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“There are 11 major planned events in London today that will have a police presence.  One of these will be a Palestinian Solidarity Campaign [“PSC”] demonstration which has three conditions imposed on it,” the Metropolitan Police tweeted on Monday.

The three conditions were that the PSC followed the prescribed route through London, participants assembling in preparation for the procession must assemble in a prescribed area and the event must end and the crowd to disperse by 5 pm.

As reported by Jewish News, the PSC has been the main group organising the anti-Israel demonstrations in London and across the UK following the 7 October massacre by Hamas. 

So, who is the PSC? 

PSC, Anti-Jewish Activism and Terrorism

The Palestinian Solidarity Campaign does not include any financial data, donor information, or sources of funding on its website, reflecting a complete lack of transparency and accountability … It is a leader and chief proponent of BDS [boycott, divestment and sanctions] and anti-Israel campaigns in the UK, which frequently invoke the “apartheid” libel.

PSC maintains a database of universities and pension funds that invest “in companies complicit in Israeli violations of international law.”

PSC is part of a network of NGOs that promote artificial and manufactured definitions of apartheid to extend the ongoing campaigns that seek to delegitimise and demonise Israel.

According to PSC, “PSC is currently working to strengthen our legal capacity in coalition with the European Legal Support Centre.”

In 2019, the Palestinian NGO Network (PNGO) and the Rights Forum launched the European Legal Support Centre … Mulitple PNGO officials have ties to terrorist organisations, and at least five PNGO members have ties to EU-designated terror organisations.

Palestine Solidarity Campaign, NGO Monitor

PSC’s racist activism and campaign to radicalise others began long before the attack on Israel on 7 October.

According to NGO Monitor, in 2014, PSC was the primary organiser of demonstrations that specifically targeted Jewish-owned TESCO and Sainsbury’s Stores. In a blatant display of Jew-hatred, PSC-affiliated demonstrators destroyed kosher food items at the stores.

In 2015, the Cooperative Bank closed PSC’s bank account because of fears that money could inadvertently be funnelled to illegal groups in Gaza.

In February 2023, PSC’s Brixton branch published a pamphlet on Instagram urging British workers to root out “Zionist” colleagues and have them fired.  It also urged people to refuse to speak to people who support the existence of the Jewish state and suggested that “if a Zionist wants to talk to you, direct them to a therapist.”

Responding to the booklet, a spokesperson for Campaign Against Antisemitism said: “This Instagram post is nothing short of incitement by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, amongst whose supporters there has been a long history of anti-Semitism. Zionism is simply the movement to afford Jews the right of self-determination in Israel afforded to other peoples all over the world and recognised in Article 1 of the UN Charter.

“The claim that Zionism is racism is, therefore, an attempt to deny Jews, uniquely, the right to self-determination, which breaches the International Definition of Anti-Semitism. In addition to the incendiary and grotesque insinuation that Zionism is a mental health disorder and the call to have Zionists fired from their places of work, this post by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign constitutes clear incitement and intimidation.”

Last month, the Daily Mail revealed that PSC director Ben Jamal organised projecting “from the river to the sea” onto Big Ben.  The deeply offensive slogan is widely seen as anti-Semitic and a call to drive Jews out of Israel.

This month, PSC invited a “Palestinian icon” to be a guest speaker at an event advertised as a fundraiser for its West Midlands branch on 8 March.   But PSC attempted to distance itself from the event following an outcry after it emerged the Palestinian plane hijacker Leila Khaled was set to be among the speakers.

Lord Walney, the government’s adviser on political violence and disruption, told The Times: ‘Even by their own recent standards, it is staggering that the PSC wants to give a platform to [Khaled].

There have also been calls to block Khaled from receiving a visa ahead of a scheduled talk at an event in Australia in June, the Daily Mail reported.

Khaled, 79, the first woman to hijack an aeroplane, is a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (“PFLP”) which has been designated a terrorist organisation by the US, Canada, Japan and the European Union but is no longer proscribed by the UK after Brexit. She has been described as “the poster girl of Palestinian militancy” but she is more accurately described as a terrorist.

Khaled became an infamous figure in 1969 after hijacking a plane on its way from Rome to Tel Aviv, and a photograph of her holding an AK-47 rifle was published around the world, as she became an icon for those who believed terrorism was the best means to take the fight to Israel.

The following year she attempted to hijack a plane from Amsterdam to New York. The plane diverted to Heathrow and she was later released in a hostage exchange.

