20 December 2025

Open Letter to Sir Mark Rowley, Metropolitan Police Commissioner – Yesterday You Were Anti-Semitic, Today you are Anti-Palestinian

Rowley Has Decreed that ‘Globalise the Intifada’ is A Crime – Today I Repeated It Twice in A Speech As Sussex Police Looked On

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The attack on Jews at a Chanukah celebration in Australia has become the pretext for a crackdown on civil liberties and democratic rights. Mark Rowley, Metropolitan Police Commissioner is to the fore in calling for the suppression of the Palestine solidarity movement.

Sir Mark Rowley, the Heinrich Müller of the Met

Rowley, as part of his efforts to use British Jews as the Trojan horse for a Police State has repeatedly refused to meet with anti-Zionist Jews or the Palestine Coalition whilst meeting with pro-Genocide Zionist groups. For him, anti-racist Jews are as much the enemy as Palestinians. 

Written evidence to Parliament by Palestine Solidarity Campaign states that

The MPS has so far refused repeated requests for an in-person meeting with representatives of the Jewish bloc and on at least two occasions the police have sought to prevent them joining the march on the grounds that, being Jewish, they were assumed to be counter demonstrators.

When people call out the racism of the Metropolitan Police we should remember that it began with colonial policing of the Irish, then moved onto Jews and is now manifested in  anti-Muslim and anti-Black racism.

On Sunday at midday I shall be one of 3 Jewish speakers at a webinar Scottish PSC is holding on the the killings in Australia. London’s Gestapo Commissioner Rowley, alongside his Manchester understudy Stephen Watson, announced that the chant ‘Globalise the Intifada’ was now an arrestable offence. In response I penned an open letter to Rowley.


Dear Mark Rowley,

You issued a statement recently which said that ‘Antisemitic hate crime has surged, protests have intensified, and online abuse has grown since 2023.’ This is the method of Nazism. Juxtaposing completely different phenomenon.  Everything equals everything.

Your concern about racism is touching, even novel, given that you have turned a blind eye to it for so long. In February 2025 you told BBC's Today programme: "The public can have confidence in us." Your only gift is knowing how to lie. The very police station Charing X, whose racism and misogyny led to the sacking of your predecessor, Cressida Dick, was the subject of a Panorama programme Undercover in the Police which confirmed that you were a liar. Racism and sexism were everywhere.

As long as the Metropolitan Police are led by a racist there is no hope of reform. You have made it clear that the only racism you are interested in is ‘anti-Semitism’ – a prejudice not a form of racism. Attacks on Mosques and Muslims and Black people are no concern of you. The only ‘racism’ that concerns you is that against privileged White people .

The implication of your remarks were clear. Protests against genocide were responsible for the growth of anti-Semitism and on-line abuse. Such a sleight of hand is worthy of Goebbels and is indicative of nothing so much as your own dishonesty.

There is no evidence of a growth of anti-Semitism, unless you redefine it as opposition to Zionism, ethnic cleansing and genocide. But let us assume I am wrong and there is a growth in anti-Semitism, why is that?

The Israeli government and the Zionist movement have branded all opposition to the genocide in Gaza as ‘anti-Semitism’. If you oppose starving children you are anti-Semitic. Is it any wonder that some people believe them and then target Jews?

No one knows better than you the history of the Metropolitan Police. From the murder of Stephen Lawrence to the murder and rape of Sarah Everard and the canteen culture of Charing Cross Police, to say nothing of all the Black people you have murdered in the line of duty (Roger Sylvester, Mark Duggan, Chris Kaba et al.).

Senior Police officers even agreed to the police spying on the Stephen Lawrence Defence Campaign. A fish rots from the head down and the precondition of the Metropolitan Police reforming itself is your replacement.

When anti-Semitism was a genuine form of racism in the 1930s, anti-Semitism was rife amongst the Police. Today when Jews are the moral alibi and the pretext for the British ruling class support for Israel then ‘anti-Semitism’ is a concern of the Police.

When I asked Google’s AI ‘were the Metropolitan police antisemitic during the 1930s and sympathetic to the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists ’, which was led by Sir Oswald Moseley, the results were instructive and shed a light on your concern about ‘anti-Semitism’ now.

It is also instructive to refer to Daniel Sonabend’s book ‘We Fight Fascists’ about the fight of the mainly Jewish Anti-Fascist 43 Group after 1945 and the anti-Semitism of the Metropolitan Police.

