The Politics of Recognition

This follows on from yesterday’s post about the policing of pro-Palestine marches and the sudden fixation on the chant “Globalise the intifada”. But the real issue was never one slogan. It is how visibility drives suspicion, enforcement and hostility in Britain.

The law has not changed. The climate has. The police are responding to perceived impact rather than dictionary definition, trying to prevent violence rather than adjudicate politics. That is understandable. What is harder to defend is how selectively that logic is applied.

It is also worth being precise about what is actually being policed. Whatever one thinks of the chant, neither Hamas nor any other Israel-focused group has treated “intifada” as a call to attack Jewish communities outside Israel. International attacks on Jewish targets have overwhelmingly come from global jihadist movements such as ISIS and al-Qaeda, not from protest movements or from Israel-Palestine-focused actors. Treating the slogan as a proxy for violence against Jews in Britain collapses the distinction between Jews and Israel and assigns a global intent that simply is not borne out by evidence or precedent. It is a category error. Police can and should act on incitement, threats and intimidation. They cannot credibly claim that a slogan constitutes a call for worldwide violence against Jewish civilians.

Britain has long tolerated far-right chants that perform the same function. “We want our country back.” “Stop the invasion.” “Send them home.” They are vague by design, emotionally loaded, and intended to intimidate without spelling anything out. Everyone knows who they are aimed at. Yet they pass as robust political speech, usually because they are wrapped in flags, accents and familiarity. Language that sounds foreign is scrutinised. Language that sounds native is normalised.

This is not an argument for letting everything go. It is an argument for recognising what is already happening.

Hate follows visibility. Where difference is visible, hostility becomes opportunistic and ambient. Where it is not, hostility becomes ideological and symbolic.

Muslims face higher volumes of street-level abuse because visibility produces frequency. Jews, most of whom are not visibly identifiable, face a far higher per-capita risk through threats to synagogues, schools and institutions. When Jews are visibly identifiable, as with Lubavitch or Chabad communities, the pattern shifts again. Visibility invites projection.

The Bondi tragedy showed this clearly. Rabbis appeared publicly offering comfort, doing what Chabad always does. For some observers, that visibility alone triggered suspicion. Not because of what they said, but because of what they looked like. The hatred was already primed. It simply needed somewhere to land.

The same mechanism runs across society.

Physically disabled people are instantly recognisable and face constant, casual judgement. Staring, comments, accusations of fraud. Mental disabilities are not visible, so discrimination arrives later and harder, when behaviour departs from expectation and is punished rather than understood. Black people are stopped and searched more often not because they offend more, but because visibility feeds preconception. LGBT people are tolerated until visibility increases, a Pride flag, a same-sex couple holding hands. Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities are treated as a problem simply by arriving. No chant required. Presence is enough.

This is why the “disabled, black lesbian” trope exists. It is not satire. It is a sneer at visibility itself. Stack multiple recognisable markers together and the mocker convinces themselves they have spotted something artificial, performative, excessive. What they are really doing is punishing legibility. Turning a human being into a caricature so they do not have to confront how differently society treats those who are seen.

Which brings us back to chant policing. Chants matter, but they are triggers, not causes. Enforcement is drawn not to meaning, but to recognisability. What looks threatening is policed. What feels familiar is indulged. The flag provides cover. The accent reassures.

The danger here is not free speech versus public order. It is inconsistency. When enforcement looks asymmetric, extremists on all sides exploit it. One cries repression. The other cries indulgence. Both feel vindicated.

None of this is resolved by pretending words have fixed meanings detached from context. Nor by acting as if only one form of hatred exists, or only one community bears its weight.

Hate does not require logic. It does not need evidence. It does not even need words. It only needs a shape it can recognise.

Codicil

It is also worth noting what Farage has said, repeatedly and unambiguously, about Israel and Gaza. He has rejected the charge of genocide, opposed any suspension of arms sales, dismissed recognition of a Palestinian state as “rewarding terrorism”, and framed the war largely as a civilisational struggle between the West and Islamist extremism. Criticism of Israel from the British left, he has suggested, is driven less by concern for civilians than by hostility to Israel itself.

That positioning matters. Farage is not neutral on this issue. He is emphatically aligned with a maximalist, security-first defence of Israel and routinely uses the conflict to reinforce his wider narrative about Islam, immigration and cultural threat. At the same time, he has previously trafficked in rhetoric that Jewish institutions themselves have criticised as drawing on antisemitic tropes.

Against that backdrop, the silence over the Dulwich College allegations becomes harder to explain as mere caution. Grassroots Jewish bodies spoke. Holocaust survivors spoke. The formal leadership did not. Yet some of those same institutions have been vocal, and rightly so, about slogans at marches and the policing of protest language.

This need not imply approval, endorsement or conspiracy. It does suggest that political familiarity and perceived alignment can lower the threshold for public challenge. Farage’s overt Islamophobia and his vocal alignment with Israel’s war aims appear to render him a more comfortable figure to ignore, even when credible allegations of antisemitism surface.

Once again, the pattern holds. Antisemitism is confronted aggressively when it comes from the margins, from protests, from foreign-sounding language. When it comes wrapped in blazers, banter and Union Flags, and attached to a useful political alignment, the response softens or disappears altogether.

That is not moral consistency. It is selective indulgence.