PSC and Politicians

Shamefully, according to the Guardian, several sitting Labour Members of Parliament have attended PSC events – including the former shadow chancellor John McDonnell and the MP for Poplar and Limehouse, Apsana Begum. Labour has refused to suspend MPs who have attended events, despite demands from senior Tories, because PSC is not a proscribed organisation. 

In 2015, Sir Keir Starmer, the then Labour parliamentary candidate for Holborn and St Pancras, joined fellow candidate and Green Party leader Natalie Bennett in speaking at a Camden PSC event. The event launched the PSC’s “Vote Palestine” initiative, an offline/online campaign “to find out which candidates to support” in the UK general election.

Labour’s tolerance of the group’s ideology was on display at their conference on 9 October 2023, two days after the attack on Israel.  PCS had a stall at the Labour conference at which Begum, a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, was photographed posing with the PSC.

From 2011, Jeremy Corbyn was the chair of the Stop the War Coalition until he stepped down in 2015 when he became leader of the Labour Party. After he stepped down as its chair, Corbyn continued to support the coalition, which became a source of friction with other leading members of the Labour Party.

Stop the War collaborates with PSC, for which Corbyn is a patron.

In 2019, Corbyn, the then-leader of the Labour Party, faced calls to quit as patron of PSC, an organisation he had been closely associated with for two decades.  At the time it was revealed that activists of local PSC branches across the UK were sharing anti-Semitic cartoons of Jews and conspiracy theories about Israel controlling the world.

Corbyn ended his tenure as Labour leader on 4 April 2020. He was accused of overseeing an influx of anti-Semitism into the party during his time as leader and once referred to Hamas as his “friends.”

In October 2020, Corbyn was urged to resign from the Labour Party altogether after the human rights watchdog found Labour broke equality law in its handling of anti-Semitism complaints under his leadership.

Corbyn is still a PSC patron and regularly speaks at its rallies.  He remains a Labour MP for Islington North.

There are other ties between Labour and the PSC.  For example, Ben Soffa, who serves as secretary of the PSC and is also one of its directors, headed up Labour’s digital organising until the first week of November 2023.

Soffa is an activist who spearheaded the pro-Palestine march on Armistice Day in 2023, as well as other protests. 

The Daily Mail reported:

The PSC, which Mr. Soffa has been on board of since 2013, has been organising marches up and down the country against Israel’s retaliation to the barbaric attacks launched by Hamas terrorists on 7 October.

On that day, Hamas terrorists crossed the Israel border and slaughtered 1,400 Jews. The Manchester PSC branch described it as a “heroic move” by “freedom fighters” that “gave us all a glimpse of a liberated Palestine.”

The Sun reports that as well as being a director of the PSC, Mr. Soffa was also the Labour Party‘s £61,000-a-year head of digital organising. 

Man who organised Armistice Day pro-Palestine march was working for Keir Starmer at the time – but mysteriously ‘left his job this week’, Daily Mail, 9 November 2023

In 2016, Soffa married his partner – Labour MP and member of the shadow cabinet, Cat Smith.  Corbyn attended the celebrations.

PSC, Black Lives Matter and Marxism

As The Cynical Brit began a series of Twitter threads: “The PSC is an organisation which wants to destabilise the West. They hide Islamic extremist ideology behind Marxist ideology.”  (You can read The Cynical Brit’s Twitter threads HERE and HERE.)

In May 2021, PSC organised a demonstration in London and was joined by Black Lives Matter (“BLM”). “The demonstration was the latest in a range of protests in which BLM has allied itself with the Palestinian cause – a link made not just in London, but also at protests across major western cities,” The Week reported.

The 2021 BLM protests in London featured chants of “we are all Palestinians,” while The Times reported that “among the many Palestinian flags and hand-drawn placards being flown at a recent anti-Israel demonstration in New York one stood out”; the placard read “we can’t breathe since 1948.”

Marxism underpins the BLM agenda.  BLM was founded by Marxists who set out explicitly to dismantle the foundations of Western society.  The PSC appears to have similar aims.

On its website, PSC states: “Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) is a community of people working together … against racism, occupation, and colonisation.”  However, as we noted earlier, PSC is not against racism, they are promoting it.

Another aim PSC has in common with BLM is social justice. In written evidence submitted to a committee of the UK parliament, PSC stated: “PSC believes that the … anti-boycott bill threatens to erode local democracy, restrict freedom of expression, and undermine campaigns for social and climate justice.”

