In Portsmouth, With Flag & Kippa From The EDL Props Department (video)

In Portsmouth, the UK's premier naval port, from which many a maritime hero left to fight his country's enemies (and from which, in stark contrast, this group of villains left for their adventures abroad), a counter-demo last month outside the war memorial (the one next to the Guildhall) by the EDL against a march against Operation Defensive Edge staged by Portsmouth and South Downs branch of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

Below is a section of the anti-Israel crowd. Inevitably, the Greens and the Far Left are in evidence. The big red banner is that of the local trades union council (the rather Islamic-looking badge is in fact the city crest, adopted in the nineteenth century along with the motto "Heaven's Light Our Guide"):

The EDL's props include an Israeli flag brandished (that seems to be the correct word) by a man kitted out in an over-sized kippa.

I've no idea whether there is now a consensus among Anglo-Jewry that the EDL's avowed support for Israel is but a stick with which to goad the opposition.

The sight of a man fitted out with such props is disconcerting.

Yet obviously not as disconcerting as the knowledge that a pleasant medium-sized city in the South of England, a city not known (at least not when I was there last) for a huge Muslim population, nevertheless had a bunch of jihadist vipers in its bosom...