by David Broder
Sunday 28th September saw the “Al Quds day demo”, an Islamist demonstration against the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem. The protests have taken place annually since a 1979 decree by Iranian Islamist cleric Ayatollah Khomeini during that country’s counter-revolution.
Counter demonstrations were organised not only by leftist critics of the Iranian regime (most prominently the Worker Communist Party of Iran) but also a separate protest which included Iranian monarchists and right-wing liberals; supporters of the Israeli government; and British fascists attacking the Al Quds demo not for its participants’ politics but out of racism.
The 300-strong Al Quds demonstration, supposedly in solidarity with Muslims in Palestine, was full of Hizbullah and Islamic Republic of Iran flags.
Islamic clerics led the Al Quds demonstration: only two people from the British left – both from George Galloway’s Respect Renewal – took part.
“We are all Hizbullah”: the slogan popularised by the Socialist Workers’ Party at a demonstration against the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war. Many demonstrators carried pictures of Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah (back).
Young children corralled by their parents into participating in the demonstration: one wears a Hizbullah cap.
The Neturei Karta, an ultra-reactionary Jewish group who give cover for Holocaust-denying Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.
The Worker-Communist Party of Iran, followers of the late Mansoor Hekmat, protest the repression meted out by the Islamist regime in Tehran.
Israeli flags waved by right wingers on one of the counter-demonstrations.
March for England, a fascist group, raised slogans such as “Terrorist bombers, off our streets!”, “Hang them, hang them”, and “White pride: no surrender!”.
After standing among March for England as they scuffled with the police in an attempt to attack the Al Quds marchers, right-wing Iranian dissident Potkin Azarmehr, recently quoted approvingly on the Principia Dialectica website and lauded by their members on the demonstration as a “democrat”, embraces an English fascist.