Worldwide protests against Israeli terrorism continue

Protesters in Melbourne, Australia (Picture: Solidarity on Twitter)

Hundreds of thousands marched in solidarity with Palestine protests on every inhabited continent last weekend.

Big rallies in Australia saw at least 45,000 fill the streets of Melbourne, and 50,000 people joined a demonstration in Sydney, overshadowing a pro-Israeli rally attended by just 1,000 people.

In Germany protesters defied the cops’ repression and held up banners and placards that read “Stop the genocide. Stop the apartheid”.

Around 17,000 people were on the pro-Palestine demonstration in Dusseldorf and 10,000 in Berlin. Police arrested protester Monika Kalinowska at the Berlin demonstration. It was reported that she was arrested because her placard said, “Israel is a terrorist state.”

After the protests, she said she was “really starting to question whether we actually have freedom of speech in Germany.”

Tens of thousands of South Africans took part in a pro-Palestinian march in Cape Town on Saturday demanding the Israeli ambassador be expelled. Hundreds marched in Harare, Zimbabwe.

In the heart of imperialism, the United States, thousands of protesters marched through Manhattan and shut down Grand Central Station in New York on Saturday.

Hundreds of school students also walked out of their classrooms on Thursday of last week. They left their classrooms and took buses to a rally at New York City public library.

On Thursday evening 2,000 people protested at the headquarters of the New York Times newspaper. A small group of protesters managed to occupy the lobby briefly.

Demonstrators were accusing the news outlet of a bias in its coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza.

Several hundred in Chicago protested outside a fundraiser for US President Joe Biden’s 2024 election campaign where crowds chanted “Genocide Joe” on Thursday evening.

In Baghdad, Iraq, thousands protested against a visit by US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. He came to visit the Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shiaa al-Sudani.

Thousands of students and residents of Karachi, Pakistan, took to the streets against Israeli war crimes. In Belgium, 21,000 joined the protest in Brussels.

In France tens of thousands joined a pro-Palestine protest in Paris on Saturday, and there were marches in other cities.

The next day around 150,000 joined marches “against antisemitism”. These were a deliberate effort to use fake opposition to antisemitism and racism to condemn the resistance to Israeli terror.

The clearest evidence is that among those taking part were Marine Le Pen, three-time presidential candidate for the fascist National Rally and the party’s president, Jordan Bardella.

Meanwhile, a joint summit of the Arab League and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation in Riyadh, Saud Arabia, last week showed the cowardice and betrayal of the region’s leaders.

The final declaration on Saturday condemned Israeli claims that it’s acting in “self-defence”.

But it rejected calls from Algeria, Iran and Lebanon to disrupt oil supplies to Israel and its allies as well as severing the economic and diplomatic ties that some Arab League nations have with Israel.

The opposition to the move was led by the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, which “normalised” ties with Israel in 2020.