More than 500 people joined a pro-Palestine sit-in at Liverpool Street Station at around 5.30pm yesterday (October 31, 2023), to demand a ceasefire and an end to arms exports to Israel.

The demonstration was peaceful and there were no reports of violence or disturbances.

But that didn’t stop some people making wildly inaccurate claims!

Principle among these has to be the bane of This Writer’s life, Rachel Riley. The Countdown co-presenter posted a message on ‘X’ (formerly Twitter), claiming this of people at the sit-in: “An angry mob screams ‘Jihad now’.”

In fact, it seems more likely that they were chanting, “Ceasefire now,” as other sources have quoted them:

In fairness, she wasn’t the only one making this mistake; it seems the historian Simon Schama misheard them also, and claimed they were shouting, “Intifada.”

Ms Riley may also have been shamed into removing her post by the fact that the event was at least partly organised by Jews Against Genocide:

It’s hard to claim an event is anti-Semitic when it has been set up by Jews.

I’m told this is the latest in a string of ‘X’ posts by Ms Riley. Initially I called for people to ignore her and deny her the oxygen of publicity but clearly this was more hopeful than realistic.

Perhaps it would be better to remind people that the person responsible for this kind of wild inaccuracy once took me to court for libel and won, for a reason that makes very little sense (I may elaborate on this later, after referring to the judgment).

Anybody feeling that there is an injustice in what happened to me is invited to support the fund to pay my court costs in the following ways (yes, it’s still going):

Make a donation via the CrowdJustice page. Keep donating regularly until you see the total pass the amount I need.

Email your friends, asking them to pledge to the CrowdJustice site.

Post a link to Facebook, asking readers to pledge.

On Twitter, tweet in support, quoting the address of the appeal.

And don’t forget that if you’re having trouble, or simply don’t like donating via CrowdJustice, you can always donate direct to me via the Vox Political PayPal button, where it appears on that website. But please remember to include a message telling me it’s for the crowdfund!

If either Ms Riley or Mr Schama want to take advantage of the right of reply to put their side of the story, they should feel free to do so.

Returning to the sit-in: Ms Riley mentioned in her (deleted) post that Liverpool Street Station was where the Kindertransport children – Jewish youngsters who escaped certain death in Germany due to the efforts of people including Nicholas Winton – arrived in the UK.

This Writer would hazard a guess that this was the reason it was chosen as the location for the sit-in; as a reminder that it is still relatively recently that many Jewish people’s lives were in terrible danger and that – rather than subject other innocent people’s lives to the same danger – they have a duty to pay on the kindness that they received.

It didn’t stop certain bad-faith actors (or are they simply ignorant dimwits?) from trying to claim the event was anti-Semitism on the march – which is a contradiction in terms, if you think about it. Here are some of the usual offenders.

Karen Pollock’s tweet, below, includes a video clip in which you can clearly here the crowd chanting, “Ceasefire now” – and definitely not “Intifada” or “Jihad now”. Whether anyone was using the “From the River to the Sea” chant is not shown on the clip:

Whether “From the River to the Sea…” is genuinely anti-Semitic is hotly disputed and Ms Pollock is wrong to present only one side, without even acknowledging the other.

But then, it seems Ms Pollock is failing to acknowledge quite a number of important elements…

Former Labour MP Ian Austin falls into the same trap as Ms Pollock – “From the River to the Sea” isn’t chanted in the clip he uses (it’s the same one):

And Tory MP Brandon Lewis, using the same clip, appears appalled that British people should want an end to the violence and mass murders taking place in Gaza:

Labour’s Kate Hoey gets a schooling on safety from musician Phil Gould:

And there’s always this … this… this:

Why Jewish passengers would feel afraid to use a station being occupied by Jewish people is beyond This Writer.

The next one is off-the-scale:

So Heidi here is pushing unsubstantiated claims including one that those taking part in the sit-in were “screaming genocidal chants”, and is upset that British Transport Police took no action against the same event after it became clear that services were not disrupted at all.

Does anybody believe this is rational behaviour?

Does anybody believe any of the posts by critics of the event are rational?

It’s all right to support a particular side in a conflict – whether it’s just a debate or violent conflagration. But it’s not all right to use false claims to stoke ill-feeling.

Sadly, the people whose messages you see above are unlikely to stop.

So those of us with more level heads are going to have to keep debunking them.

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