One of the most satisfying things to witness is when a bullied victim finally stands up for himself, beats his tormentor in a fight and wins everyone’s respect.
I was once such a person. I was eleven years old and a member of a church choir. Another choir boy who was two years older took a disliking to me, and when the opportunity came his way would punch me, kick me or put me in a headlock. How nice. That his father was one of the ministers did not deter him. Eventually, he challenged me to a fight after Friday night’s choir practice in the garden of remembrance, whose abundant bushes and tall shrubs would obscure our pugilism from adult view. To my and everyone else’s surprise, I accepted his challenge. No one gave me a choc-ice’s chance in hell and when finally Friday night came, an audience of boys gathered expecting to witness me take a beating.
Which I nearly did. Before we began, I had to remove my glasses and leave them on a tree stump nearby. I remember him coming at me with flailing arms, trying to finish the fight quickly. His punches came hard and cold as stones. I flailed back and only by luck struck him flush on the side of his jaw which dropped him in a groggy state. The giggling audience went silent as his disbelieving friends helped him up, hoping the fight would continue, but he was in no fit state. Instead, he burst into tears, his nose a copious stream of mucus. Grabbing my spectacles, I ran home and had trouble sleeping as I was terrified of the consequences.
But there were no consequences. The code of silence descended and no one admitted to knowing why my former bully had a huge purple-green bruise on the side of his face. He said nothing too, not wanting to be seen as a snitch. I heard he mugged his parents off with the story that he had fallen from his bike on the way home that Friday night and hit his face on the handlebars.
I left the choir shortly afterwards as my voice had begun to break, and I hated the idea of singing alto. I took up boxing a few years later and learned how to land a right-cross with real venom.
Something synonymous happened at the Phoenix Cinema in East Finchley last night. After weekends of anti-Semitic demonstrations in London, Jews and their allies finally said enough is enough.
The Cinema, bravely, was showing a film called Supernova: The Music Festival Massacre which chronicles Hamas’ massacre of Jews and other nationalities on 7 October last year. Hamas’ apologists turned up to demand that the screening was cancelled. The Cinema refused, stating firmly that when a cinema has been hired privately, as it had been on this occasion, there would be no censoring or vetoing of the films being shown. Ken Loach, one of the Cinema’s patrons, resigned in protest, but the Cinema’s management was undaunted in its defence of freedom of speech and artistic expression.
As brave were the estimated two thousand Jews and their allies who gathered at the Cinema to defend its decision. Draped in Israeli and Union flags, they played through loud speakers the pop song ‘I’m Still Standing’ by Elton John. Yes, still standing indeed after millennia of persecution. The most angry in the crowd were young Jews who will not be denigrated and intimidated by genocide justifiers anymore. They chanted, “Terrorists’ supporters off our streets!” Yes, London’s streets also belong to London’s Jews.
The great news is that the ‘From the River to Sea’ bullies did not get their way and the film showing went ahead. As the anti-Jews filed away into Finchley Tube Station, they left with the chants of “fucking scum” and “wankers” ringing in their ears. Quite. The police are also investigating a possible hate crime and criminal damage as the Cinema was vandalised with red graffiti earlier in the day.
Is this a turning point? Has the proverbial worm turned? I think so and I hope so. The Islamists and their allies may have intimidated Parliament and the Met police but they will not intimidate Jews.
From the ashes of a pogrom, daily insults and assaults and wave after wave of anti-Israel protests has come, like a phoenix, a revival of the spirit of Jewish resistance. The Jews have been here many times before and have always triumphed. Persecutions, exiles and termination camps have failed to destroy them. The Jewish crowds chanted last night: “Y*ds always win.” You bet they do.
Peter Harris is the author of two books, The Rage Against the Light: Why Christopher Hitchens Was Wrong (2019) and Do You Believe It? A Guide to a Reasonable Christian Faith (2020).
If you enjoy The New Conservative and would like to support our work, please consider buying us a coffee – it would really help to keep us going. Thank you!
Good for your younger self, Peter, and good for the cinema and the Jews who refused to be intimidated by bullies.
Israel and the Jewish community are fighting the battle that we in the secular UK are going to have to fight someday or lose. Islam is no friend of anyone.
Bravo Zulu! Well done the Red Sea Ramblers and supporters!
Well done!
I stand with Israel!
Am Yisrael Chai!
Pingback: News Round-Up – The Daily Sceptic
“undaunted in its defence of freedom of speech”
Would you, I wonder, have responded so favourably to screenings of Veit Harlan’s work?
You may, perhaps, be inclined to take that enquiry as a suggestion of your misconstruing “freedom of speech” as a freedom for others to say things with which you agree (to which the perception of you as approving of a declaration of there having been enough “anti-Semitic demonstrations in London”, already, might lend support), but the issue it has possibly now brought you to consider is less superficial.
When powerful groups use media as a means of mass influence, this is not to be confused with an unprivileged individual’s raising of his own voice to speak his mind, in a forum where every other individual is equally (more or less) equipped to contradict him.
You are not, I presume, aware of the concept of atrocity propaganda. Perhaps you were too occupied, fighting lads who’d found your superciliousness intolerable, to hear of the mythical tossing of babies from incubators.
I shall not review a movie I haven’t watched, and so, for the purposes of discussion, let us assume that, notwithstanding its title, “Supernova: The Music Festival Massacre” is an unbiased, factual, presentation.
What good, and what harm, can you conceive its screening, at this juncture, as doing?
“‘I’m Still Standing’ by Elton John”
For how much longer will those, who accepted the mmRNA injections, promoted by Reginald Kenneth Dwight, and Maurice Joseph Micklewhite, and, separately, by Brenda Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, who knighted them both, be able to say the same?
“the ‘From the River to Sea’ bullies did not get their way and the film showing went ahead”
I suspect you’ve got Likud’s stance on the screening completely upside down [1], but you may know them better than I do.
1. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/original-party-platform-of-the-likud-party
“Y*ds always win.”
What implications can you see in, separately, the fact of, the belief in, and the desire for, any, uncorrelated, group being invariably victorious?
(Were we to consider the virtuous as invariably victorious, the group’s selection on grounds of virtue would be correlated with our disposition towards its victory, and, by “uncorrelated”, I intended to preclude consideration of such groups.)
This, in my interpretation, does not directly and explicitly address Supernova Sukkot, but it is almost universally overlooked in all discussion of the 7 October operations:
“Casualties fell as a result of friendly fire on October 7, but the IDF believes that beyond the operational investigations of the events, it would not be morally sound to investigate these incidents due to the IMMENSE and complex QUANTITY of them that took place in the kibbutzim and southern Israeli communities due to the challenging situations the soldiers were in at the time.” [1] (emphasis added)
1. https://web.archive.org/web/20231214212217/https://www.ynetnews.com/article/rkjqoobip
This, in my interpretation, does not directly address Supernova Sukkot, but it is almost universally overlooked in discussions of the 7 October operations:
“Casualties fell as a result of friendly fire on October 7, but the IDF believes that beyond the operational investigations of the events, it would not be morally sound to investigate these incidents due to the IMMENSE and complex QUANTITY of them that took place in the kibbutzim and southern Israeli communities due to the challenging situations the soldiers were in at the time.” [1] (emphasis added)
1. rb[dot]gy/5ibv5e
“the ‘From the River to Sea’ bullies did not get their way and the film showing went ahead”
I suspect you’ve got Likud’s stance on the screening completely upside down [1], but you may know them better than I do.
1. www[dot]jewishvirtuallibrary[dot]org/original-party-platform-of-the-likud-party