Benny and the burqas?

Benny Morris gave a talk at the London School of Economics back in June this year. Because of his overt support for genocide in both Palestine and the US there were protests against his presence. Here is how he described an encounter with protesters against him near to the venue of the talk. Here's how Benny Morris described the encounter:

As I walked down Kingsway, a major London thoroughfare, a small mob—I don't think any other word is appropriate—of some dozen Muslims, Arabs and their supporters, both men and women, surrounded me and, walking alongside me for several hundred yards as I advanced towards the building where the lecture was to take place, raucously harangued and bated me with cries of "fascist," "racist," "England should never have allowed you in," "you shouldn't be allowed to speak." Several spoke in broken, obviously newly acquired, English. Violence was thick in the air though none was actually used. Passersby looked on in astonishment, and perhaps shame, but it seemed the sight of angry bearded, caftaned Muslims was sufficient to deter any intervention. To me, it felt like Brownshirts in a street scene in 1920s Berlin—though on Kingsway no one, to the best of my recall, screamed the word "Jew."

Further on in the article Morris uses the encounter to draw a wider lesson about Muslims and the west:

Another disconcerting element in what went on in the lecture hall was the hosting LSE professor's brief introductory remarks, which failed completely to note the harrassment and intimidation (of which he had been made fully aware) of the lecturer on Kingsway, or to criticize them in any way. My assumption was that some were LSE students.

There was a sense that the chairman was deliberately displaying caution in view of the world in which he lives. Which brings me back to what happened on Kingsway.

Uncurbed, Muslim intimidation in the public domain of people they see as disagreeing with them is palpable and palpably affecting the British Christian majority among whom they live, indeed, cowing them into silence.

Well I can't be bothered to watch the video of the lecture but it turns out that Morris was lying about the encounter on Kingsway.




If you skip to about 30 minutes into the clip you will see that there was nothing about the protesters to make anyone assume that they were Muslims or Arabs.  It's not just distant history that Morris rewrites these days.

The Innovative Minds website has an article to accompany the video clip.