It describes how the head of 'G' Division, Superintendent Charles Satterthwaite shouted 'Fucking Jew bastard!' at a Jewish anti-fascist Murry Silver as he repeatedly  beat him, whilst two of his officers held Silver against the wall.  Satterthwaite was described by one member of the 43 Group, Lennie Rolnick as a 'first class anti-Semite who would have done well at Belsen (concentration camp)’.

Historian Dave Renton found that anti-fascists were three times as likely to get arrested as fascists.  Sonabend asked why this was and his answer was ‘Widespread anti-Semitism in the Metropolitan Police force’. Nor was Satterthwaite the only officer who made regular reference to the faith of the anti-fascist disruptors he was arresting. Two young Group members from the East End, a hairdresser's assistant called Vidal Sassoon and his friend Mo Levy, had a particularly nasty run-in with the law, which Sassoon described in his autobiography.

One evening in Kilburn, we chased the fascists into a pub and were ourselves chased by the police. They arrested three of us. It took a long time to get to the police station which was only a few streets away. Two policemen held one of my comrades, Mo Levy, while a sergeant pounded him, beating him everywhere but the face, at the same time calling us 'dirty Jew bastards', 'fucking Yids who Hitler missed' and 'sons of foreign whores'.

Sonabend writes that

Knowing they were dealing with an institutionally anti­ Semitic organisation, the 43 Group's leadership were keen not to provoke the police. In fact, they went out of their way to be cooperative.’ 

Have the Police changed?  Yes in the sense they are no longer anti-Semitic, because the Jews are no longer on the left nor are they working class. Note that Sonabend described the Met as ‘institutionally anti-Semitic’ just as Black people in the 1980s and 1990s were to describe the Met as institutionally racist.

Jews have changed and the focus of the Met’s racism has changed but that is all. The Metropolitan Police have changed the target of their racism but they are still the same old  uniformed racists.

Today support for Israel and Zionism is the political rationale for their Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism. Israel is the most anti-Muslim country in the world and has formed an alliance with anti-Muslim racists such as Tommy Robinson, who was an Israeli government guest recently as well as individuals such as Dutch fascist, Geert Wilders.

In your statement Mark you said that ‘Our thoughts are with those who lost their lives, their families and those injured,’ referring to Jewish victims of the Australian attack. Over 100,000 Palestinians have been killed and hundreds of thousands injured in Gaza.  Children have been starved to death.  Yet you haven’t even acknowledged the death and destruction in Gaza. Your thoughts are with Australian Jews but not Palestinian children. What other explanation for this is there other than racism? Palestinian lives don’t matter because they are an indigenous people, the victims of western colonialism.

In your pathetic statement you say of Jewish people that

Jewish children attend schools behind fences, guarded by security and routine police patrols. No community should have to live like this. That must change.’

Really?  If Jews are under siege it is a siege of their own and your making.  You are deliberately making Jews into targets as a justification for the British State's support for Genocide. They are your colonial pets, hostages for your own malevolent intentions. Jews are the justification for the State's increased repression.

You say ‘Current laws are inadequate’.  Really?  You have been given more and more powers yet always you are dissatisfied. Perhaps when we have a fully fledged police state you will be satisfied? Or maybe when juries are finally abolished so that servile judges can be relied upon to rubber stamp your arrests and prosecutions.

It is not for you to comment on the adequacy of the law. Still less is it for you to define that law. For most people the laws are already too repressive and we know from past experience that it will be trade unionists, climate protesters, housing activists - indeed anyone bar employers and the rich who will feel their effects. 

What you want is a police state where people like you dictate the political agenda.  And speaking of dictating the political agenda you have all but outlawed chants such as “globalise the intifada”. Well I for one will make sure to include at least one mention of how the Intifada should be globalised. 

That is why today at a demonstration in Hove outside the offices of Vile Kyle MP, I repeated the slogan ‘Globalise the Intifada’ to make it clear that we, not you, will decide what we say.  Sussex police officers just looked on. So are we to have different laws now for different cities?   The Intifada is an Uprising against an Illegal Occupation. It has nothing to do with British Jews, much as you would like to lay the blame for Israel’s genocide on Jews.

We will not allow you to dictate what we are allowed to say and not say. You are paid to implement the law not to make the law.

We refuse to be stampeded into a police state by those who use Jews as the pretext for abolishing freedom of speech. When the Police decide what we are allowed to say and not say then we are already on the road to dictatorship.

It is time to move on Mark Rowley. You belong in a museum alongside all the other dinosaurs such as your role model, Gestapo Chief Heinrich Muller. As long as you are head of the Metropolitan Police we can expect a continuation of the racism that led the Met 30 years ago to covering up for the killers of Stephen Lawrence.

Tony Greenstein

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