This is the first of two guest posts from the writer Joshua Winston that will be going up today. They are interviews that Mr Winston said that he carried out at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park. I must admit that the ‘Palestine’ supporters that are described in this article are sadly typical of their ilk. Shouting ‘from the River to the Sea’ implies that there is no place for Jews in the ancestral Jewish homeland and is a chant that is quite frankly genocidal. I’d like to apologise to the author for not getting this up earlier than I said I would, but I had to clean up all the cocoa powder that my toddler son had decided to decorate the living room with.

Here is ‘The Big Ride – Palestine’ by Joshua Winston

Today in Speakers’ Corner, there were about 100 cyclists who suddenly descended on the area. They were all decked out in identical attire which had obviously been mass-ordered and mass-produced and paid for by someone or some group. The tee shirts said THE BIG RIDE PALESTINE. They came cycling to the corner where everyone debates and then they stopped and started chanting ‘From the rivers to the sea’. This is essentially a call for the genocide of the Jewish people. There happened to be one Jewish man trapped in amongst them and I ran to his aid and filmed as many of them as I could. He was gracious enough, once he had calmed down, to allow me to buy him a cold drink and have a chat.

JW – Hi Joseph, I’m Joshua. What did we just witness in Speakers’ Corner?

J – About 100 cyclists just rode through with tee shirts saying, end the seize on Gaze and chanting “Free Palestine”. What are you freeing it from? Essentially, they want a state that is Palestinian in nature but they want to get the Jews out of there. They want a Jew-free country. This is what Abbas has said on many occasions. That’s what these cyclists are supporting. Ending the seige on Gaza is supporting Hamas, essentially.

JW – What colour were the majority of those cyclists today?

J – White.

JW – And they were all branded with the same outfits, someone’s funding them. The most disturbing thing for me is that they were chanting “From the river to the sea”. Can you explain what that means for our readers?

J – There’s the moderate pro-Palestinians and there are there are the extreme ones. The moderate ones understand that the Israeli boundaries must remain. And “From the river to the sea” is saying wipe all Jews off the map. It’s codeword for kill all Jews. Do you think a Jew should have no right to self-determination?

JW – The worrying thing for me about those cyclists is that the whole of the park seemed to be on their side. Not one person, besides myself, came to your aid and I placed my body between anyone who looked to me like they might want to get physical.

J – (laughs) Well, Speakers’ Corner belongs predominantly to a certain group of people.

JW – I’ll say it – Muslims.

J – Yes, so I wasn’t surprises but I would not let something like that pass me by, no matter how many numbers there were. If you don’t say anything, then the protestors win and I was really not ready for it. It came from nowhere. I’m normally a shy guy, but I was overwhelmed with an adrenalin rush. Did they have permission to do that? I have no idea.

JW – The park has very specific cycle lanes. They were not using them and they drove through no-cycling zones. I’ll go back and show the police my footage.

J – And the police are nowhere to be seen. That was a totally inappropriate occurrence. I don’t even live here. I’m on holiday from the States, and for me to come back here and witness such casual violence is unsettling. There’s no war going on in Gaza just now, they’re sending over flaming balloons to our kindergartens and dropping bombs on us.

JW – What upsets you the most about this. I don’t care about Hamas, what upsets me the most that there are seemingly normal people walking through this city with no idea what Jews are living under in Israel and yet they’re spouting such hatred towards us.

JW – The anti-Semitism in the UK just now is rife. It’s a pity you had to come back after two years in order to be met with contempt and hatred.

J – Those cyclists in their expensive outfits and fancy bikes have no idea of what life in Israel is like. They’re informed by selective news outlets from the comforts of their couches and then they’ll decide to have a day out and protest about something on which they know nothing.

It should be noted that I went back to the park after I had conducted my interview, and I spoke with police officers who said that I shouldn’t expect anything to be done about it, not even for one person to get a ticket for cycling in a non-cycling lane, even although the park laws stipulate a £50 fine. Makes me wonder whose side the cops are one.