A Festival of Resistance

Every August artists and art lovers come to the Edinburgh festival. This year they were treated to an even more valuable fringe event, as demonstrators from all over Scotland protested the Israeli destruction of Lebanon.
The police, as is their wont, profusely photographed the demonstration to ignore accurately its size. The police on the demonstration itself gave a head count of 5000. Their estimate of 3000 demonstrators in The Scotland on Sunday should be taken as the Lothian and Borders' Police entry to this year's comedy awards. Since the demonstration stretched from the top of Leith Walk to the Mound at one point, a reality based estimate would be closer to 10000 people. And what people they were. They included trade unionists and students, Muslims and non-Muslims, Jews and Gentiles, the elegant and the Glaswegian. A sure sign of a large and diverse demonstration is when one meets a casual acquaintance from an entirely seperate context - as I did while waiting at the Meadows for the march to move off.

After chatting with a prospective landlady (my acquaintances are very casual) I joined the moving protest through the University district. The demonstration made its way to the US consulate on Regent Terrace. There we sat down and those at the head of the demonstration laid children's shoes in front of the consulate, to represent the hundreds of Lebanese children killed by US made bombs dropped from US made planes by Israeli pilots. We then walked around the terrace onto Princes Street - producing the exhiliration that comes from a mass of political people dominating a shopping thoroughfare.

Having reclaimed Princes Street, we turned our attention to The Mound, where the rally was to begin. The platform in front of the assembly rooms was mounted by speakers such as Aamer Anwar, Muhammad Sarwar MP, Barry Levine of Scottish Jews for Justice for Palestinians and Salma Yaqub of Respect. The latter's speech summed up the meaning of the march, referring to the transatlantic terror stramash in all the papers;
'We're here to protest against real terrorist bombing - that in the skies above Lebanon.'
The rally ended with a resounding call to converge on the Labour Party conference in Manchester on the 23rd of September. As I write, the ceasefire in Lebanon appears to be holding, a month overdue. Even more overdue is the consignment of Tony Blair, aider and abetter of Israel's month of madness, to the dustbin of political history.