Image: Shutterstock
Well, was this the week that Britain truly entered the 21st century? On Wednesday 21st February 2024 that famous 96-metre tall Perpendicular Gothic Revival-styled London landmark, Big Ben, was used as a projection screen for an advert - well, a political slogan, actually, but that’s still an advertisement, isn’t it? - and London’s fine, upstanding Metropolitan Police subsequently declared that no criminal offence was committed.
Now, I may be being a bit dim, here, but this seems to me to be a potential problem on two main counts …
One: the ‘Maybe it’s not a good idea to advertise genocide’ argument
The message that was projected, ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’, is shorthand for the declared genocidal goal of the Islamist Hamas faction. That is, their declared aim of a complete takeover of the land from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea, and the elimination of all Jews in that area and beyond.
That surely would be a crime, a monstrous crime, wouldn’t it? So, does the Metropolitan Police’s decision mean that we are now allowed to advertise criminal intent with no fear of consequences? And how does this square with all the hoo-hah about hate speech?
Two: the general ‘advertising’ argument
More broadly, if no criminal offence has been committed by this projection on to Big Ben, does it not mean that this activity can be lawfully copied by anybody and everybody? Thinking back to my time in and around the advertising sector, I imagine a number of art directors and copywriters are salivating at the prospect of creating ads for this new ‘billboard’. I mean, not least, I imagine the folks at Viagra are priapic with anticipation. It is, surely, just perfect?
As the saying goes, you have to laugh or you’ll cry. But to conclude this week, here’s something that may bring a tear to the eye. It certainly does to mine, and I’m not Jewish. It is a portion of a speech made by Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952) to a British royal commission in Jerusalem, on 25 November 1936. The commission was set up by Stanley Baldwin to consider the working of the British mandate after a series of Arab attacks on Jews. From 1949 to 1952 Weizmann was the first president of Israel:
We never forget. Whether it is our misfortune or whether it is our good fortune, we have never forgotten Palestine, and this steadfastness, which has preserved the Jew throughout the ages and throughout a career that is almost one long chain of inhuman suffering, is primarily due to some physiological or psychological attachment to Palestine. We have never forgotten it or given it up. We have survived our Babylonian and Roman conquerors. The Jews put up a fairly severe fight, and the Roman Empire, which digested half of the civilized world, did not digest small Judaea. Whenever they once got a chance, the slightest chance, there the Jews returned, there they created their literature, their villages, towns, and communities. If the Commission would take the trouble to study the post-Roman period of the Jews and the life of the Jews in Palestine, they would find that during the nineteen centuries which have passed since the destruction of Palestine as a Jewish political entity, there was not a single century in which Jews did not attempt to come back. It is, I believe, a fallacy to regard those 1,900 years as, so to say, a desert of time; they were not. When the material props of the Jewish commonwealth were destroyed, the Jews carried Palestine in their hearts and in their heads wherever they went. … When Rome destroyed their country, the intellectual leader of the Jewish Community came to the Roman commander and said, ‘You have destroyed all our material possessions; give us, I pray, some refuge for our houses of learning.’ A refuge was found; the place still exists; it was then a big place, and is now a tiny railway station by the name of Yebna - in Hebrew, Yabneh. There were schools there, and there the Jews continued their intellectual output, so that those schools became, so to speak, the spiritual homes, not only of Palestinian Jewry, but of Jewry at large, which was gradually filtering out of Palestine and dispersing all over the world. They replaced the material Palestine, the political Palestine, by a moral Palestine which was indestructible, which remained indestructible; and this yearning found its expression in a mass of literature, sacred and non-sacred, secular and religious.
And Hamas wants to drive the Jews yet again back out of their homeland. No!
Thanks for reading.
Hmmm ... these are troubling times, indeed.
As some sort of half-Brit (my mother is a British citizen, born to a Jewish family in Berlin in 1938 -- not the best of odds! -- but: Kindertransport) I follow what goes on in the UK, and I am quite worried. There seems to be a malaise, not only in Britain but many European countries, an unsettled forboding of worse to come. I'm afraid our betters have made some very foolish decisions in decades past, and they seem intent on riding their vainglorious chariot of virtue straight off the cliff.
I sense that many ordinary people are seeing the direction of travel and are hunkering down, consolidating, preparing for difficult times. I hope I'm wrong but fear I'm right.
Live well my friend!