Is it a crime to tell crap jokes about Israel?

Let’s be fair. Yes, the arrest of a retired teacher under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000, for displaying a joke from the allegedly satirical magazine Private Eye on an anti-Israel protest in Leeds, was a ridiculous infringement of free speech. But no, this is not proof that the British state is part of an anti-Palestinian conspiracy.

Indeed, the problem is that this sort of police overreach allows the anti-Israel crowd to pose on the moral high ground, as supposed defenders of freedom, when in fact they are effectively aiding the Islamist butchers who pose the biggest threat to liberty today.

In the Gaza-Through-the-Looking-Glass, truth-turned-inside-out world imagined by the mainstream media, Israel is again being falsely accused of committing genocide, while the truly genocidal Jew haters of Hamas (aka ‘the Gaza Health Ministry’) are quoted as if they were authoritative sources of truth.

Deploying the same upside-down logic, the Islamo-left at home loves to accuse the British authorities of being ‘complicit in Israeli genocide’ – just when the UK and the rest of the West are winning plaudits from Hamas, for deserting the only democracy in the Middle East and the only Jewish state on Earth.

This nonsensical version of events has been boosted by the recent police arrests of protesters accused of supporting Palestine Action, after the UK government proscribed that group under the Terrorism Act 2000. One arrest which has attracted particular attention was that of 67-year-old ex-teacher Jon Farley, detained by West Yorkshire police for six hours and questioned by anti-terrorism officers before being released without charge.

Farley’s suspected offence was to reproduce on a placard a joke from Private Eye, which supposedly exposed the UK government’s double standards by contrasting ‘Unacceptable Palestine Action: Spraying military planes with paint’ with ‘Acceptable Palestine Action: Shooting Palestinians queuing for food’.

Farley said he liked the joke because ‘It’s got a bit of nuance about it’. Depends on your definition of the n-word, I suppose. For some of us that joke was rather typical of the sort of crass, one-eyed double standards that too often pass for ‘edgy’ political comedy today.

In reality, the vandalising of RAF planes, which got Palestine Action proscribed by an embarrassed Labour government, would never have been deemed ‘acceptable’ – in different times it might have got the activists shot rather than arrested. And the notion that a) Israel has been deliberately ‘shooting Palestinians queuing for food’ and that b) this is acceptable to the British government, is a seriously bad joke.

It is a stand-out case of viewing Gaza-through-the-looking-glass. In the real world, such claims against Israel come from Hamas – the Islamist death cult that is ultimately responsible for all civilian suffering in Gaza. Contrary to what Private Eye implies, those blood libels have been parroted by the UN and swallowed whole by political and media elites in the UK and the West.

So, the joke illustrated the familiar Israel-bashing, woke crap. But of course that does not mean it should be treated as a crime. Indeed the Farley incident rather illustrates both the principled and the practical reasons for defending freedom of speech. In principle, free speech has to be for these fools, too – and nothing should be treated as beyond a joke. We defend it for all or none at all.

Perhaps more pertinently here, since I do not want to waste too much time fighting for the rights of Israel-haters, it shows the practical case for upholding free speech. Once you start calling for people to be censored, you enable them to pose as martyrs, and make it appear that you are afraid of their arguments. Hence the woke warriors of cancel culture, who have spent years trying to restrict if not abolish free speech for anybody they brand ‘far right’ (ie, just about anybody), can now claim to be the ‘real victims’ of UK state censorship over the Israel-Hamas war.

The satirical snobs at Private Eye will of course be revelling in all of this as proof of their paper’s supposed ‘anti-establishment’ credentials. Editor Ian Hislop justifiably called Farley’s arrest for holding up the joke ‘mind-boggling’ and ‘extraordinary’. He then smugly declared that it was ‘actually a very neat and funny’ joke ‘about the hypocrisies of the government’s approach to any sort of action in Gaza’. He added that the response in their office was that: ‘Well, the jokes have been criminal for ages.’

What really has been true ‘for ages’ is that Hislop’s Private Eye regurgitates dully conformist left-liberal guff on everything from bashing Brexit and Israel to backing trans ideology and the Labour Party. As I wrote in my book Revolting!, after Private Eye described the democratic Brexit revolt in a spoof headline as ‘Turkeys vote for Christmas’ back in 2016: ‘If it was irony the Eye was after, how about, “Satirists Side With Establishment”…?’ Our cultural elitists surely do not need West Yorkshire Police giving them any more excuse to boast about being on ‘the right side of history’.

Meanwhile, back in the real Middle East, rather than Gaza-through-the-looking-glass, Israel is not only fighting for its life against genocidal Jew-hating Islamists, but also fighting on the frontline of the global war for democracy – and for the freedom to make crap jokes.

Mick Hume is a spiked columnist.