Palestinian writer Mohammed El-Kurd (@m7mdkurd on Twitter) misspoke at a recent 13 January 2024 London rally for Palestine, forgetting the word “not” in the last line of an otherwise abundantly crystal clear speech:
Note in particular that the posted video has been subtitled correctly, as the speech was intended:
Text of Mohammed El-Kurd’s speech
Obviously, it would not make sense, attached to the rest of a speech castigating Israeli massacres, in a sentence that also sees the addition of the typically negatively-associated adverb “normalize” before the noun “massacres”, for El-Kurd to be talking about anything except Israel’s ongoing massacres of Palestinians. Enter the Zionists.
Coordinated Zionist smear posts on Twitter
The Zionist smear posts of the partial video were in their multitudes. I found dozens and dozens of them by using the phrase “we must normalize massacres as the status quo”.
The videos you will notice, are not the complete 3-minute speech about Israel’s genocide, just a 22-second clip of the slip, to allow it to be dishonestly taken out of context.
Here’s how the videos were spun by the usual suspects, with the number of their followers that each of these accounts has noted below. To read the tweets, click to enlarge and swipe/use arrow keys or arrows for the slideshow.
The Literal Grammar Police
This is the insidious reality of fascism at work to silence its critics. Notice all the public calls to arrest and deport El-Kurd and several tagging the Metropolitan Police in London.
Following lots of pressure and bad faith complaints and some—no doubt—good faith complaints who took the second hand spin at face value, London’s Metropolitan Police posted the following on Twitter:
El-Kurd kept in good spirits after the embarrassingly easy Zionist weaponization of the UK capitol’s police force, but ultimately indeed had to turn up in person to answer questions.
Mohammed El-Kurd’s “further update”
I was investigated by Britain’s counterterrorism police, which succumbed to political pressure from top Israeli propagandists, diplomats, lobby-affiliated British government officials, and countless right-wing media outlets, who demanded I be arrested and charged over a recent anti-zionist speech I gave in London.
The interrogation, which I attended with counsel, proved to be a great waste of time and public funds, and the police promptly closed the case and pursued no further action. If anything, it was a mere inconvenience.
This is but one of the many recent instances that reveal the political bankruptcy of Zionists, who have to rely on duplicitous and ridiculous measures to distract from the colonial violence they defend and perpetuate. It should also serve as a reminder that, in the ‘civilized world,’ those opposing war crimes are more likely to be scrutinized and persecuted than war crimes themselves.
In the last 107 days, the Israeli occupation forces have murdered a daily average of 250 Palestinians; 1 in every 20 Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip has been killed, wounded, or dispossessed by the Israeli regime. Genocide is the crime and Zionism is the culprit. That is the only headline that matters.
Source: https://twitter.com/m7mdkurd/status/1749088737533821215
Regardless of the conclusion that “the police promptly closed the case and pursued no further action”, the Zionists were indeed successful at deploying a level of state intimidation against someone speaking out against a brutal regime. It was way too easy. Would it have happened if the speaker was a Zionist?
“First they came for the misspeakers….”
I don’t think the Zionists have thought this one through. If you successfully weaponize a country’s police force to—at least appear to—conduct an investigation of someone merely misspeaking, what happens to free speech when it’s someone from their own team that the same tactic—now normalized—is deployed on?
Since October 7th, pro-Israel activists and propagandists have been widely seen calling for violence against Palestinian men, women and children daily—baying for the massacre of all of Gaza’s civilians and declaring approval of Israel’s blatant genocide—at rallies and on social media.
It is entirely likely, particularly given this instance as a model for future action, that this tactic will be next be deployed on them.
We must not normalize the weaponization of the state against speech—never mind simple incidents of misspeaking. That’s a road no one should dare to venture down.
Scottish OG from the time of the First Intifada and the birth of the international movement of solidarity with the Palestinian people • Former Friends of Birzeit University Coordinator • Birzeit University Public Relations Officer • Cofounder and Editor of the original Electronic Intifada website • Creator of countless websites for pro-Palestinian organizations around the world via nigelparry.net
