You don’t mess around with Tom. His story follows:
Pugnacious self-defence is very much the theme of this season, but you don’t have to time-travel back to the Selucid period to find yourself in a fight.
In what I think we can all agree are These Troubled Times We Live In, Jews can get into confrontations quite easily, depending on who we’re sitting next to at a dinner party.
Or even which shop we go to at a shopping mall.
Last week, a message went out on Facebook alerting a few members of the Melbourne Jewish Community that an anti-Israel demonstration was to be held in the Melbourne Central shopping center in the CBD.
It would be targeting the Israeli cosmetics company Jericho, which has a cosmetics counter on level one.
This is all part of the far left’s latest wizard wheeze to target Jewi…uh, I mean “Zionist” economic targets as part of a broad policy of boycotts, disinvestments and sanctions aimed at Israel, Israeli goods, Israeli companies, shops run by Israelis, companies run by Jews who support Israel and even chains like Starbucks which have nothing to do with Israel whatsoever, except there’s a rumour on the internet that they do.
The theory behind this strategy, to the extent that it exists, is that Israel is an apartheid state and so its government can be eliminated just like the old South African regime, by the world isolating it culturally, economically. intellectually and politically.
Clearly not a theory that stands up to even a cursory examination, but then many of these activists enjoy living in a hermetically sealed dream world of their own construction and they tend not to want to be confused with things like facts.
I arrived at Melbourne Central a little after 5pm, and was able to locate the Jericho counter by simply walking in the direction of the unmistakable whining drone of left-wing chanting.
A group of around thirty people were standing behind a banner.
Most of them were dressed in teal t-shirts with some slogan or other I didn’t bother to read, I’m sure it was “racist” this, “imperialist” that and “colonialist” the other, I’m sure you’re all familiar with these people’s lack of imagination when it comes to slogans.
Some short-haired harridan was shrieking into a megaphone about oppression and Palestinians and how every jar of cosmetics was helping to murder babies or some damn thing, as I say, I tend to just mentally zone out such nonsense.
The point was that this line of rabble were all clustered tightly around the front of the cosmetics counter, trapping the two Israeli guys manning it, plus a handful of other members of the Jewish community I recognised who had arrived earlier.
It looked as if the demonstrators were not going to let anyone in.
So, having way too many Scottish genes in my DNA to be able to back away from a confrontation, I went in.
I’m really not sure what the scruffy dweeb who looked to be 5 foot 5 in height and 9 stone in weight sopping wet was thinking when he said he wouldn’t let me in, but four seconds later when he was lying on the ground and the cops were pouncing on him for trying to stop a customer going about his business, I’m sure he was already regretting his strategy.
Hey, I didn’t hit him! I just pried him away from the counter and moved in and when he tried to shove me away, I shoved back. Granted, I may have shoved back fairly hard. Then he fell over. Just clumsy I guess – look, who knows how these things happen?
The few of us who were trapped inside the Jericho cosmetics counter had a grand old time shopping away, mainly to tick off the protesters, who seemed to lose a bit of enthusiasm for confronting the Little Satan’s minions in the wake of the falling-over-and-getting-grabbed-by-the-police incident.
After a while they decided they had made whatever the hell their point was (was it “We Are Enormous Borderline Racist Retards”?) and drifted off out of the shipping center and across the road to the grounds of the State Library, natural habitat of species such as the lesser-brained placard-waving idiot.
The two Israeli guys running the cosmetics counter were extremely happy that they got some support from the Jewish community, and showered us with free samples. I could certainly do some good with a bit of free soap after all that.
They said they were perfectly proud to represent Israel, and refused to be intimidated by the boycott crowd.
Unfortunately, the demonstrators are likely to be back.
This boycotts, disinvestment and sanctions strategy is all the rage among the smart set these days, and the Jericho counter at Melbourne Central is as tempting a target as Ahuva cosmetics is in London.
So this kind of thing may unfortunately become something of a regular feature of life here in Melbourne.
It’s important to fight back though.
Buy cosmetics from Jericho, in fact buy Israeli goods wherever possible.
And perhaps if someone were to set up some sort of alert system using Facebook or Twitter so members of the community can be warned if such a things is about to take place, then we could be there in numbers to confront the demonstrators.
These people cannot realistically be argued with, they have their own version of reality and are invincibly ignorant of the reality of Israel.
But if they see lots of people who are prepared to confront them, they may at least decided to pick other, less defended targets.
These people are self-righteous bullies, and like all bullies, they will run away if people of good conscience stand up to them.
