kindergartens in order to slaughter their children, slitting the throats of Israeli Jews as they sleep or blowing them up. 

It sets out to murder as many Jews as it can. Its sentiments are not merely “fringed with something more deeply antisemitic”. Its foundational covenant, as published in 1988, said this of the Jewish people: 

With money they have taken control of the world media – news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting services, etc. With money they sparked revolutions in various countries around the world in order to serve their interests and to reap profits. They were behind the French Revolution and the Communist Revolution and [they are behind] most of the revolutions about which we hear from time to time here and there. With money they have formed secret organisations, all over the world, in order to destroy [those countries’] societies and to serve the Zionists’ interests, such as the Freemasons, the Rotary Clubs, the Lions, the Sons of the Covenant [i.e. B’nei B’rith], etc. All of these are organisations of espionage and sabotage. With money they were able to take control of the colonialist countries, and [they] urged them to colonise many countries so that they could exploit their resources and spread moral corruption there.  

There is no end to what can be said about [their involvement in] local wars and world wars. They were behind World War I, through which they achieved the destruction of the Islamic Caliphate, reaped material profits, took control of numerous resources, obtained the Balfour Declaration, and established the League of the United Nations [sic] so as to rule the world through this organisation. They were [also] behind World War II, through which they reaped enormous profits from commerce in war materials and paved the way for the establishment of their state. They [also] suggested the formation of the United Nations and the Security Council to replace the League of the United Nations [sic] and to rule the world through this [new organisation]. Wherever there is war in the world, it is they who are pulling the strings behind the scenes. 

Hamas has recently revised this covenant. It was reported to be taking out these Jew-hating passages, having finally realised they might be somewhat unhelpful to the Hamas PR machine which so wows western Israel-haters. In this interview, however, its spokesman sidestepped the question of whether it had actually done so.

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