“Social justice,” “climate justice.”  Where have we heard that before?

PSC’s written evidence also stated: “PSC has convened a coalition of more than 70 civil society organisations including trade unions, charities, NGOs, faith groups, climate justice, human rights, and solidarity organisations, who have come together in opposition to this bill.”

It’s not only in opposition to government bills that PSC forms coalitions.  A pro-Palestinian protest on 9 December 2023 was organised by a coalition of groups including PSC, Friends of Al-Aqsa, the Stop the War Coalition, the Muslim Association of Britain, the Palestinian Forum in Britain and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. 

Working with faith groups is a key part of PSC’s alliance building.  In a Twitter thread, The Cynical Brit posted an image of an article from PSC’s website.  We were unable to find the article on PSC’s website but below is a screenshot taken from a tweet in the thread.

Friends of Al-Aqsa (“FOA”) was established in Leicester in 1997 as another spin-off loose affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood (“MB”), one of the world’s oldest political-Islamist groups, Egypt-founded but global. FOA holds a seat on the Stop the War steering committee.

FOA’s founder, Ismail Patel was one of the founders of the now-defunct British Muslim Initiative (“BMI”) led by Anas Altakriti and Azam Tamimi, from the Muslim Association of Britain (“MAB”).

Wikipedia notes that MAB encourages its members to vote in certain ways in elections – it supported Labour’s Ken Livingstone for Mayor of London, Respect in London in 2005 and the Green Party of England and Wales in South East England.

Wikipedia also notes MAB has direct ties to the Muslim Brotherhood:

[MAB] is reported to have had direct ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas; the latter has been proscribed as a terrorist group by the UK government since 2001. In the past, MAB openly identified itself as an Islamist movement.

In MAB’s Inspire newspaper, produced for the 28 September 2002 anti-war demonstration, an article on the MAB’s “Historical Roots and Background” links it explicitly to the Islamist tradition of the Muslim Brotherhood.

At the UK Stop the War Coalition conference in January 2003, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty [also known as Workers’ Liberty] moved a motion to dissociate from MAB. A MAB speaker, replying, said that MAB was proud to be associated with the Muslim Brotherhood.

Muslim Association of Britain, Wikipedia via Encycloreader

According to Wikipedia, the Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip in 2007 was the first time since the Sudanese coup of 1989, that a Muslim Brotherhood group ruled a significant geographic territory.

FOA’s Patel has met Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and has praised Hamas as the legitimate resistance to the Israeli state.

According to Workers’ Liberty, it seems that in 2007 the BMI had a more activist orientation than MAB, seeking closer partnership with George Galloway’s Respect and with Stop the War.

Galloway, who won a by-election to become the Member of Parliament for Rochdale in February 2024, became the vice president of the Stop the War Coalition in 2001.  He was expelled from the Labour Party in 2003 for inciting Arabs to fight British troops. In January 2004, it emerged that Galloway would be working with the Socialist Workers Party in England and Wales, and others, under the name ‘Respect – The Unity Coalition’, generally referred to simply as ‘Respect’.  In the opinion of The Observer Respect was an “alliance … between the Trotskyist far left and the Islamic far right.” 

Trotskyism is a Marxist ideology based on the theory of permanent revolution first expounded by Leon Trotsky.

In 2014, Galloway declared Bradford an Israel-free zone. He told a meeting of party activists in Leeds that Israeli tourists were not welcome in Bradford.

During his speech, Galloway said:

We don’t want any Israeli goods, we don’t want any Israeli services, we don’t want any Israeli academics coming to the university or the college, we don’t even want any Israeli tourists to come to Bradford, even if any of them had thought of doing so.

We reject this illegal, barbarous, savage state that calls itself Israel.

George Galloway investigated by police for saying Bradford an ‘Israel-free zone’, The Guardian, 7 August 2014

There seem to be anti-Jewish traits running through at least two of the coalition organising the pro-Palestinian protests: Stop the War and PSC.  Additionally, two more – FOA and MAB – have direct ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.  Another member of the pro-Palestinian coalition, the Palestinian Forum in Britain, is also part of the UK Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas support infrastructure. Making it five out of the six coalition members organising the protest on 9 December 2023 linked to nefarious activities. 

It seems the “pro-Palestinian” protests are less about being for Palestine and more about being against Jews.

Featured image: Palestine Solidarity Campaign Source: The Independent