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There's Nothing Radical about Flying the Palestinian Flag

(Spectator-UK) Brendan O'Neill - To the fashionably Israelophobic of the Euro activist classes, waving the Palestinian flag might just be a convenient way to prove your moral worth to your fellow intimates in right-thinking society. But to Israelis, the flag can prick awful memories of the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. There are just too many of these flags now, right? They're everywhere. Take a walk round London and you'll see more Palestinian flags than Union flags. You might even see more Palestinian flags than Pride flags. The middle classes drape them over their shoulders when they bravely take a break from Saturday brunching to march against the Jewish State. They flutter from lampposts. There isn't a campus in the land that is not adorned with them. There are TikTok videos advising the young on how to match a red beret with a green blouse and black trousers so that everyone you encounter will know what an amazingly moral person you are. Don't get me started on the keffiyeh, the uniform of the self-righteous, the sartorial signifier of political rectitude. Some scoff at the idea that Jews might feel put out by the flag under which a thousand of their co-religionists were butchered last year. I think these ubiquitous flags have far more to do with us than with Palestinians. Not content with commandeering the keffiyeh and making it the hot must-have of polite society, now the Palestinian flag is a thing the city elites might hang from their windows so their neighbors will know they're Good. It's about a kind of cultural supremacism. The Palestinian flag's omnipresence feels oppressive to those of us who've long since tired of our towns and cities being turned into soapboxes by an activist class that loves nothing more than impressing its moral dominion over us little folk. There's an ironically conformist bent to these ostentatious displays of the Palestinian colors. There's nothing radical about flying the Palestinian flag. If you want to be radical, wave the Israeli flag. People will splutter and rage and manhandle you. They will grab your flag and run off with it. They will destroy it like some Dark Ages hysteric burying a blasphemous icon.
2024-12-03 00:00:00
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