Rosie Cuckston

On the anniversary of the Westminster attack, we remember Leslie Rhodes, Andreea Cristea, Aysha Frade, Kurt Cochran, and PC Keith Palmer. My thoughts are with their loved ones. It was an attack on our city, but it could never break the values we hold dear.

If your Faith feels undermined by chocolate box branding, diverse TV adverts or 8 mins of public prayer at a 2 hour interfaith event, then it isn’t your Faith under attack, it’s your sense of control, your discomfort with difference, and your understanding of what Faith really is

These are some of the pictures up in the Joseph Wales gallery in Margate, by Matthew Collings

In Margate. My cheeks are red. I am shaking. I popped into an exhibition that turned out to be the insane fever dream of an artist called Matthew Collins: ‘Drawings Against Genocide.’ The exhibition is described as ‘drawings… raising consciousness about hell…. Israel is the pure encapsulation of it. Zionism is this terror state’s ruling ideology.’ Shocked by the use of Nazi imagery - the room is full of the Star of David pasted around figures meant to be Israelis and the Jewish ‘lobby’ spewing blood, to say nothing of blonde yummy mummies wearing ‘globalise the intifada’ shirts, I spoke to the artist to share my reaction as a Jewish person. He was instantly aggressive. As soon as I started to say I was shocked and threatened by what I was seeing because it was Nazi imagery, the artist started yelling at me that I didn’t mean anything I was saying. Anytime I tried to speak (calmly) he said: ‘you don’t mean any of what you said, you’re just repeating ‘hasbarah talking points’ because ‘you’re defending a genocide’. On and on he yelled, in my face. I said: ‘if I was a Black person…’ but couldn’t finish the sentence because: ‘you’re not are you?’ On the Nazi ideology point he said: ‘yeah. Why do you think it’s there. Israel are the Nazis’. His breath was disgusting. The crowd began booing and closing in around me, making to shoe me out. I said: ‘fine, get the Jew out’ and he yelled more across the room at me, ‘repeatedly jeering ‘call the police, go ahead, call the police’. I said I would, and the community security trust, which features as a devil in his exhibition. This was met with even more jeering. ‘Yeah, call the CST’ was the last I heard before leaving. Someone snapped pictures of me while I was being shouted at. Short video shows the artist. The longer video, of our final almost surreally disgusting exchange, didn’t record.

“We are manufacturing a whole new generation of terrorists in the Middle East,” former U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel tells me, saying the Trump administration's conduct of its war in Iran appears to him unprecedented.