This is my complaint about the report at the end of the World at One on Saturday lunchtime. I suspect that the arrest of the person concerned was choreographed with the police in order to get this snippet. Because placards of the sort referred to can be misinterpreted in this way, it is counterproductive to carry them in my view. It should also be noted that the police announced that they would be carrying out a very intense surveillance of the march looking for people to arrest for this sort of thing. Ben Jamal, Director of PSC noted: “So 18 arrests of which only 13 related to main protest. Of these 13, 6 were for failing to disperse. So 7 arrested in relation to hate speech out of a crowd of 300k, 4 of which were people from a fringe group selling a booklet. This after a mammoth ” robust” police operation.“

At the end of the broadcast there was a report on the demonstration calling for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza which focused on the police arresting a demonstrator for carrying “a Nazi symbol”. This associates marchers calling for peace with fascists, which is a smear.

I presume that the symbol concerned was a montage of the star of David with a swastika. This montage was originally developed by Jewish anti Zionists horrified at the extent to which Israel’s consolidation as an Apartheid state with increasingly genocidal policies and attitudes (demonstrations of settlers and others chanting “death to the Arabs”, “May your villages burn” etc) was imitating other racist states, South Africa, the US South under Jim Crow and, most traumatic, Nazi Germany.

The idea of this was to shock people into a recognition of what they were becoming. As such, it takes a Nazi symbol as the ultimate horror and is the complete opposite of parading support for it. On the last demo there was a very elderly Jewish lady who had home made placards making a similar analogy. She was arrested by the police. An antisemitic action on their part.

This matters because this sort of report is designed to inhibit support for the marches, by associating them with a politics that their participants oppose vehemently. In the context of the IDF threatening to “intensify” their attack after the current pause, and invade the South of Gaza, we are likely to be seeing a genocidal slaughter on an even greater scale than we already have.

The only thing that will hold them back is opposition from their traditional supporters. That requires mass mobilisation pulling the ground out from under the mainstream consensus that values Palestinian lives as less than a tenth valuable than Israeli lives. Your news snippet, in seeking to demobilise these marches, is complicit in allowing the sort of attacks that have killed 67 of your journalistic colleagues to find even more victims.

This is the moral challenge of our time.