Newly released police interview transcripts show how a Jewish protester was charged after holding up a placard mocking a Hezbollah leader.
During a counter-demonstration in Swiss Cottage, north-west London, on September 20th, the man spent three minutes brandishing a cartoon image showing the terror chief holding a pager. When he returned to a follow-up protest on September 27th, he was arrested.
In the recording of his interview in detention, police repeatedly asked the detainee if he believed the image would offend “clearly pro-Hezbollah and anti-Israel” activists—Hezbollah the proscribed terror group, that is.
The suspect described how:
Two police vans and six officers turned up at our house to search for ‘offensive material,’ which was quite invasive. It was a horrible experience … They put me in the lounge and asked my partner to go with them around the house. They weren’t very pleasant to her and even went through her knicker drawer. It was totally ridiculous.
Although charged under the Public Order Act for “causing racially or religiously aggravated harassment, alarm or distress by words or writing,” the case against the counter-protestor was dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service on May 10th, saying there was “insufficient evidence for a realistic prospect of conviction.”
The incident has raised, once again, the issue of ‘two-tier policing,’ both in London and in Britain more widely.