Excellent coverage of events from Al-Jazeera. The BBC instead opted to focus upon the low drama of the day, although the police setting themselves upon protestors making their way from the city centre to the Kensington Israeli Embassy is worth mentioning. Apparently Galloway was amongst the beaten, a few SWP members were hospitalised. Doubtless certain elements are applauding this thuggery.

Anyway, I turned up around half an hour late but things were still immensely busy. The turn out was quite simply massive, in the tens of thousands. We filled the entire square and then overflowed

I didn’t get to listen to many speakers (Galloway’s speech was forgettable and a young Palestinian/Briton declared Israel an “Illegal state”, but that’s about all I caught sight of) besides the purged man Rees, who was introduced as “The delegate to Cairo” since he was unceremoniously dumped from the SWP Central Committee. His speech conspiciously failed to mention socialism a single time, but the same was true of the few others I heard.

I spoke to a bunch of far lefties, as always. Today’s new lot began with the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist). They sold me (yeah, I actually paid) a copy of Workers and it was explained to me that they considered immigration a tool of the capitalists to push down wages, and opposed it along with the EU and Euro.  That I had stumbled upon the far-left wing of UKIP was confirmed to me when I read their rag and discovered that it approvingly reviewed a new book by a Daily Mail writer on the credit crisis and criticised “Foreign students” for usurping the places of true Britons.

The Communist Party of Britain were rather more sane and were seemingly very eager to recruit me after the chat. It had been a while since I got the full-on treatment, it was as flattering and disconcerting as ever. Like the rest of the Communist Parties they were of the view that they were the only real one, in this case because they were the only ones with the electoral rights to the word “Communist Party” and becasue they were the largest one and the only one which stood in elections.

The Communist Part of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) were also in presence, selling books on the topic of Zimbabwe (the country they love more than any) amongst other Stalinist-apologist screeds. The CPGB(ML) have mad love for any tyrant who never says sorry and in conversation with a member I was informed that the USSR should still exist and the sorry state of affairs with it not had only came about due to the filthy revisionists, who revised Marxism-Leninism and thus reversed the greatest time in history.

I encountered the table of Socialist Appeal soon after leaving the station (but not before being filmed by the fit squad they’d stationed right outside the irregular exit the London Underground staff had sheparded us through) and initially confused them with Socialist Action (or did I meet Socialist Action and confuse them with Socialist Appeal?).

The representative of the International Bolshevik Tendency I met was altogether more amenable than the chap I met at Marxism 2008. He emphasised them being keen on popular fronts, such as against the BNP, and said that it was just that they hated Stop The War. I have to say that when they were presented in a way which stopped them sounding so frightening they came across as fairly anodyne:

“Another group keen on 1917, eh? Well there’s a surprise…”

The World Socialist Website (organ of the “Socialist Equality Parties”) were set up next to the AWL but disagreed with their take on the issue of the Middle East, disparaging the notion of supposed internationalists adopting a two state solution. The WSW seems awfully keen on internationalism, so we had a nice chat. We, in this instance, being a young man and his like-minded grand-mother. They rather suddenly decided that they liked my opinions so much they would film them and I stumbled over my tongue for a few minutes after having granted my flattered permission.

The Worker’s Revolutionary Party were present and shifted a copy of their daily newspaper News Line onto me. “Sportline” carried a distinct lack of class material and the television guide was devoid of all socialist analysis. The man I spoke to was affable, having just finished the hard push of a leaflet advertising their youth event to a distinctly reluctant muslim youth. He informed me that yes, they were the lot that were loyal to Healy. Which resolved my previous curiosity with regards that issue, but raised the new one of why the ones backing the unwilling-woman-groping toad had managed to survive. An AWL member told me Libyan oil, although they were also paid by Saddam.

I have to wonder if this was an interest declared under full disclosure during 2002.

Finally, Revolution. Unlike at the last event I came across them at I did actually end up talking to them, but I didn’t muster the courage to ask them directly about the orgy rumours. Shame on me.

As things were winding down Robin from the AWL was engaged in a discussion with a group of Muslims, who clearly knew their Islam and were providing quite a challenge. It seems that they were of the view that Islamic culture and government could deliver in a way that no other could, with one of them asserting that the treasury in charge of delivering money to the poor in need of it at one point could not as there were none left. They stated that compared to socialism this was a superior model, but the matter of contemporary examples was a little trickier.

Much like most Trotskyites will tell you there are only Stalinist or social democratic imposters to socialism in the world, to these Islamists there was only pretend Islamic rule.

The most interesting area of this discussion came in an aside regarding whether Saudi Arabia was right to force women to cover themselves and Iran to hang gays. I was told that as this was the law of the land people should have attempted to change it while obeying it, or else left. My example of the Poll Tax being overturned by mass disobedience was retorted to by this hardly being the standard means of altering the law.

