Sadiq Khan has yet to comment on the decision to ban this weekend’s Al Quds Day march, as a spokesperson for the Mayor of London called it an “operational policing decision”.
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood blocked the annual event in the centre of the capital after the Metropolitan Police assessed that it posed a significant risk of serious public disorder.
Instead of marching through the capital, this year’s event will be static, with the River Thames used as a physical barrier separating pro-Iran demonstrators from counter-protest groups.
As the Met set out plans for Sunday’s event, Khan has not said if he agrees with the Home Secretary’s decision to prohibit the procession.
The mayor declined to comment, with his spokesperson telling the JC: “The Met have set out what they believe would be a real risk of serious public disorder if this procession and counter-protest took place on Sunday in the current international context. This is an operational policing decision.”
Around 1,000 officers will be deployed to police a gathering expected to draw up to 12,000 people.
Police will also increase patrols in Jewish areas during Quds Day. Other neighbourhoods across London could see fewer officers, as local police are redeployed to central London to manage the demonstration.
Khan has criticised the march in the past. During the 2024 mayoral election campaign he told a Jewish community event that he had asked then home secretary Amber Rudd to ban the demonstration in 2017.
“In previous years there were Hezbollah flags flown at the Quds march and there was language that was clearly – in my view – breaking the law,” he said at an event at JW3.
Khan told the audience he had been disappointed that earlier governments did not follow his request.
Al Quds Day, named after the Arabic word for Jerusalem, was established in 1979 by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. It has since become an annual global rally framed as an expression of solidarity with Palestinians but widely criticised as a propaganda exercise for the Iranian regime.
In London, a march marking the day has taken place annually during Ramadan. For more than a decade, critics have called for the event to be banned, particularly after previous demonstrations featured Hezbollah flags before the organisation was fully proscribed in the UK, alongside placards calling for the destruction of Israel.
Last year hundreds of demonstrators marched through the capital, carrying images of Iran’s former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force (IRGC), who was killed in a US drone strike in 2020.
One of the march’s organisers is the Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC). Its director, Massoud Shadjareh, has previously expressed support for the Iranian regime.
In 2020 he wrote that “we are all Hezbollah” and said he “aspired to become like” Soleimani.
The JC reported last year that Shadjareh had spoken at events in Iran organised by the Basij Resistance Force, a paramilitary group of street thugs founded by Khomeini and sanctioned by the UK.
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