| Zionist Troublemaker Boasts About Attempt To Stop MPACUK Debate |
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| Saturday, 10 December 2005 | |
 First MPACUK received chillingly violent phone-calls from people proudly identifying themselves as Zionist: "If you want to keep breathing you better stop promoting that Alan Hart b**stard". Then Zionist students pressured Westminster University to censor ‘The Great Debate: The Truth About Zionism’. But thankfully a Christian group, the Quakers, gave us an even bigger room to hold the debate. And alhamdullilah there was a huge turnout of Muslims, Jews and people from all backgrounds to discuss a political issue that affects us all: Zionism and the State of Israel.As everyone knows from our website MPACUK welcomes open debate and there were a few Zionists in the audience who had their say peacefully. But we’ll leave the story of another Zionist activist to be told in his own words, posting on the ‘Middle East Forum’:
"hi Cormac. did you go. I didn't get a chance to reply as I was there. It went well with the exception of one Zionist who came just to disrupt the talk. I was that Zionist I am proud to say."
Unfortunately this one Zionist did a pretty effective job at disrupting the talk - walking in half way through Stephan Marks' speech and immediately starting to shout abusively at the panel of speakers. We were alert to the threats we’d been receiving and MPACUK staff caught all his disruptive and threatening behaviour on film. He was given a warning from the chairwoman and was approached by a member of staff asking him to wait until the question and answer session. He didn’t take kindly to that: "His little mate sidled up to me 'Listen, my friend...', he began. 'I'm not your friend', I interupted, 'I'm your enemy, and you'd better move up a chair, because I find your proximity threatening'."
After more warnings he kept his interruptions to loud grunts and one word comments. And then during the question and answer session the MPACUK chairwoman gave him his opportunity to speak. After a long preamble about his nightmare journey from South London and Arabs being ethnic cleansers of Jews his question, which he repeated many times, was "We’re Zionists, so what you going to do about it?". It seemed like he was pleading for someone to say they wanted to exterminate Jews and looked deeply disappointed not to find any racists to oblige him. But his comments on the forum show there was one racist in the room: "'I brought the book, and also learnt an awful lot about some of the racist policies of israel,' They are not racist: they are affirmative action. 'including the limitation of israeli arabs to 32% in some areas, and the granting of 90% of israeli land only for jews.'." After he’d been given his chance to ask his question he went back to shouting out and constantly interrupting. He kept standing up and seemed very twitchy, keeping his bag on his lap and repeatedly zipping and unzipping it - which personally made me very nervous given the death threats: what if the guy had a knife or even a gun? After a final warning from the chairwoman to let other people have their chance to speak, MPACUK staff asked him to leave. This is his account:"Finally Saladkrim [he’s even invented his own abusive name based on Salah-u-din] found he couldn't resist his urges and started physically manhandling me. I squared up to him and the head of MPACUK, Asghar Bukhari, leaped from the podium and screamed 'Don't touch my mate!' Then the lady organiser started shouting at the bouncers for getting violent. She asked me to leave then and, let's face it, post ankle operation, I couldn't handle a whole squad of 'em." Well, if any non-Muslims had the impression that Muslim women are meek doormats they will have had a shock. A Muslim sister telling the men to step back and the Zionist troublemaker to get out saved the event from this sabotage attempt. The chairwoman apologised to the audience and the debate went ahead with many brilliant questions and comments from the diverse audience. {moscomment}    |