Effectively this was legalism, not extremism.

Robin found this encounter frustrating, it was becoming abundantly clear to both of us that little headway has, had or can be made into turning those Muslims who show out in solidarity to their suffering brothers/sisters in Palestine into the sort of socialist solidarity displayers which the various Trotskyite/Communist groups covet.

On the way to the stations we encountered two individuals from the SWP, who spoke of the Respect project and mentioned two Central Committee members visiting their branch and having an immense row over it. We were mostly in agreement until we neared the protest and the bizarre SWP-wide love for the hijab came to the fore. Apparently one of them had a friend who was wearing even more concealing items and he thought it was great.

This is by far the most disturbing trend amongst the SWP I have noted: as Western culture is something they have a low view of they imagine that any form of resistance to its norms is a positive one. Amusingly, they also consider it to be a “Personal choice”. Highly liberal, I approve entirely.

The protest was packed and loud. I decided to engage in some irony by sating my hunger in Starbucks, only to be topped by some muslim children opposed to the Zionist funding coffee outlet surrounding the door and chanting “Jew! Jew!”, which is about the most amusing insult I can imagine receiving from a bunch of foreskin-free semites following an Abrahamic faith.

The crowd was penned in further away from the police on this occasion than on the last, with the centre only retreating a few hours in in order to box in the hard-core with batons on three sides. The police had been issued riot shields and the riot police were mostly left sitting in vans, with them only securing one small flank.

“Down, down! Is-ra-el!” was a common chant, and I heard a few more “From the River, to the Sea, Palestine will be free!”s today. The socialist presence was light, becoming more so when the SWP abandoned the protest early for the pub. That said, besides the rump of the AWL (conspicuously minus quite a few members who’d been around earlier) which consisted of around 2 people there wasn’t really any socialist contingent I could identify.

I suppose I might have missed them, though.

The violence of the day amounted to some poorly thrown projectiles,  with the only ones that seemed to hit being inneffective ones which grazed off due to small size. At one point a railing was torn loose and flung against the police, but they dealt with that with minimal fuss. There was some drama when a bottle thrower threatened to be disarmed by a white bearded man and resisted most vehemently.

I met an Iranian rightist and a short, unaffiliated socialist pro-Palestinian Jew who was, very confusingly, not Penny Red and thus must have been some form of clone. Understandably the news of a ground invasion caused some divided feelings there (friends in the IDF makes for some devoided loyalties, I suspect) but the most interesting impact was upon the crowd:

Had it been distributed a little quicker I imagine that there would have been a full on charge. As things stood, the news filtered gradually in a hum of hear-say from people glancing down at texts. The mood changed charply for the blacker but the spread of knowledge was too slow for things to truly kick off.

An evacuation of the kiddies was still timely, though: the police came crashing forwards at two points

Our comrades departing us an Allied Worker and I headed to the pub, returning to await Robin’s departure from the box-in that had developed around him (no doubt triggering quite some deja vu). At this stage we met two more factions worthy of note:

The first were another set of Jews opposed to Zionism, quite distinct from those encountered the day before. These were clearly less orthodox types and used secular reasoning in place of theological proclamation. Their poster read “Two peoples, one future”, although they informed us that they hosted both 2 and 1 state believers in their organisation. Both of them were clearly of the view, however, that only a single state is really viable. When asked by my Allied Worker comrade what it would be called (an issue I consider him to have overstated the importance of) they replied “Uhm…Palestine…Probably.”

It seems that I had found another internationalist, thus making at least four in one day. This record is perhaps explained by the event, although there were undoubtably plenty of nationalists as well. I asked them if they felt unsettled by slogans that basically suggested Israel was ripe for a purging and they told me they were, but that rhetoric and reality were two different things.

Then I encountered an elderly woman talking to a group of three muslims. The name “David Ike” was being used repeatedely and this caused my ears to prick up. Apparently there was someone even better than Ike and when I asked why she told me that he was too repetetive and hard to keep track of. She gave me a name which I promptly forgot and I asked her to condence his ideology for me.

Apparently the Zionists are attempting to thin the world’s population, the sort of policy I would have loved the sound of during my misanthropic environmentalist extremist phase, and killing loads of people is the way they are approaching it. This is not because the Jews are evil, mind, but simply because of the “Zionist Movement” and the western leaders twitching along to their puppet masters.

But who is behing it all, I asked?

The Illuminati, she replied.

Soon enough the police freed our trapped comrades in a manner that suited them and we left for another, nicer, pub. Whether to feel exuberant at the massive success or desparing at its failure to cease the land invasion was unclear. Israel was embarking on the largest military operation in had done since 1967 with or without our approval.

But at least they were not permitted to do so undistracted.