Earlier this week MPACUK released an article about a certain Mr Seth Stein who while waiting for a flight to take off was grabbed in a head-lock and physically and verbally abused by a passenger claiming to be a New York police officer. Here are some of the more disturbing comments that were posted on the MPACUK website.

 

 Why would we hope that? The ordeal that Mr Stein had to deal with was not in retaliation for any thing he peddled if anything he peddled interior design! If he peddled anything else it wasn’t relevant to the story or the responses. In trying to highlight that this climate of fear has made an environment where people who “look Muslim”, not just Muslims, can be targeted.  MPACUK tried to highlight that hate has a way of finding targets and that we are all together in this troubling time, if the target could have been a Christian, Agnostic or Atheist would the response have been the same?

 

Let’s imagine for a second that the person had been a Muslim, other than the members of the Community Security Trust (A pro-Israeli vigilante group) or the BNP, no sane person would have posted.

“Hilarious!”

However a sane person did, these types of comments are normally reserved for Muslims by Zionists and Islamophobes and the rest of us are left shaking our head in disdain but at least with a moral steadfastness that keeps us above of the sewer of effluent aimed at us.

“Hilarious!” Hmmm, no it’s not, if anything it is deeply depressing that the airlines are allowing members of the public the licence to intimidate other innocent passengers with no more evidence than the colour of their skin and a gut feeling.  In this case Mr Stein happened to be Jewish, so rather than shock, empathy or horror, the comments posted resounded with a deep uncomfortable resonance of anti-Semitism. MPACUK allow Islamophobic stuff to go up, because it allows Muslims to see what nasty opinions are out there but to date we have not had to pull any comments that are anti-Semitic as the genuine Muslims and non-Muslims who post on the website have more sense than to gloat when misfortune befalls individuals. The comments weren’t anti-Semitic but they did lack a certain human empathy that normally results in support for the victims of hate. And the question the contributors have to ask themselves is why?

The last comment was the first to be posted and it said it all. The impression that all Jews are some how responsible for Islamophobia, the current climate of hatred aimed at us, and Israel’s atrocious policies, are some how rolled up in the head lock Mr Stein found himself in, is ludicrous and contemptible.

No we don’t need to see more of that, we need to be more than that, we need to attain a higher ideal and stand firm against oppression and support victims of injustice whatever their faith. Today we the members, readers and supporters of the Palestinians need to reflect, and ask ourselves when did we start to sound like fascists and Zionists?  

What do we need to do is change that.  We cannot allow their hatred to turn us into a reflection of themselves, and we cannot allow Mr Stein to become a poster-boy for our frustration at the position we find our selves in.