Westminster is now a no-go-zone every Saturday, since the Re’im music festival massacre on October 7th. The murder and abduction of over 1,300 civilians prompted pro-Palestine activists to occupy British cities, deface and drape flags over monuments, and pray en masse outside Downing Street. The most egregious of these provocations is set for November 11th — Armistice Day.

A case was already made in The Critic for the demonstration to be permitted: to avoid creating a hierarchy of who has the right to free assembly. Paralysed by these liberal egalitarian principles, the Prime Minister and Home Secretary have ruled out banning the gathering. This is proving to be unpopular with the public.

A People Polling survey found 48 per cent of Brits want the gathering banned. Fewer than one in three believe that the police can prevent the demonstrations from escalating to violence.

Why such little faith? Because we’ve seen the Met holding Palestinians flags whilst their reprobate owners illegally scale scaffolding. They took to Twitter to explain that “jihad has a number of meanings” after an internationally-proscribed Islamist organisation called for “Muslim armies” to mobilise towards a global caliphate. This is despite making numerous arrests following protestors fighting with officers. The most the Met can muster is to insist organisers “urgently reconsider” the protests they have planned.

These demonstrations are not anti-discrimination, but displays of dominance

British patriots aren’t afforded the same protection. Officers accuse bystanders attacked with flagpoles of provoking the crowd and “breaching the peace” with their presence. They threaten counter-protestors flying our flag with arrest if “anything close to racist is said”. They arrest others at home for complaining about Palestinian flags flying from their local highstreet lamp-posts on Facebook. They ask veterans not to fly union jacks because “There’s way more of them [protestors] than there are of us [police]”.

Police officers punish law-abiding Brits to avoid offending a volatile Islamist minority. As Louise Perry has analogised, this is like telling a battered wife not to burn her husband’s dinner if she doesn’t want to be brutalised in future. We are in an abusive relationship with an unfaithful state. No wonder many want to leave.

This appeasement strategy proves that multiculturalism is not a melting pot: it’s a blender. It liquidates everything in its container, producing only indigestible sludge in which the strongest ingredient leaves a bitter aftertaste. We are commanded to unilaterally liquidate our heritage, in the hopes of resolving the conflicts we import from the rest of the world.

We should not be in the position where the Met is made to look foolish by interpreting Islamic theology, but mass immigration and suicidal multiculturalism mean we are. The situation is best depicted with the photo of the Royal British Legion stand in Charing Cross Station last Saturday.

Liberals must learn that tolerance is not neutral. It is a value that must rest on reciprocity. Tolerance becomes a liability when dealing with an ideology that poses an existential threat to our way of life. Why should you be protected by the rules of our game, when you declare your intent to flip the board?

A nation only lasts as long as its people are willing to enforce its values. In Britain, the universalist assumptions of the dominant strain of permissive liberalism has left our government vulnerable to subversion. Believing the demonstrators can be reasoned with, they appeal to what they believe to be their standards. Deputy PM Oliver Dowden implored them to say “Jewish Lives Matter”, because they marched for BLM in 2020. (Never mind that BLM Chicago celebrated the Re’im massacre.)

The charge of moral hypocrisy doesn’t matter to those who believe there is no truth but power. These demonstrations are not for anti-discrimination; they are displays of dominance. We must wrap our heads around the fact that they do not see the world in the same colour-blind, individualistic terms as you or I. Otherwise, our civilisation will die, and its ineffective defenders will inscribe “Imagine if the roles were reversed!” on its tombstone.

We know that the government possesses the power to stop this: Braverman referenced the time when the Met banned an EDL gathering in 2011, underneath her tweet about the Armistice march. What it lacks is the will to do so. (Perhaps the Met’s alleged Hamas-sympathising advisors have something to do with that.)

The realistic prospect of ethnic conflict should give the government pause about letting this protest go ahead. Tommy Robinson declared his intent to counterprotest at the Cenotaph, after returning to Twitter last weekend. The consequences of mass immigration are manifesting all around us — despite the public voting against in every election for the last decade. The government might be mindful that members of the public, feeling betrayed by democratic processes and the police, may turn to vigilante justice in defence of the memorial service.

I take no joy in this prediction. To quote JFK, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Likewise, if we tolerate the intolerable, we desecrate our own culture so that an undesirable other will take its place.

As Douglas Murray said, “I do not want to live in a country with Hamas supporters … If there are people in the UK who are offended by the posters of missing Jewish children, they must leave.” We don’t allow dinner guests to stay once they start trashing the furniture and tracking mud in our rug. It is time to show them the door before they burn down the house.

The social fabric has been frayed enough. Station the same servicemen we honour on every street corner. Allowing the pro-Palestinian gathering on November 11th to go ahead disrespects the glorious dead.