A solicitor was questioned for wearing a Star of David. The Met’s own words confirm it: the force now treats a Jewish symbol as potentially “antagonising.” Is it any wonder that open antisemitism is given its head on the streets of London?
October 21, 2025 08:26
There is an old adage: when you’re in a hole, stop digging. It’s a notion that the beleaguered Metropolitan Police might observe. Under fire over almost everything it does – or rather doesn’t (such as catching criminals and tackling open Jew hate on the streets of London) – the Met have somehow managed to make the latest bad situation worse, this time over the arrest of a Jewish solicitor who was monitoring an anti-Israel demonstration in August.
Video emerged over the weekend of the suspect being questioned at Hammersmith police station, where he had been taken after his arrest. The lawyer claimed that he had been taken away – handcuffed and then detained by police for nearly ten hours – because he had been wearing a Magen David necklace and that this was considered provocative, given that he was in the vicinity of an anti-Zionist protest.
The Met responded with a lengthy statement to the effect that this wasn’t at all why he was arrested: “[T]he claim this man was arrested for wearing a star of David necklace is not true. He was arrested for allegedly repeatedly breaching Public Order Act conditions that were in place to keep opposing protest groups apart…The man told officers he was acting as an independent legal observer but his actions are alleged to have breached the conditions in place, and to have gone beyond observing in an independent and neutral way to provoking and, as such, actively participating as a protester.”
But the Met’s statement is an object lesson not so much in missing the point as in demonstrating just how far gone the police now are, and how problematic – to put it mildly – the attitudes raised by their questioning of the arrested man are. To be blunt, it is entirely irrelevant why he was arrested. Maybe be breached the conditions, maybe he didn’t. We don’t know. The issue is not why he was arrested but the questioning he faced when he was being interviewed. And what we do know, with stone cold certainty, because we can all see the footage, is how that questioning by the police played out. And it is chilling.
The detective asks the suspect: “What necklace are you wearing?” He replies that it is a Star of David. The suspect’s solicitor then steps in to object to this line of questioning. The policeman says he didn’t mean to offend but is following up the notes of the arresting officers, that “because the Star of David was out and present to people… they felt that was antagonising the situation further”.
Wearing the Star of David was an antagonistic act, according to the police.
The suspect’s solicitor responds that this is “appalling” – not least because the Star of David could not have been antagonising the protestors, since this particular demo was organised by a Jewish anti-Zionist group. How could they have been offended by a symbol of their own Judaism?
The policeman then says he doesn’t “want this to become a political debate in an interview”. But he then describes the demo as “a hostile environment where pro-Palestinian protesters are obviously objecting to what is happening in Israel and Gaza”. He then asks the suspect: “Do you see how that [the Magen David] could be an antagonistic emblem or sign…to people in that environment?”
What we have here is unambiguous and – as the suspect’s solicitor puts it in the video - appalling. The foundation of the line of questioning is the notion that a Magen David worn by a Jew can be seen as an “antagonistic emblem or sign”. The policeman is saying, in effect, that Jews need to mind their manners around anyone who might be offended by their mere presence.
The suspect, it should be said, remains on police bail, six weeks on. But far from resiling from any of this after it was exposed at the weekend, and far from apologising for any of it, the Met issued a statement making it worse by clarifying that, yes, this is the actual position of the Metropolitan Police, rather than the views of some ill-informed and wrong-headed officers.
The Met’s statement argues that the context – the (disputed) circumstances of the suspect’s arrest – somehow makes it ok for police officers to drag people into police stations and question them in the middle of the night over their supposedly provocative wearing of a Jewish symbol.
We have, of course, been here before, when Gideon Falter of the Campaign Against Antisemitism was threatened with arrest near a demonstration for being “quite openly Jewish”.
Is it any wonder that open antisemitism is given its head on the streets of London?
As so often, satire provides the most telling commentary on where we now are. Years, ago the BBC show Not The Nine O’Clock News had a sketch tackling police racism. It is all too reminiscent of what appears to be the police’s attitude to Jews:
Police Chief: In short, Savage, in the space of one month, you have brought one-hundred and seventeen ridiculous, trumped-up, and ludicrous charges.
Constable Savage: Yes sir.
Police Chief: Against the same man, Savage. Savage...why do you keep arresting this man?
Savage: He's a villain, sir.
Police Chief: [in deadpan disbelief] ...A villain.
Savage: And, and a jailbird, sir.
Police Chief: I KNOW he's a jailbird, Savage, he's down in the cells now! We're holding him on "possession of curly black hair and thick lips".
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