ENGLAND: Prozionist Corporate Media Deliberately Labels Pro Palestine Marches as "Hate Marches"
S. E. Anderson
‘Hate Marches’
A 2026 ProPalestine March in London.
Two marches will assemble in central London tomorrow. One is championing the rights of Palestinians and commemorating 78 years of displacement and occupation; the other, organised by the far-right activist Tommy Robinson, is calling on supporters to ‘unite the West’ against Islam and immigration. Yet only the former has been widely described in the British media as a ‘hate march’.
According to the Nexis database, there were only 29 stories referring to ‘hate marches’ between 1 January 1994 and 7 October 2023. Since then, 3152 stories have used the term, most of them focused on pro-Palestine protests. In other words, despite regular demonstrations of racism, hate, discrimination and bigotry on the world’s streets, more than 99 per cent of stories that mention ‘hate marches’ have been published since 7 October 2023 and have focused on anti-racist protesters.
During the fascist ‘Unite the Right’ march in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, demonstrators chanted ‘Jews will not replace us’ and ‘white lives matter’. An anti-racist counter-protester was killed. The British media described the march as ‘infamous’ (Independent), ‘violent’ (Financial Times), ‘vicious’ (Sun), ‘notorious’ (Sunday Telegraph), ‘lethal’ (i Paper) or ‘deadly’ (Mail, Guardian, Observer, BBC One, Sunday Times), but not ‘hateful’.
The English Defence League marches that took place in the first few years of the 2010s, and were designed specifically to terrify England’s Muslim communities, rarely received any epithets to indicate their hatefulness. They were more often than not described simply as ‘far right’.
In the summer of 2024, anti-immigrant protesters targeted mosques and asylum hotels across the country. Hundreds of people were arrested and dozens jailed for violent offences, but only thirty stories in the UK media referred to the demonstrators as ‘hate mobs’. By contrast, 78 stories have used the phrase to refer to pro-Palestine protesters since 7 October.
These double standards are once again evident ahead of tomorrow’s protests. Since the horrific knife attack in Golders Green on 29 April, 325 stories have mentioned ‘hate marches’, nearly twice as many as in the first four months of the year combined, with the vast majority focusing on pro-Palestine protests.
There is no evidence linking the pro-Palestine marches that have taken place since 7 October to last month’s antisemitic violence, but that hasn’t stopped politicians and the media trying to connect them. Rishi Sunak sacked Suella Braverman as home secretary in November 2023 after she wrote an article in the Times accusing the Met of a ‘double standard’ for allegedly taking a tougher stance against right-wing protesters. Following the Golders Green attack, the Telegraph ran an article claiming that ‘Suella Braverman has been proved right on the hate marches’.
Braverman, now the education spokesperson for Reform UK, appeared on GMTV at the end of April to call on the government to ban ‘hate marches’ that want to ‘erase Israel from the map’. The Sun and the Telegraph published editorials attacking peaceful pro-Palestine demonstrations, attended by large numbers of Jewish people, as ‘hate marches’.
The Met commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, claimed on TV that protest organisers have deliberately sought to organise marches ‘starting or ending in the vicinity of, or walking past, a synagogue’. The Palestine Coalition has called his remarks ‘false and defamatory’. There is no evidence for the allegation, or that the marches are a threat to Jewish people. A retired Met detective toldDeclassified UK that senior officers have failed to explain ‘how protests that include Jewish groups can be deemed to be terrorising the same community it is asked to keep safe’.
None of the 325 stories mentioning ‘hate marches’ since the Golders Green attack have used the term to refer to Tommy Robinson’s ‘Unite the Kingdom, Unite the West’ protest in central London tomorrow, except for a handful that quote a Palestine Coalition statement calling it a ‘real hate march’. After Robinson’s last outing in London in 2025 there were 22 arrests, including six for violent disorder. But the phrase ‘hate marches’ continues to be used overwhelmingly for pro-Palestine protests. ///
s. e. anderson
author of The Black Holocaust for Beginners
"If WORK was good for you, the rich would leave none for the poor." (Haiti)
--------------------------------------------