"In Penzance, they want to talk about Zionists killing children." by Tanya Gold.
Tanya Gold
14.4.2024: War explodes as predicted in the Middle East! We are all Palestinians now?
Israel Dragging US into New Mid-East War: "They Know What They're Doing."
In Penzance, they want to talk about Zionists killing children
"I am spying on my neighbours. I live in west Cornwall and I didn’t think there would be a Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) rally here, but there was. I didn’t think I would go but I did. I didn’t think I would speak at it, but I did.
"My issue with the PSC is that some of its supporters struggle to stand for Palestine without being anti-Jew.
"You might think this would be easy but in my experience, they cannot do it. In the early days of the war there was a PSC rally in Falmouth, a university town 30 miles east. I expected that, but I expected nothing in Penzance, my hometown.
"Politics is strangely muted here: people have more urgent tasks, such as putting food on the table. The week after October 7, some ladies of the church put a note under my door. They are praying for us, they said.
"I overheard a man in the greengrocer’s denouncing Israel on 10 October. I asked him if people were crossing the border to kill his family. He said no. And that was it.
"Still, I heard there would be a PSC rally in Penzance and I looked at the Facebook page. I have good reason: I have a son and I am nervous that his bucolic childhood will end with the shout, “fucking Jew” from a child who doesn’t know what a Jew is.
"I found a few fanatics: a Morning Star-reading Buddhist who posts photographs of paragliders with Palestine flags in between walking in the St Loy woods; a teaching assistant who hates Israel so much she insists on using asterisks instead of its name because that’s normal. It’s the passion.
"The rally was at the bottom of Causewayhead. I wasn’t alone in supporting Israel. When I got there, I found a Jewish woman with her husband. They each carried a laminated Israeli flag and a laminated photograph of the hostages in Gaza. A crowd assembled. It was various: some young people; more elderly people; some families; a man with a Palestine flag but no shoes. We were stared at with a kind of muted hostility and curiosity. They passed a petition round for the local MP.
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Jon Donnison, a BBC journalist, reporting the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital blast (Photo: BBC News, X/Twitter)
"The first speaker read out the Michael Rosen poem Don’t Mention the Children. It charges Israel with refusing to broadcast the names of dead Palestinian children.
"Then we were heckled. A man walked past and shouted, “Who started it?” in a broad Cornish accent. He was heckled back. Then a young man opened his mouth and screamed, “From the river to the sea”.
"At this, I heckled, because every rally is a paradigm of the conflict itself: what happened to the peace poetry? Then a woman with a bobble hat came and stared at me. I stared back until she left. The original heckler was dispatched.
"Next, a young woman repeated the blood libel that the al-Ahli Arab hospital was bombed by Israel. Her lies made her breathless, but activism is a drug.
"Then a man spoke about establishing a PSC in Penzance. I heckled again. I asked: what’s the endgame? What do you want to see? “We want peace,” he said. I asked: Two states? One state? He said, “I genuinely don’t know. That’s something I’m reading about now and trying to figure out”.
"Because this was not unlike a group therapy session, he asked me what I wanted. Peace, I said: two states and an end to the war. I would like to stop extremists holding all the power.
"I was interrupted by a man saying, “but Zionists”. He said all Zionists were extremists, then he changed his mind. I would, I said, like my child to be able to walk the streets without, at some point, someone calling him a fucking Jew.
"At that point a woman screamed: “Stop killing the children then!” I stopped and was applauded by perhaps three people. Though they might have been applauding the heckler.
"It’s hard to say. The next person called the (so far theoretical) heckling of local Jewish children “despicable”. I was grateful for that.
"A few people came to speak to us afterwards. They said they were glad we were here. One was from my son’s cub group: she reminded me of the names of her children.
"A youngish man accused us of weaponising the Holocaust. Another man wanted to talk about the geopolitics but when I mentioned Iran, he waved his arm: it’s not important, he said.
"The Buddhist did not come over. I think she could not bear to be in our presence. Real Jews interfere with the theoretical Jew of her imagination. I fantasise that she was disappointed that we did not have horns.
"The picture here is complicated, and not without hope. More as it comes." END OF ARTICLE.
It is not at all clear who runs the following organisation but I have been libelled by it and called 'antisemetic' and a 'holocaust denier', neither of which applies. I am however against regimes that are genocidally focused on killing others, theft of land, illegal settlement, inequality before the law and institutionalised rascism and apartheid. I am also against the rhetorical use of weaponising such terms as "antisemitism", "holocaust denier" and "blood libel", to close down rational discussion and to deflect attention from obvious, overt, heinous crimes, perpetuated by a self-styled 'Jewish State'.
Cornwall Anti-Semitism Watch
https://www.facebook.com/cornwallantisemitismwatch/
Just more Zionist attempted character assassination and invective (it is what they specialize in)
A google search of my name interestingly throws up this defamatory comment by the Cornwall Anti-semitism Watch organisation. Strange how this is listed when so many other articles are ignored on my veaterecosan blog. Are the algorithmns Zionist too?
Henna H Sibtain
"Tim Veater a paid up nazi hasbara troll."
Karen Mckenna is with Henna H Sibtain. https://www.facebook.com/search/top?q=henna%20h%20sibtain
From her FB page it would appear she is a Palestinian supporter that makes her attack on me even more inexplicable.
22.4.2024: Not that anyone's interested but I went on a bus ride! Every year old buses, like dinosaurs, gather in Penzance and offer free trips. In we squashed on a 1950's single decker, on a round trip to Sancreed - allegedly the only Cornish inland parish. (I can't believe that somehow) I sat next to an old chap from that parish who didn't stop conversing all the way, whilst eating a pasty. I've never seen a pasty last so long! He thought I was eighty, which was nice of him and came as a bit of a shock. Looking on the bright side, at least it gives me five years credit. He was quite upset when I guessed he was seventy, when actually sixty-five. That's what I call 'natural justice'. We said hello to all his ancestors as we passed the Sancreed church yard and the former home of the artist, John Miller. He had been a gardener for the Bolitho's at Trewidden all his working life where he said they sold 80,000 Camelias every year! However he had never noticed the unusual Ginka biloba tree standing tall opposite St John's Hall. I guess he's not the only one.
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