Anti-Semitism campaigners have reacted with anger after a Metropolitan Police officer was filmed telling a Jewish woman that swastikas displayed during a pro-Palestinian march in London needed to be ‘taken in context’.
Footage on social media shows a Jewish woman complaining to an officer about placards bearing swastikas being carried by anti-Israeli demonstrators.
She said: ‘I was told when I asked that a swastika was not necessarily anti-Semitic, that doesn’t seem right to me’.
The officer said that ‘everything needs to be taken within context, doesn’t it’?
She offered to show the police officer the placards, but he insisted he had to remain at his post and said there were other officers throughout the protest.
The woman explained that she had spoken to an officer who told her that it was ‘not their job to arrest people with swastikas’.
A spokesman for the Campaign Against Antisemitism said: ‘This interaction is absolutely gobsmacking.
‘The very notion that a British police officer could imagine a context in which the Nazi swastika is an acceptable image to be displayed in public is distressing enough, but for him to be uncertain about its meaning in the context of a march oozing with anti-Semitic rhetoric and signage is an indictment of the Met.
‘This is less the fault of a solitary officer than it is of Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley, who has bent over backwards to rationalise and “contextualise” calls for violent jihad and genocidal chanting.
‘If Sir Mark disagrees with this officer’s assessment, he should come out and say so and explain what training he will provide to his officers to ensure that they are clear that Nazism is bad.’