“Met police chief condemned for claiming pro-Palestine protests intended to go past synagogues Submitted by MEE staff on Tue, 05/05/2026 - 11:19 Coalition of campaign groups call on Mark Rowley to retract comments claiming that organisers repeatedly intended to include synagogues on their planned demonstration routes in London Pro-Palestinian supporters hold placards and wave flags in central London on 11 October 2025 (AFP/Henry Nicholls) Off A coalition of campaign groups have demanded that Mark Rowley, head of London's Metropolitan Police, retract a claim that pro- Palestine protest organisers repeatedly intended to include synagogues on their planned demonstration routes in London. The groups included the Palestine Solidarity Campaign , Friends of Al-Aqsa , the Stop the War Coalition , and the Palestinian Forum of Britain . They were responding to recent comments in The Times, in which Rowley stated: “Their initial suggestion for their route, their march, has involved walking by a synagogue. Each time we’ve prevented that, we’ve put conditions on. “The fact that features as the organisers’ intent, I think that sends a message… that feels like antisemitism. That may be a fair or unfair inference, but that’s the message it sends.” The groups said Rowley’s “claims are incomprehensible and defamatory”. They called on him to make a “speedy public retraction” of his statement and his “scurrilous claim of antisemitism”. The coalition said that for their next demonstration, for the upcoming Nakba Day on 16 May, they wrote to authorities in December last year with a proposed route from Embankment to Whitehall which has no synagogues. They said they had used the route twice before. They said: “After three months of silence we were finally told by your officers that this route was disallowed on the grounds that Tommy Robinson’s far right demonstration - a real hate march - was inexplicably going to be granted the whole political centre of London, and that we would have to march elsewhere.” Golders Green attacks: A Muslim was also stabbed - not that you'd know Read More » A second suggestion was made to march from the Israeli embassy in west London to Trafalgar Square, which again had no synagogues en route. It was rejected, and a shorter route was “arbitrarily imposed”. “The truth is that at no point have we ever requested to ‘walk by’ a synagogue on any of our marches. We have no interest in doing so. Police recordings of our meetings with you will confirm this,” the coalition said. A spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police said Rowley’s comments were not specific to upcoming protests in May. They said the police chief was “reflecting on the totality of the period of sustained protest since October 2023”, during which roughly 30 large marches were organised by the groups. The spokesperson said half of these involved starting or ending near, or walking past, a synagogue. They added that on 20 occasions, the route was changed “to protect Jewish communities and sensitive premises from disruption and/or intimidation”. A Met spokesperson said that continuing to assemble close to synagogues, in the view of Rowley, could “send a message to Jewish communities which feels like antisemitism”. The pro-Palestine groups called Rowley’s comments “completely unacceptable for a senior public official” and said that his “false claims and accusations… can only raise the level of tension in the current situation”. Last week, the same groups criticised attempts by politicians and the media to smear the demonstrations, as well as suggestions they could be banned. A 45-year-old Somali -born British national was arrested on Wednesday afternoon after the stabbing of two Jewish men, aged 34 and 76, in Golders Green, a neighbourhood of northwest London with a large Jewish population. Politicians, including British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, have used the Golders Green attacks to condemn pro-Palestine marches and call for their curtailment. In an interview with the BBC's Today programme on Saturday, Starmer said the language used on marches should be policed and suggested that there could be a case for banning marches altogether. UK Politics News Post Date Override 0 Update Date Mon, 05/04/2020 - 21:19 Update Date Override 0
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