On Saturday May 2nd, Friends of Palestine WA (FOPWA) held a small protest outside the IGA store in Mend St, South Perth. This was the second action we had organised as part of an ongoing campaign to persuade the management of IGA stores to reconsider the stocking of Israeli citrus fruit and to encourage IGA customers to boycott products sourced from Israel.
We had hoped the protest would be another modest opportunity to raise awareness among Perth shoppers of the Boycott, Divestments & Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel that is steadily gaining ground throughout the world. Unfortunately our efforts were hampered on two fronts.
The first problem was the presence of three Zionist activists, one of whom masqueraded as a protester, who evidently had made it their business to disrupt our activities. We have reason to believe one of these Zionists had contacted the manager of the store two days prior to the protest and given a false account of what had taken place at the Mt Lawley IGA store a fortnight earlier, claiming we had been aggressive and intimidated customers, an outright lie obviously designed to encourage the management of the South Perth store to call the police and shut down our protest. On the day of the protest, these Zionists took photographs of several of our activists and generally made a nuisance of themselves.
The second problem we encountered involved a rogue individual who joined our protest. This individual was not known to any of us, though Alex Whisson, the convener of FOPWA, had met him briefly at one of our demonstrations in January. This individual had a video camera with him and asked us for permission to film the protest. We granted him permission as we saw no reason at the time to do otherwise. Moreover, we saw no reason to exclude this particular individual from the protest in general.
The individual in question however later became engaged in a heated argument with two of the Zionists. Though a number of members of FOPWA witnessed fragments of this incident, the full content of this argument and the unmistakeably anti-Semitic views of the individual concerned were only subsequently made known to us upon viewing the video he later posted online. Let us at this point make it perfectly clear; Friends of Palestine WA is totally and utterly opposed to any and all forms of anti-Semitism. Anyone purporting to speak or write on our behalf who disseminates anti-Semitic views will be expelled from our ranks. Furthermore, any individual expressing anti-Semitic views and associating those opinions in any way, shape or form with Friends of Palestine WA will be barred from participating in our events.
FOPWA as an organisation is obviously not in the business of promoting anti-Semitic views. We therefore have no intention of sending out a link to the video in question. In any case, the video has since been removed by the hosting website because of its racist content. Suffice it to say, many of the views expressed in the video are anathema to anyone opposed to racism in all its forms. The individual concerned has now been removed from our mailing list and will be discouraged in the strongest possible terms from participating in our future activities.
The presence of this rogue racist individual and the indirect association of his repugnant views with our activities was, to say the least, an unfortunate incident in and of itself. What made it doubly unfortunate was the opportunity it afforded the three Zionist agitators to once again promulgate the myth that all criticisms of Israel are by definition anti-Semitic. On the contrary, the fact the individual concerned was promptly removed from our mailing list, and the fact he and others of his ilk will be strongly discouraged from taking part in any of our future activities, ought to make it plain to anyone still harbouring any doubts that Friends of Palestine WA is an organisation totally committed to the principles of anti-racism and therefore utterly intolerant of any and all forms of anti-Semitism.
Alex Whisson
Convener
Friends of Palestine WA
