Badenoch ignores reality to defend far-right marches and attack anti-genocide

Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has denied reality to try to prop up her appalling position of wanting peaceful anti-genocide marches banned, but not fascist ‘Tommy Robinson’ hate marches.

Badenoch claims that her position is not the most festering racist hypocrisy by arguing that the marches are “not the same”. Pointing to the deaths of two Jews in Manchester in 2025 and last week’s Golders Green attack, her rationale, if you really stretch the meaning of that word, is that:

Criticism of religion is allowed in this country. We mustn’t mix the two things. I am talking about the attacks on Jews. It’s not the faith that’s being attacked, it’s the people.

The off-the-scale denialism and dishonesty of this is manifold:

• No one on the left is attacking Jews for being Jews — no one on the left is attacking Jews, period.
• The left is condemning Israel for genocide; conflating Jews and Israel, as Badenoch does, is antisemitic.
• At least one of the Manchester synagogue victims was killed by Greater Manchester Police and another wounded, and the attacker came from a pro-Israel family.
• The first victim of the Golders Green attacker was a Muslim — Badenoch, like Keir Starmer and the ‘mainstream’ media, continue to pretend he doesn’t exist.
• Unlike the left, the far-right does attack, and often kills, Muslims. Unlike the left, the far-right rapes women because they are mistaken for Muslims. The far-right mows down Muslims in the street, ignored by government and media..
• Unlike the anti-genocide movement, the far-right marches do spout hate, toward both the Muslim religion and people who are, or even look, Muslim. The fascists hate both the people and their religion and are not shy about acting on it.
• The other main group that attacks left-wing Jewish people is… pro-Israel mouthpieces like the appalling Melanie Phillips. They put those Jews in danger by describing them as a threat; because they threaten Israel’s monopoly on the narrative. But in the diseased minds of the Israel lobby – many of whom are not Jewish – there is no difference between Jewish people and the interests of Israel. Zionism is racism – including antisemitic.

Double standards

And Badenoch even condemns herself (but no doubt, hopes we won’t notice). Trying to equate anti-Israel politics with anti-Black racism, she said:

When something happens to black people, no one does the whataboutery. When something does happen to Muslims, we don’t say what about antisemitism?

But Badenoch herself is a denier of anti-Black racism. When a major Tory donor’s racism toward Britain’s first Black woman MP Diane Abbott was exposed, she dismissed it as “trivia.” She also defended a government report that minimised racism.

She has attacked and dismissed the academic study of racism as a “dangerous trend in race relations” because, she claims, it casts: “blackness as victimhood and whiteness as oppression” and decolonisation as a “fad”. At the same time, she attacked the Black Lives Matter movement and wanted all political parties to condemn it for being “political”.

What a pity she can’t apply the same to the deeply racist ideology of Zionism.

What a pity, too, that she is happy to airbrush out the actual, and far greater, racist violence and hate directed at British Muslims. By the likes of ‘Tommy Robinson’, certainly — but also by the Israel lobby, whose proponents routinely demonise Muslims to support Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians. That violence, far more widespread, often sees Muslims die or suffer appalling violence.

But then, Badenoch is a Tory. On the hard right of even that racist party. And a member of the tricolour uniparty of Labour/Tory/Reform, all of which is deeply, irredeemably racist. Against Muslims, against Black people, against other racialised groups – and, most definitely, against Jews if they dare to dissent from the Israel-first line.

In one way and one way only she’s right, though. The entirely peaceful anti-genocide marches, which always have Jewish humanitarians front and centre, are not the same as the hate-filled, racist, violent, thuggish and brain-challenged far-right that she, a Black woman they would despise, wants to defend.

Featured image via the Canary